Stalebot closing old notes and deleting abandoned railways?

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Edit: Yet another headline proving Betterridge’s law. Hope you enjoyed this April Fool’s joke!

Like many of you, I lose track of my old notes sometimes, so it’s nice to see someone discover it and try to resolve it. But I just checked my spam folder and noticed a surprising notification about one of my notes getting resolved by “stalebot”. It sounds like the bot that some GitHub repositories use to clean up old bug reports – but AI-powered, because it’s 2025 and who doesn’t look at a vacuum cleaner and think it could be more AI…

Hi, stalebot has resolved one of your map notes near Alexandria, Campbell County, Kentucky, United States. Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨
Hi, stalebot has resolved one of your map notes near Alexandria, Campbell County, Kentucky, United States. Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨1720×828 85.8 KB

I guess it fell in the spam folder because of all the emoji or something. I should check my spam folder more frequently, because I was too late. This bot already closed the issue a couple days ago due to inactivity. It didn’t act on the note at all, like I would expect an AI bot to do these days; it simply closed it as stale and left the POI alone.

Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨
Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨700×1342 96.6 KB

Well, at least we have bots running around closing out stale notes without bothering to read them. Now the users who’ve been doing that thankless job will finally have time to map! That’s what AI is supposed to do, after all – free us up to do the less menial tasks.

But then I looked up this bot’s profile and saw something alarming: it is editing, and it’s also creating notes. I did some digging and found that the profile photo is an emoji by Vincent Le Moign, CC BY. At least whoever chose it had the good taste to use real, openly licensed artwork.

User profile for stalebot, with 255 edits, all on one day, and 1,024 map notes. A mapper since March 30 who last edited today. The old ways do not bring me joy like the new ways. ☺️
User profile for stalebot, with 255 edits, all on one day, and 1,024 map notes. A mapper since March 30 who last edited today. The old ways do not bring me joy like the new ways. ☺️1920×800 59.2 KB

All the notes are alike, complaining about an abandoned feature (mostly railways I think) that hasn’t been touched for a year and threatening to delete it just like one of the stale notes. I thought the megathread a year ago and all the other abandoned railway threads were cathartic for the anti-rail people, but they’ve regrouped and they’re back with a vengeance:

Oh no! 😱 Way 1118748789 has been tagged railway=abandoned for over a year. 🏚️ Unless it resumes revenue service within the next 30 days, I will cheerfully delete this way along with its history. 🚮 If you would like to preserve this railway for future generations, simply retag it as either railway=preserved 🫙 or highway=cycleway. 🚴 I will reluctantly delay its inevitable demise by another 30 years or until bicycle=yes is removed, whichever comes first. 🥇 Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨ I’m sorry, but as a helpful cleanup bot, I didn’t understand your message. 😞 Let’s try again. For example, you can ask me to plan your next rail journey, read you a poem about abandonment, or generate an illustration of an attractive mouse conducting a locomotive that you can set as your editor wallpaper. What would you like me to do? ✨
Oh no! 😱 Way 1118748789 has been tagged railway=abandoned for over a year. 🏚️ Unless it resumes revenue service within the next 30 days, I will cheerfully delete this way along with its history. 🚮 If you would like to preserve this railway for future generations, simply retag it as either railway=preserved 🫙 or highway=cycleway. 🚴 I will reluctantly delay its inevitable demise by another 30 years or until bicycle=yes is removed, whichever comes first. 🥇 Uh oh! 🤖 My artificial intelligence detected that this note has been open for over a year with no activity. 🏚️ If no further activity occurs within 30 days, I’ll cheerfully close this note so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🚮 Have a nice day! ✨ I’m sorry, but as a helpful cleanup bot, I didn’t understand your message. 😞 Let’s try again. For example, you can ask me to plan your next rail journey, read you a poem about abandonment, or generate an illustration of an attractive mouse conducting a locomotive that you can set as your editor wallpaper. What would you like me to do? ✨700×2048 180 KB

Amusingly, this appears to be beta software, or the developer hasn’t gotten the hang of the OSM API yet. Stalebot is replying to itself, well ahead of schedule, and getting itself confused. And it seems to be treating the comment box as a prompt? The suggested prompt about plastering my editor background with mice hints at this forum possibly being used as training data, which is intriguing. I’ll play with that when I get a chance, but I also wanted to see what would happen if I simply close the note. Would that protect the railway from deletion?

Looking through the list, I see that apparently stalebot had the same idea as I did. Stalebot closed one of its own notes as stale, then turned around and reposted a new note, not even reopening the existing one! No wonder it has created over a thousand notes in just a couple days!

Whoa there! 🐴 stalebot closed osm.org/note/4100467 before I had a chance to delete anything. 😠 As a helpful cleanup bot, I will repeat my previous message. 🔂 Way 1118748789 has been tagged railway=abandoned for over a year. 🏚️ Unless it resumes revenue service within the next 30 days, I will cheerfully delete this way along with its history. 🚮 If you would like to preserve this railway for future generations, simply retag it as either railway=preserved 🫙 or highway=cycleway. 🚴 I will reluctantly delay its inevitable demise by another 30 years or until bicycle=yes is removed, whichever comes first. 🥇
Whoa there! 🐴 stalebot closed osm.org/note/4100467 before I had a chance to delete anything. 😠 As a helpful cleanup bot, I will repeat my previous message. 🔂 Way 1118748789 has been tagged railway=abandoned for over a year. 🏚️ Unless it resumes revenue service within the next 30 days, I will cheerfully delete this way along with its history. 🚮 If you would like to preserve this railway for future generations, simply retag it as either railway=preserved 🫙 or highway=cycleway. 🚴 I will reluctantly delay its inevitable demise by another 30 years or until bicycle=yes is removed, whichever comes first. 🥇700×1920 140 KB

I think all the noise is starting to have an effect, because I looked at one of the abandoned railways stalebot was complaining about, and @RR has gone ahead and retagged it to something that the bot presumably finds less objectionable. All the wordsmiths deliberating about tagging for the renderer never saw this day coming:

wth now i have to tag for the stalebot??? Edited 18 minutes ago by RR. Tags: access=yes bicycle=yes foot=yes highway=path.
wth now i have to tag for the stalebot??? Edited 18 minutes ago by RR. Tags: access=yes bicycle=yes foot=yes highway=path.702×700 38.7 KB

I alerted the DWG, but they’re probably busy with all the pranks going on today. All I got so far was an automated reply, which I might as well get from stalebot…

Does anyone know who’s behind stalebot? Do they realize the potential it has to drive away contributors? Organic Maps thought they escaped from GitHub’s stalebot and now this. Does this bot’s behavior fall under the automated edits policy, or are we supposed to give it a pass because it’s pandering to the outspoken anti-rail crowd?

This rant is making me hungry. Anyone up for some fish? :fish:

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Wow that’s really bad - and everything this bot does got to be reverted and the notes deleted.

Yes, these are automated edits and even worse, it’s not allowed to create notes automatically, see Notes/API and development - OpenStreetMap Wiki

Edit
Oh my, it’s the first of April :smiley:

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oh ffs, I thought I would have to battle an AI for closing notes for being “too old to stay alive on map” :stuck_out_tongue:

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By the way, Pittsburgh’s Fish Fry Map is CC0 and the annual archives back to 2017 are stored at the WPRDC, if you want some fish or need a new project for OHM.

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