[OSM-talk] New email capable forum for OSM: https://community.openstreetmap.org/

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/03/2022 14:59, Florian Lohoff wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 12:33:33PM +0100, Amanda McCann wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> In case you haven't seen, there's a new OSM(F) hosted web forum using the modern Discourse software. It's integrated with your existing OSM account (ish). You can use (most of it¹) via email, so you can still communicate with OSMers via email.
>>
>>     https://community.openstreetmap.org/
>>
>> You need to turn on mailing list mode in the settings.
>>
>> Feel free to try it. If it's nice enough, maybe we could convert this
>> mailing list to use that software, rather than the current Mailman
>> software. 😮 Imagine that, software updates! 🤣
> Please dont. This mailinglist works with pure ASCII mails. Using some
> web phorum interface makes this all HTML junk with all the usability
> issues.
>
As others have noted, deciding to expand the scope of the project while 
the most important requirements have not yet been met (dealing with the 
lack of ongoing support for OSQA, the help site software etc.) aren't a 
particularly good idea.  It's great that people might in the future be 
able to interact with Discourse purely by email, but literally no-one is 
suggesting that we migrate existing mailing lists to Discourse tomorrow, 
or (as someone was worried about on the forum) "delete all existing 
forum content".

However, it is worth noting that even now email notifications from 
https://community.openstreetmap.org do contain "Content-Type: 
text/plain" so even curmudgeonly oldsters like me who detest HTML-only 
email* can be happy.

Best Regards,

Andy

* despite negligable support from clients on some platforms these days.