I’ve noticed that a litter bin in Sittingbourne seems to have attracted a lot of spam comments (e.g. OSM changeset discussions of manof25).
I keep reporting the spammers when I see them, but is there a way to either lock comments on that changeset, or have the DWG keep a close eye on it? At this point it’s vanishingly unlikely that anyone commenting on this particular POI will have a legitimate message.
Possibly this URL has entered some spam database of URLs.
If it persists, may simply be worth eliminating the URL by recreating the POI under a different ID. Not ideal but would probably stop the problem.
It depends on what is in their database.
As they seem to be commenting on the changeset that originally created it that will remain even if the object now gets a new node.
In this situation it is the changeset discussion that attracts the spam, and we currently lack a facility to hide a changeset completely or close it for comments.
Experience suggests that they’d just move to a different URL if that happened. We’ve seen the “favourite URLs” thing before, on old forum posts, old help site posts, OSM data and more. Spam user profiles are probably the most popular, though.
Querying OSM data is possible by taginfo, and most of the others are searchable in some way; as noted above please email the DWG with any new examples to search for, but things like user profiles need hiding by the admins so just reporting those is the way to go (I did that last night with one new spammer of the litter bin above).