I repeatedly encounter confused people who apparently enabled notes layer and close random notes.
Maybe in attempt to hide them, maybe because they somehow except that clicking “resolved” is actually fixing data.
I have seen almost no useful note closures from such people, just randomly closing old notes would be more useful.
I propose to do not display “Resolve” and “Comment & Resolve” to people who made no edits.
Maybe it would be also useful to rename “Resolve” to “Close”? To make clearer that closing note does not magically resolve problem reported there?
Maybe also add “Hide notes layer” button below Resolve/Comment buttons? (Making it visible also to anonymous) to help people who enabled note layer by accident
That would also confuse people into thinking that “Close” would just close the note from appearing to them, not completely closing the note for all.
Indeed though those two buttons should be hidden from such accounts. It’s not easy to also consider checking the closed notes all the time in case one was closed due to that reason.
In the Russian translation, “Resolve” is translated to “Close”. And this causes people to click this button to close the tab. And because of the same translation in the mail notification, I was written several times by the authors of the notes why do you think that the POI is closed.
I would also like to add that if you do this, it will only be on the site’s frontend, and not in the API. Because otherwise, you’ll just confuse those new to iD, who won’t be able to process the note before sending a first changeset. Well, or it will require adding a change to the iD code, which will add a delayed closing of notes. Which is actually more correct.
I don’t know how big the problem actually is, but if it exists it is of course worth thinking about it.
Those notes I saw closed by people with no edits were often reopened by them a moment ago - well one can wonder what this should be good for… - or sometimes opened by an anonymous user (maybe the same person) a bit earlier.
To avoid that notes are closed “by mistake” it might be worth to think about a change so that they can not be closed without a comment anymore.
That’s a good insight. Can the Russian localization translate it to something closer to “mark as resolved” or “no longer relevant” to avoid confusion? Maybe some other localizations have this problem too. I think it also used to be “Close” in English at some point long ago.
How about disabling no-comment resolve, requiring commented resolve from the submitter? Likely very often both of these groups close them, and don’t respond further afterwards. At least it needs to have an explanation when closing.
We’ve discussed this, but we haven’t found a good translation yet. Translation close to “Resolve” in Russian also has a problem. In short, it encourages the user to click on this button, because they may think that after that the information specified in the note will appear on the map.
Nobody reads the actual text on screen any more . We’ve seen this behaviour in many places, so I don’t think that it is a localisation issue.
I suspect, like your initial comment suggests, in some cases people have turned on the notes layer by accident and “just want to make the red zits go away”. In other cases some people treat notes in “their” area as a to-do list, and any new ones that they can’t solve (using whatever form of OSM mapping they engage in) get closed.
. We’ve seen this behaviour in many places, so I don’t think that it is a localisation issue.
icon ?