Recently a number of accounts popped up all behaving in the exact same way. All changesets use “.” as changeset description, the users have very similar names (at least the first few), all users are engaging in the same type of editing activities.
I would like to bring these edits to the attention of the Brazilian OSM community so that their changes can be reviewed and fixed or reverted if necessary.
Some of their edits are blatantly fake, for example renaming islands and adding fake places and roads where there are none. I believe these have all been reverted.
I’d vote to revert all the edits from these users. It seems there might be valuable edits from this person, but hard to pick in all these changesets.
We should also monitor close these cities/regions, so we can act much faster too.
We had a short discussion in our Telegram group, and it seems this is the consensus. We can, of course, wait for more input, but I’m sure the DWG has some opinion as well.
If anyone spots any issues, feel free to fix it or let me know. Reverting data that has since been touched by other editors is always more prone to errors.
I’ve reviewed the changesets of the users you mentioned, as well as Grandunus, brepilef and Eliaria Soares da Silva. I’ve flagged in OSMCha all their problematic edits that I could verify. These accounts exhibit the same editing patterns: changesets described only with “.”, similar modifications to road classifications and place names, and edits concentrated around the same areas, particularly Campos dos Goytacazes and Ilha do Arvoredo. Several edits also affect the same objects previously edited by the earlier accounts.
Another account worth monitoring is GabiruX_, which was blocked for similar editing patterns and has since been unblocked. One of its first actions after the block was lifted was to revert one of your reversions without providing any source or rationale. I have already reverted that changeset.
In Ceará, we were also closely following the edits of Estuks. About a month ago, that account changed its name, started using “.” as the changeset description after some of its highway classification edits were reverted, and its editing patterns, though not as critical, became more similar to those described here.
