How about limit new accounts?

Foundation
,
223

Yet I really wouldn’t like this community to become that disappointingly hostile as wikipedia’s.

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224

You are confusing the choice to bear with a mostly harmless misguided person with “nothing that can be done”.

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225

Sure, in another place I wrote, not every social problem needs a technical solution. I guess I will learn one day, that correctness of data is less important than amount of data and stop aching.

226

The corresponding tools are all after the fact:

  • The block
  • The revert

When I was new, I made some plunder. Hopefully I learned to behave since then. No idea how the learning might have been advanced though.

227

In the case you referenced it would be completely possible to take legal steps (as the person is known) that would lead to real consequences if they continued their behaviour.

228

Thank you, good to know this. I’ve found an alternative way that can show vandal’s changesets, not changed objects: filter by changes in name:ru in osmcha, and it displays user names with their changesets (not everyone is a vandal there of course), then you can filter by the user.

As to the vandalism, it continues:

There were different ideas about new users above, however it still seems strange that a new user (I can’t find out when these were registered, but they have sequential IDs) can make hundreds of edits removing data within a short amount of time (a few hours). At first, the vandal removes the key from 1 feature/changeset, then 100 features, 250 features, then he self-destructs. What is possible to do here, except reverts? This creates lots of useless object versions, e.g. Way History: ‪Одеський морський вокзал‬ (‪37193675‬) | OpenStreetMap : versions 45, 43, 41, 39, 35, 33, 31, 29, 27, 25, 23, 21 are vandalism, and as many others are reverts.

229

Is continued vandalism why OSM is 150,000 instances of name:ru down, have removals not been reverted or is there a proper reason for the reductions?

230 
changesets=> select distinct user_name from osm_changeset where user_id = 20481051;     
    user_name      
-------------------
Asantera Leppo
POaoOphoRAnsignia
user_20481051
(3 rows)

changesets=> select count(*) from osm_changeset where user_id = 20481051;                
count  
-------
  468
(1 row)

DWG Ticket#2023101810000011

231 
changesets=> select distinct user_name from osm_changeset where user_id = 20481052;
     user_name      
--------------------
 miEBbes
 user_20481052
 salvadore sziciero 
(3 rows)

changesets=> select count(*) from osm_changeset where user_id = 20481052;
 count 
-------
  1526
(1 row)

DWG Ticket#2023101810000029

232

At this time these have not yet been. DWG ticket numbers exist, see above.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that in 2022, some names such as street names no longer have a Russian alternative. A further complication was that in some cases Russian “names” were just poor transliterations of existing Ukrainian names. A suggestion to remove these en masse was discussed in the country forum here; and I think it’s fair to say that that approach was broadly rejected (the community was at least against mass edits by that editor).

However, there certainly have been name:ru removals as part of other name changes that have been discussed within the community (something like “we’ve got the list of updated names from XYZ place; the new names take effect from Monday”) on the forum or Telegram.

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233

I really wish people who don’t know how to do reverts properly wouldn’t do it. For example, here the object is reverted to the old version and the work of other mappers is lost. It brings no less damage than the actions of that vandal. Such edits are difficult to track because there are so many of them now

https://pewu.github.io/osm-history/#/way/636788737

I also want to remind once again that OSM is not a place for provocations based on racial, gender or national grounds. Such usernames harm the reputation of the project

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234

Using external auth is fine in my opinion, but only if you accept a lot of them, like if you accept fb, google, microsoft, apple, github and openid, then I have no issue with it. However, if you only accept google and fb or only microsoft and apple, than this is problematic, because you’re choosing the ones you prefer for users to use.

235

For info, https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/15187.

Edit: The new names for the ways were re-added in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/142933152. I also re-added the old_name:ru and also changed the new names for the relation (which had been missed) in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/142961515

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236

Would it have been better to keep the name in old_name and old_name:language?

237

For information, we’re still seeing waves of undiscussed mechanical edit (removing name:ru from all sorts of objects in Ukraine). The previously mentioned OSM history link shows the problem - in this case 3 deleted accounts have removed @Barroszt’s obsolete name:ru and (along with many other edits) were reverted by DWG accounts including mine**.

The rate limiting that @Mateusz_Konieczny wrote about here is still working, but it is still possible for a “new” user to sign up mechanically, make a very large number problem edits and then, because this issue remains unaddressed, delete their account.

** We (the DWG) will need to go through @Barroszt’s edits to try and unpick the mess to make sure that edits like this one are reapplied.

Following https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/15187 that user has been in contact with the DWG about removing their block - I’ve emailed them to clarify the sorts of edits they’ll want to make if we do so.

Edit: I’ve raised https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/4307 as an issue, since I couldn’t see exactly the same issue elsewhere. It will need discussion since there are a number of existing conflicting requests here.

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238

If you look carefully, in the example that I showed everything was done very well and the names were transferred to old_name:*. Sometimes happens that users, especially beginners, do not do this due to lack of experience. We are periodically reminded that this is important, sometimes I put old names myself after such edits

2 Likes
239

There are new waves of vandalism by new users. This time it is about the existence of Israel.

I see it’s already been reverted and the users blocked.

240

Unfortunately the node got deleted again by vandalism (#68) which is not reverted yet. So this is ongoing.

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241

Some of that user’s edits had already been reverted, but I’ve started off a “complex revert” of that user in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/142963083 which should mop up the stragglers. There may be edge cases that need manual intervention, and given the state of the war there may be “new accounts” responsible for more vandalism later, so once these reverts are complete it would be worth people looking at what may be still wrong.

Edit: Just looking at the node data just now, and there is still quite a bit to untangle.

5 Likes
242

And looking at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse_Revert/history - revert is still ongoing as of now.