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.
user_20481052 #20481052 (the same ID as the one above) — Joined | 1526 edits registered on OSMCha, about 15 hours ago Changeset: 142738466 | OpenStreetMap
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I agree, but let’s have a separate thread about it. It’s not the most acute problem that doesn’t corrupt data.
Plus we have several applications that actively use it and we need to warn their developers.
Let’s get back to limiting the size of edits for new users.
We see again edits of 10000 objects already in Israel. Let’s limit the size of edits for new accounts to 1000-2000 changes. That way we’ll make DWG work a little easier.
At the DWG level, I would suggest the idea of trap objects. If some newcomer made a large (in area and/or size) changeset and affected some important established object, then automatically block it for a couple of hours. In the case of name:ru tag vandalism, this should work well.
That’s part of the problem, true, but the sheer volume of edits by new users (which was your first point) means that quite a lot of damage can be done before something is detected. Also, some edits are “indiscriminate” - watching objects does not help there. For example, the most recent vandalism of e.g. this object was spotted “by accident” (well I was half expecting problems in that area, saw it, and blocked and reverted the user (mostly**) cleanly).