Blurry: yes, it’s just overloaded servers for tile.osm.org (besides the problem that those 256*256px tiles will always be a bit blurry depending on the screen dpi).
Would it make sense to put that recommendation into the Wiki and Switch2OSM? And/or to recommend just using the planet dump instead of diffs if weekly updates are sufficient? Is there some QA for planet dumps?
No. Replication diffs are just automated data streams, planet dump is build out of those. There is no QA involved.
And I think that e.g. @SomeoneElse is already recommending QA checking, probably also on switch2osm.org.
The truth is: just setting up a tileserver might have worked in more peaceful times for mankind, it won’t work anymore in 2024 (and did not in 2023 as well). E.g. I could still show you tilelayers that show the vandalism in Israel from last year as of today (that tilelayer used an infected planet dump and never updated since then).
Thank you. There’s been a lot of great advice both from yourself and from @SomeoneElse in this thread, I am just worried it will get lost if it isn’t documented more prominently
Yes, it might be a good idea if both the planet.osm.org website as well as e.g. the tile usage policy (or nominatim usage policy etc.) would carry a warning about this.
The language is (obscene) Russian, but with Cyrillic У sometimes replaced by Latin Y. The content is strongly and vulgarly anti-Putin and anti-Russian.
“OSM” is all of us. We need to decide what sort of project we want it to be - should it allow essentially anonymous contributions from anywhere or should more rules be put in place around account sign-up? Just saying “something must be done” might raise the profile but isn’t in itself helpful. How do you think the project should change** so that issues like this don’t happen - and what will be the impact on the 99.9999% of non-vandal OSMers?
Ultimately someone who is technically familiar with the website code will need to make changes to that, but before that as a project we need to be happy with the direction of the proposed changes and understand what the implications are.
** this is definitely best discussed in another thread
By all means write a wiki page (or a wiki post here that can be pinned) that is a concise summary of the best advice above that someone posting here for the first time and just knows OSM as “a map they can edit” can follow.
The current wiki vandalism page covers all sorts of ground and is neither concise nor a good summary of this problem. There are lots of “This is the first time XYZ has posted — let’s welcome them to our community” in the 360 or so posts above. That’s entirely to be expected - we can’t expect people reporting an urgent issue to read 360 prior posts or sift through our delightful wiki before posting.
I tried to summarise here what is the suspected motivation of this vandal and here what someone should do when they see a problem, but I’m sure there’s more that the second of those in particular should say.
With regard to the Switch2osm guides, I did write a diary entry that among other things explains how to use the Switch2osm pages to keep an “occasionally updated” site - perhaps it’s worth another link below the three technical “Updating your database as people edit” how links to add a page that explains why you might want to do that only occasionally and what you’d check before pushing the update button. The code of the site is here.
This one here: Wave of vandalism is a good and concise post about the problem that should be pinned (with an English title) (and also translated into other languages to be pinned in subforums for Russian|Italian|Spanish|etc. pp.)
It’s pinned in the German forum, and the second half is in German, but it makes sense to pin just the English translation separately under General talk or Help and support. I can’t do that, probably only a mod can.
There’s the people who don’t know where to report vandalism, but there’s also people who want to make maps from OSM data and do not want to have vandalism in it. I can take a stab at putting a warning in the Wiki or the Switch2OSM guide, but I am not really the best qualified person to do that, so it would have to be reviewed by someone else (no pun intended).
