From my current understanding, the core OSM website is developed using Ruby on Rails, and there’s a prevailing hesitancy to make any modifications to it. Should there ever be a migration of the website to a different programming language, such as Python, I am confident that maintenance would become significantly more manageable.
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No matter how annoying it may be, but a brief summary of this discussion on 08/22/2023 can be given in four acts:
What if block editing of name* tags and other sensitive data for users who has less than 50 commits? Also, the account should be created at least one month ago. Something like this.
Also, I would consider not to save changes of vandals in the history.
Such people are either stupid and dont understand that they hurt OSM much more than they hurt Russian users. Because they basically force Russian users to stop using OSM-based services and switch to proprietary alternatives.
Or they dont care less about OSM and just want to harm people they hate.
One instance that I saw had “them”, under different aliases, change the name of a single street 6 times in 2 hours! 
, so I think they’re just trying to do as much damage as they possibly can?. 
An annoying side-effect of that is that people are helping by reverting change #6, which then rolls back to #5, but that is also vandalism, so other mappers are then complaining that that person, who is innocently trying to help, is also creating vandalism! 
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What I don’t understand is why do they need to make multiple edits in a row? OSM titles aren’t generated instantly, it usually takes hours until reverted changes take place. So even when their changes reverted fast it still takes time for end users to receive updated map titles.
As far as I understand, they’re doing it to complicate the reverts. If you revert the last edit, it will still revert to a vandalized version and you’ll look as their accomplice and they’re hoping that you’ll get banned for that =) They’re also impersonating well-known mods to make it look like there is a struggle among mods and some mods are sided with the vandals.
I’m surprised that OSM doesn’t have tools to delete users without a trace, it seems like the only option. With such a tool, it wouldn’t matter how much damage you did before, it will all disappear, so there would be no incentive to keep trying. It’s all about cost of attack being lower than the cost of defense, and I think we need to change that equation.
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It will make things harder for them, but they will still be able to create multiple new accounts like they do it now.
This is correct, see GitHub - openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website: The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap
That’s not correct. See either Commits · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub for the 12k+ commits, or have a look at the list of closed pull requests to get a feel for how many changes per week are merged.
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Real solution is restore old version of Russian map before date of start Ukrainian vandalism. Rollback all changes and good too. Now OSM in Russia completely unusable.
It’s shame that OSM team allows such actions
No one on the OSM team “allows” vandalism. A lot of people are working intensively and with great personal effort to curb and revert this unspeakable vandalism.
Shame on you for this disrespectful comment.
The only real solution is to immediately stop the real existing vandalism of Russian soldiers and officers on the ground in Ukraine and restore Ukraine to the state before the date of the start of the Russian war of aggression.
Nobody has the right to engage in vandalism - neither in OSM nor in real life!
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I sure that OSM team directly assist this vandalism act by their inaction. Without this assistance it is impossible.
In such case any normal administrator should restore good version of data and block all modifications before resolve security problem. It’s not simple vandalism. So many modifications can create only by automatic bot. This is security problem of OSM. The project is under bot attack.
Why do you write me about war? OSM is NOT military project. Any war-related comment violated rules of the service. I’m using OSM for my bike routes.
This is not a valid justification to damage OpenStreetMap data. And steps will be taken (and are being taken) to block this attack and repair effects.
This is false.
Just single mapper in fixed/reverted over 2 650 794 objects in Russia (NorthCrab), see OSMstats - Statistics of the free wiki world map
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& in addition to the reverts (~ 3 million & climbing) over 10000 user accounts have also been blocked.
No, they certainly don’t!
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@TurboProject please read this good summary OpenStreetMap атакуют in addition the Operations Team have also locked edits from open proxies and tor.
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Please immediately cease this. Threats like this are not acceptable here.
And this is entirely offtopic in this thread.
I understand that you have valid reasons to be extremely angry at Russian government and whoever supports it.
But it does not justify offtopic threats on OpenStreetMap forum and vandalism in OpenStreetMap. Also, being against vandalizing map data in Russia does not make you supporter of Putin.
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Not sure what is our policy on legal threats (Wikimedia has standing policy to ban anyone making them and talk only to lawyers until these is fully withdrawn).
But please immediately cease this. If you are serious, please consult with of lawyer who will explain to you how you are wrong and why it will go nowhere.
For start you just claimed that it state-level security attack. Being victim of one is pretty strong defense. To say nothing about extreme levels of free speech in USA.
What is moot anyway given that our reaction is to revert all spotted vandalism, delete/block thousands of accounts and introduce technical measures to make repeat of that harder (yes, more than was enabled would be nice). And while you can found troll or two supporting this vandalism, overwhelming reaction is negative and with various attempts so they will be undone. And complaints are that not enough is done to prevent repeat.
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Closed temporarily due to discussion rapidly deteriorating.
To other people with access to this tools: feel free to reopen in few hours.
EDIT: OpenStreetMap forum is not a place to make this kind of threats that were made here. Please drop that lines of discussion.
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This topic was automatically opened after 21 hours.