What about automated name edits that aren’t political? I can see at least a few situations (widespread typoes, imports, deprecations, etc.) that would cause false positives. Not all bulk edits are vandalism.
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All of that is valid reason to participate somehow in defence of a country.
But it is not valid reason to write slurs on OpenStreetMap or delete valid data there.
Notably, it affects also people not described by
In general, reaction to evil are not automatically a good thing - such reactions may be also evil or harmful or bad use of available resources. If person behind this vandalism would actually care about this topics, then there is multitude of better ways to achieve their goals.
In this specific case this person is so irritating and doing some pointless things that I started to suspect some false flag with this person pretending to have this opinion to damage opinions other have about Ukrainians. Though I guess they could be just straightforward vandal actually having such opinions and refusing to of do anything actually useful.
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yes, but it is better to revert them to restore correct version of them (NorthCrab was doing it yesterday).
Introduce a full or partial restriction on editing on the territory of Russia and Ukraine from new accounts.
By partial restriction I mean limiting the number of editable objects per unit of time.
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Considering that there is no compensation for contributors here, implementing such modifications will likely require several months, if not years. Even the simplest features require a considerable amount of time to be implemented. Unfortunately, these aspirations might be unrealistic at the moment.
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They do a lot of vandalism out of these countries:
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It’s definitely not a false flag since there are some well-known mappers who admitted their participation in those acts of vandalism. I got a vandalism report a few weeks ago and it was about a videogame museum in Berlin so I don’t think that geo-blocking would help. I also checked the UA community and most of the regular users and mods weren’t pleased with what’s going on and they tried to explain that forcing an international mod team to clean up their mess is not the best way to win friends.
Is there anything a non-admin OSM user can do to help with that? I noticed that those changes are usually reverted within hours, but I’m not sure how labor-intensive it is.
there are no such tools on openstremap servers. completely no 
osmf does not guarantee quality data and how the consequence do not monitor the him. neither for names, nor for geometry, nor for a fountain…
there are a bunch of third-party validators and developments on the topic of name correctness. but they are all scattered and usually work with local languages.
I’m fully aware of that.
We probably do need something on the server side to restrict abusive automated edits, given the amount of time it takes for mappers and DWG to revert them. That’s got nothing to do with data validation.
in my opinion, the fastest to create and effective to work will be the creation of a script “after-moderation of names” on the OSM servers.
blocking the creation of many fake accounts is a third-party task, but it is also necessary in conjunction with this moderation
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