Does iD recreate nodes when edited sometimes?

Help and support
1

I’m trying to figure out why this node was deleted in this changeset and replaced by a new node at the same coordinates and connected to the same ways (which were not deleted). The mapper used the iD editor, and the same pattern repeats for over 40 traffic lights they touched. In iD, simply changing tags or applying presets to a node doesn’t result in deletion followed by creation. I tried but couldn’t reproduce this in iD using traffic light presets, so I’m trying to determine if this was intentional[1] or if there’s any action in iD that causes this (possibly a bug). Do you know if any action in iD has this effect?

  1. The mapper started mapping just three weeks ago, added many sidewalks without following the local convention, some of which duplicated existing ones already mapped as tags, then partially reverted their changes, but didn’t recover the traffic lights they deleted while trying to transition to their new mapping style. They are no longer responding. ↩︎

2

I managed to reproduce this by right-clicking a traffic light node in iD and choosing “Extract” (keyboard shortcut “E”). This action detaches the node from its parent ways, places it freely outside and creates a new node connected to the existing ways in its place.

It seems they tried to reposition the traffic light onto the new separate sidewalk. This is a reasonable step in systematic separate sidewalk mapping, but it’s a relatively obscure editor function that a new mapper probably wouldn’t discover and adopt immediately.

When the mapper partially reverted the changes, they removed the new sidewalks but didn’t restore the extracted traffic light nodes.

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