Thousands of accounts have getting blocked with the message " Please contact us by e-mail at data@osmfoundation.org", instead of the reason for blocking. Either this seems like a scheme to steal emails, which OSM already has due to people signing up with them, or the knowledge that people won’t send emails to the OSM equivalent of the UTTP. This shows that the DWG has become lazy and self-important, and the users who post these messages should be fired from the DWG.
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How do know that thousands of users were blocked with such a message?
I don’t see recently that many blocks at User blocks | OpenStreetMap
Note that DWG is a group of volunteers. I appreciate their work.
There are many complaints but usually from rightfully blocked users.
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Can you provide a small sample of those accounts, so that can be independently verified what is happening? (Also, how do you know that thousands of accounts are getting blocked?)
As you note, OSM already has e-mails, so contacting them would leak no extra information (“scheme to steal emails”). I would thus suggest affected users to contact data@osmfoundation.org as instructed (after verifying first that e-mail is correct, and not a scammy look-alike by some third party) and ask about the reason.
On related node, E-mail is quite easy to fake. One would need to verify the trusted headers to (e.g. anyone can send e-mails pretending to be “president@usa.gov” or whatever) before claiming that someone is sending some E-mails.
What is UTTP? (besides uTorrent transfer protocol)
This shows that the DWG has become lazy and self-important, and the users who post these messages should be
What shows? And which messages? Please post post some evidence. Also, even if some users were the be incorrectly blocked (for which I have not seen a single supporting piece of information yet), there is no logical connection with the conclusion you reach (“DWG has become lazy and self-important”). Can you elaborate why you think one implies the another?
fired from the DWG.
DWG members are AFAIK not employed, so can hardly be fired.
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This is the first time NoCOOKie has posted — let’s welcome them to our community!
I know that we’re supposed to “assume good faith”, especially on first posts, but I suspect that I’d be wrong to do that here …
What actually happened was that one person (yes, one person) was in dispute with their local community about how to make some changes and what changes it was OK to make. They then decided to abuse OSM by scripting an account creation and data upload process to force their point of view across; when that didn’t work they just resorted to vandalism. Some of these “new accounts” were met with the “Please contact us by e-mail so that we can discuss” message (“assume good faith” and all that) and many more were just suspended by admins.
I suspect that Mr “NoCOOKie” is actually unrelated, but is the same low-level internet troll that the DWG has seen a couple of time recently under a few other names - the characteristically crap grammar (and outside of web forms, spelling) is usually a bit of a giveaway. I wouldn’t engage with this account or similar ones directly since they just want to waste your time.
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I guess they accuse the DWG of being nothing more than a troll police: UTTP - Wiktionary, the free dictionary 
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