Vandalism report

It’s an obvious vandalism and should removed ASAP. Please take a look.

7 Likes

From the chatter in the global Discord, this class of vandalism is being investigated and reverted by DWG. It’s quite widespread right now so may take a bit to get cleaned up.

3 Likes

The same vandalism on the whole Russian country…

2 Likes

Now has a 10 year block after 112 edits getting thru, would it not be great if the database would reject name:ru deletes?

they would do other vandalisms

in fact in this edit they edited name tag to contain slurs

note that it is being reverted not only by DWG

for future advise see Vandalism - OpenStreetMap Wiki (if you are unfamiliar with revert tools, this one is unlikely to be a good place to start due to its scale)

1 Like

I’m wondering if there is a possibility to “block” changing the name:ru=*? These vandalisms are happening for a while, it’s unlikely they will end and it looks like osm current “anti-vandalism” system doesn’t work.
At the same time one user’s changesets were spammed with million very inappropriate comments.

Is there anything more we can do?

how it would help? As mentioned in what you reply: they also edited name tag to contain slurs

there’s no way to block it.
the reverse side of unlimited freedom

Och, I didn’t check thay this time it’s not changing name:ru but actual names in Russia. Sorry about that.
But the rest still stands. I think it is a bit too easy to vandalise data on osm to be honest. So I’m wondering if we can change an approach, because it looks like we can just revert those and similiar changes over and over again and they will just keep coming.
I know that people will say that it’s “freedom” and “everyone can make changes”, but are we sure we are even fighting with humans? They look like bots to me - too many changes in short time to be human-made changes.

How about limit new accounts? has some more actionable proposals

yes, it is scripted vandalism using thousands of accounts (vast majority got purged before vandalising anything)

1 Like

It would be a step to the right direction, and seems easy to implement.
However I’m more into either tag/area block (as usually vandalism targets either specified area or certain tag) or just block new users from making big edits (it’s unlikely that anyone would know how to mass-edit/import correctly 2 minutes after making an account anyway - so 99% of them will be multi-accounts, bots or just vandals). But I’m not a programmer so I can’t tell if this is possible or how much work would this need.

The EWG have been working to give mappers the ability to mute private messages from accounts they donʼt want to hear from. We havenʼt been so keen to extend this to changeset comments in case people mute criticism instead of harassment but something like this really should not be encouraged.

On the territory of Russia, most of the streets were renamed into obscene language

1 Like

yes, that was done by some vandal troll

these accounts were blocked

this edits are being reverted right now

2 Likes

It wouldn’t help it this case, the mapper didn’t have time to block these accounts anyway. Most chats or comments sections have a “cooldown”, so you have to wait 1 minute between comments for example, it does block the simpliest bots.
Also, am I the only one who think that it’s weird that you can write obvious slur in English without censorship in the first place?

Maybe block any changes of the Russian Federation territory until the end of war / Hague Tribunal verdict?

this kind of filters are often overzealous, ineffective or both (see Scunthorpe problem - Wikipedia for start)

responses mention some issues I have not anticipated

as far as I know, this is technically not feasible.
and most importantly: such an offer is stupidity

I remember one of the pillars of the Ukrainian community came out with a petition to ban edits in Ukraine.
how much mappers from Ukraine would have supported him…

will lead, it seems to me, all this to the limitation of the “open” prefix in the openstreetmap :frowning:

In the longer term, I wonder if it would be possible for any attempted bulk edit of name:* tags to be rejected by the servers and the account given a one day automatic block. Whether it’s either side in the current conflict, or racist squabbles about precedence of minority/majority languages, we could probably live without those edits.

2 Likes

I have an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s doable. Since such bots use all the same offensive (or just unusual) words, would it be possible to delete all name=* and name:ru=* tags that match specific regexps? For example, you could find all tags including “НАСИЛ.*” it’d filter words like НАСИЛЬНИК (a rapist) and НАСИЛОВАТЬ (to rape). Additionally you could also make a blacklist of disallowed names.