Back, and sorry for the silence. Answering the four things that came up, and then where this leaves the plan with the two weeks about up.
1. What I intend to create (@Kin_Sapalot, you did not miss it, I said it badly). Yes: new POIs inside the shop, the way ATMs are mapped, one node per machine. My “further step” remark was only about a standalone machine at a station or in a canteen, where there is no shop to attach it to. Supermarket machines are the whole point.
2. Which tag. I read the statiegeldwinkel thread that Dillen_GJ linked, and I take emvee’s point that it is about the facility (the shop or building) while this thread is about the machine. For the machine there are two taggings in use: amenity=vending_machine + vending=bottle_return (about 4000 worldwide, the wiki’s current method and the iD preset) and amenity=recycling + recycling_type=reverse_vending_machine (about 2500, most of them from one import). I do not want the app to be the thing that decides this for NL. So: the bot writes exactly one of the two, whichever this community settles on, and switching the tag for new nodes is a one-line change on my side. If there is no NL decision by the time creation starts, I would default to vending=bottle_return because it is what the wiki and iD currently do, and retag the bot’s own nodes later if NL decides otherwise. If someone would rather see that decided first, I will wait, and creation stays out of the pilot until then.
3. Several machines at one shop (@Tjuro, and Kin_Sapalot’s point that the count is useful). Honest answer: today the app lists one entry per OSM element and does not know that two machine nodes belong to the same shop, so your supermarket with two machines would show as two entries on top of each other. That has to change before the bot creates anything, and it is the same work whether the nodes come from the bot or from you: the app groups machines by the shop they are in (inside the outline, or within a short distance) and shows one location with its machines listed, so a report or an edit is filed against the machine the visitor picks, “the one with crates”. For creation the first version stays one node per confirmed shop; a second machine gets added once the placement step exists and a visitor can put it somewhere. One node per machine is the goal, and I will not create a node where one already exists within the shop.
4. Position, still as agreed with Tjuro: shop position with a small offset and a fixme for the first phase, exact placement later.
Where this leaves the plan. Settled here: no removals, one changeset per correction, material tags only on machine nodes and never on a shop, indoor=yes on created nodes, a duplicate check before any creation. Open: the machine tag (above), the crates key (I will open the tagging discussion I promised once the machine tag is clear, since the answer depends on it), and whether creation at this scale should follow the import process, which nobody has objected to yet but nobody has confirmed either. So the pilot I will ask for, when the bot account exists, is modifications of existing elements only: opening hours and material tags on machines that are already mapped, sandbox first, then a small hand-reviewed live batch announced here. Creation comes back to this thread as its own step once the tag and grouping questions are answered.
Eugen