Thousands of users blocked with the message "Please contact us by e-mail at data@osmfoundation.org"

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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