Mandatory link to discourse-thread before being able to start a challenge

[natrius]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

MapRoulette is a tool and its really good and i think something good. But, maybe it makes things TO easy, as there is quite some discussion in the forum about it. I personally think one way to reduce problems is to have a mandatory link to the forum where the challenge is discussed.

It needs some discussion, of course, but problems need to be adressed.

Describe the solution you'd like

A field in the form that is mandatory with a link to the discussion forum. It should be checked and the only valid url should start with https://community.openstreetmap.org/ - no other discussion-places should be allowed because this is the place where most openstreetmap mappers are present in a kinda central place.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/maproulette-critique/116922/130

[natrius]

I think this would also help with the missing centralized and open feedback #791
Because currently its just private messages.

[thigpencodes]

To clarify, are you suggesting a threshold of support for challenges to go live or simply that they have an associated discourse post? The latter is significantly easier to implement.

[natrius]

The latter, each challenge needs a associated discourse post.

It could even be more sophisticated and grab which areas the challenge is targeting and check if the post is in the correct community. If there is no community for said area, in the general area. If it targets a lot of countries, the general area.
Even more complicated and it could be checked if the tag "maproulette" for the challenge is present as well, like tomtom is doing it with their challenges.

[mvexel]

I don't dislike this idea per se, but I am also wary of spamming the community forum with discussion threads. Could the MapRoulette API serve a similar purpose, for example we may introduce an RSS feed for new challenges? The community can then decide what to do with it and MapRoulette would not impose a solution.

[jlewin]

As a new user to the platform, I've imagined that each challenge would benefit from its own chat channel. It's been a goal to file a ticket to suggest as much, but then I see some form of the idea is already being considered here.

Personally, I imagined a dedicated MapRoulette discord or slack server would exist, with a channel for each challenge. Theoretically this might allow more lively discovery of problems, best practices, and concerns within the domain of the challenge, with the heavy lifting coming from the chat platform. I'd think common issues and best practices (especially those that come after creation and/or from engaged users) would come forward more freely and naturally than what a static feed would provide. However, with the functionality comes additional overhead, moderation, and maintenance, so probably not very likely. Yet, a nice idea to consider and one that I (as a new and inexperienced user) have recently wished for.

Of note, things that I might have asked in the community were related to zooming when switching between osm/rapid, rotating buildings, scaling buildings, moving borders, if it's ok to move walkways when they collide with buildings, etc. Probably all stuff that gets discussed at length in other osm forums, but also things that seem likely to affect some challenges more than others and thus might benefit from the small community that forms around the tasks and similarity of issues, in a given challenge.