What’s new on the OpenStreetMap website?

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

More color, prettier links, and less swimming

By popular demand, I’m starting a regular series of posts summarizing the changes taking place in openstreetmap-website – the main OSM website and API. I trawled the many merged pull requests and commits from March 16 to today, distilling them into a hopefully more digestible list. Since the community here is mostly mappers and other casual website users rather than coders, I’ve mostly focused on user-facing changes.

In the future, I’ll continue posting the updates to this thread roughly monthly. Please subscribe to this thread if you want to keep getting updates, or mute it if you already follow the osm-website project closely enough that I’d be insulting your intelligence.

Before I begin, I have a small request: if you have any feedback about an individual change described here, please start a new thread about it. To do this, select the bullet point you want to respond to, click ❝ Quote or press Q, click the button next to my name, and click  Reply as linked topic. That way, I’ll be able to reuse this thread without spamming the forum category. Thanks for your consideration.

Without further ado…

Slippy map

• The Map Key panel explains the CyclOSM layer’s route overlay colors.
• If you install the OSM website as a progressive Web application, it registers as a protocol handler for the geo URI scheme.
• In the Map Layers panel, the Map Data checkbox shows a spinner while data is being downloaded from the API.

Directions

• Directions from OSRM once again mention if a step requires you to board a ferry. You weren’t going to swim, were you?
• A new toggle at the top of the Directions panel lets you switch distances between kilometers and miles. I see some smiles from our British friends, who’ve been asking, “¿por qué no los dos?” It’s also a step in the right direction for Americans like me who measure distances in, uh, hours. (Say, can we add a smoots option for those attending State of the Map U.S. in Boston next month?)

History

• We refreshed the map overlays on the main History page. The map can start to get crowded with bounding boxes after you load several pages’ worth of additional changesets. Now the bboxes are color-coded by age based on the sidebar’s scroll position. The scroll position also determines which bboxes you can select on the map, so that the newer changesets you saw initially won’t get in the way of selecting older changesets you’ve since loaded.
• If you position the map to straddle the antimeridian, all the relevant bboxes now appear, on both sides of the antimeridian. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in monitoring Taveuni, this bug fix makes the map useful when you zoom out to see the whole world multiple times over.
• While you play around with the new overlays, you might notice that the before= or after= URL parameter is synchronized with the scroll position. You can use these parameters to jump directly to a long-ago slice of history instead of spending a whole afternoon loading 20 changesets at a time. (I’ve done this. Do not recommend.)
• We corrected the license of the history Atom feed: ODbL, not CC BY-SA.

User accounts

• The Log In screen warns you if you’re already logged in. This is useful if you use Firefox Multi-Account Containers with the homepage in one container and your editor in another container.
• On the Edit Profile page, you can set a home location name to appear in the summary line of your user profile.
• Each cell in the contribution calendar is colored relative to your personal best rather than by an absolute threshold of changesets. Clicking the cell opens a list of the changesets created that day.
• We fixed an issue where users in the Western Hemisphere saw a contribution calendar incorrectly offset by one month. Time zones are hard!
• Some page titles and section headings related to following users are more grammatical.

Editors

• We upgraded iD to version 2.33.0, then v2.34.0. Both versions come with a number of improvements.
• When editing in iD, the page title says “iD” followed by the name of the feature currently selected in iD. This makes your iD window or tab easier to distinguish from the homepage.

Diaries

• The Users’ Diaries page and other chronological diary entry listings truncate each entry so you can navigate the page more easily.
• If your Web browser supports it, the bottom of each diary entry now includes a button that opens your operating system’s built-in sharing options.

Other user-facing changes

• Any www.openstreetmap.org or wiki.openstreetmap.org URL is automatically shortened to osm.org or osm.wiki, respectively.
• When viewing a changeset’s metadata, common keys such as host=* once again link to the associated key description pages on the wiki.
• If you use the website in a right-to-left language (such as Arabic or Hebrew), text in a left-to-right language is laid out correctly and vice versa, no longer placing punctuation on the wrong end of each line in Markdown-formatted content.
• In Chrome on a mobile device, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears immediately on the New Note screen, obscuring the map and preventing you from adjusting the note’s location.

For data consumers

• Did you know we no longer require your OSM attribution notice to contain a copyright symbol (©)? We updated the Copyright and License page to reflect current best practices for attribution. In case you link “OpenStreetMap” to this page (in order to call attention to the ODbL, as required), the page starts out with a brief description of OSM and links to learn more.
• The OSM API’s /api/0.6/user/gpx_files endpoint can return JSON output.

For developers

• openstreetmap-website is built with Rails 8.

You can help!

Thanks to recurring contributors @amire80, andy_allan, anton_khorev, @user10, danieldegroot2, @David_Tsiklauri, @hlfan, @holgerjeromin, @karussell, kcne, rkoeze, TomH, @trickyfoxy, and @tyr_asd for these and other changes that are less visible but no less important. And a special welcome to first-time contributors @harel_m, @neatnit, and Valchee!

If you’re familiar with some of the technologies the site uses, like Rails or JavaScript, we have a large backlog of outstanding pull requests that you can help review informally, helping the maintainers assess which ones are most ready to land. Occasionally we tag an issue as a good first issue, which means it’s well-defined and doesn’t require much background knowledge. If you don’t have a coding background but speak a language other than English, help us translate the website and other OSM software into your language.

This list of changes is pretty long, and maybe you were surprised to see some of it landing now. Over the coming months, I’ll be working with maintainers to articulate a roadmap for this and other core software projects, so you’ll have a general idea of the larger things we want to prioritize. Your feedback as community members will be crucial to putting together a useful roadmap.

How are we doing?

If you have any feedback that isn’t quite formulated well enough for an actionable GitHub issue, feel free to reach out to me directly via a private message on this forum or osm.org, or e-mail me at minh@[the OSMF domain]. (I also lurk on a few chat platforms.) My formal role as CSDF will focus on often underappreciated infrastructure, but even if you’re interested in something more user-facing, I can at least try to connect you to the right people in the community.

I’d also appreciate feedback about this post in the meta discussion about keeping track of changes. Are these bullet points putting you to sleep? Do I need to explain the changes in more detail? Would you also like to hear about non-user-facing changes such as refactoring and unit test coverage?

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

Tidier directions, your social media presence, and languages you’ve heard of

The last recap covered a lot of ground. This time I’m only going to cover a single month, from mid-May to mid-June. It’ll be a little less eventful, but only a little less.

Slippy map

• When you view a featured tile layer that’s provided by a third party, the Map Key panel links to the layer’s full legend.

Map data

• Address point labels are more consistent between the element inspector and feature querying results.
• If you get rate-limited for downloading too much data via the Map Data overlay, the error message explains why and tells you how many seconds we’re giving you to make a pot of coffee or tea or ramen.
• When you use the Query Features function, the “Enclosing features” section lists boundaries by area. Now Russia and other big areas spanning the antimeridian show up in the correct place in the list, befitting their large size.

Directions

• The Directions panel has a more compact design that makes it easier to switch between driving, cycling, and walking directions. It also explains what a routing service is, for those who are new to OSM and are used to thinking that everything location-related is “a map”.
• We improved the alignment of distance labels in turn-by-turn directions.

History

• On the History tab, if you lose your place in a long list of changesets, you can right-click a changeset bounding box and select “Scroll to changeset” from the context menu.
• If you use the website in a left-to-right writing system, changeset comments in a right-to-left writing system appear in the current order without jumbling the words.

User profiles

• Does your boss know what you do in OSM? Now you can proudly display your company affiliation with a as part of your profile.
• We added a dedicated section to your profile page for you to show off your profile pages from other sites, including social media platforms, this forum, the wiki, and OpenHistoricalMap and OpenGeofiction.
• The contribution heatmap has been reworked to no longer show the rest of the days of the current month as blank cells. Rest assured, you will not have been slacking off the rest of June (finally found a reason to use the future perfect progressive tense).
  A few issues with the new heatmap have also been fixed:
  • Too dull green made some contribution cells barely visible.
  • If Sunday is your preferred first day of the week, the heatmap would disappear
  • And for a few minutes, the user pages weren’t even reachable.
    Sorry for that.
• Tooltips in the contribution heatmap now use a more idiomatic date format for your preferred language.

Settings and preferences

• Whether you speak da or ja or uk, you probably don’t find ISO 639 language codes to be very intuitive. They look like country codes but aren’t. Now you can choose your preferred language from a dropdown menu with human-readable names. So if you’re fluent in tlh but conversant in eo and can barely hail a cab in la, you can still set that fallback list in a new Advanced Preferences tab.
• We removed the button to log in using OpenID. This only used the legacy version of the OpenID protocol. Hardly any sites support this version anymore, and for those that still do, the option wasn’t working.

Editors

• We upgraded to iD v2.34.1, which fixes a bug that deleted non-numeric values for keys like direction=* and length=* that accept keywords or units.
• You can start using keyboard shortcuts immediately after launching iD, without first clicking somewhere in iD.

User diaries

• We added a New Diary Entry button to the top of each of your diary entries for consistency with the main index page of your diary.
• We added a section to each user’s profile page previewing their most recent diary entries.
• We limited how much text you can put in a your user profile, diary entry, or diary comment. There have been some really long ones, but we tried to avoid impacting anything legitimate. (This forum has similar limits, in case you’re wondering.)

For data consumers

• We improved the performance of the API’s /map endpoint.

Yay!

There’s even a little more than this that hasn’t been deployed, so it’ll have to wait for next month’s recap. Thanks to @anton_khorev, @hlfan, kcne, mahmoudhanafy, @mmd, nertc, rkoeze, @TomH, and @tyr_asd for your continued contributions to the project. See the first post above for some ways you can help out. If you’re attending State of the Map U.S. in Boston later this week, please do me a favor: corner me and talk my ears off about your experiences, hopes, and dreams for the core OSM software. Let’s get it all off your chest.

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

Q130350264, Q7214489, Q107659597

With the launch of vector tiles on the homepage and other long-awaited features, it’s a good time to be a daydreamer. Change is possible!

Slippy map

• The Map Layers sidebar offers two new featured layers based on vector tile technology. Shortbread and MapTiler OMT make it easier for you to see the impact of your mapping on maps that are based on the Shortbread and OpenMapTiles tile schemas, respectively. If you have any questions or concerns about these layers or ideas for improving them, please see this guide to the various software components involved that you can submit feedback on.
• Click the new 文A button at the top of the homepage to change your preferred language, even if you’re logged out. Besides the user interface language, this setting also affects the language of map labels in the MapTiler OMT layer, so you can much more easily detect missing or incorrect place names in regions where your language is a minority language.

Map data and history

• The history page for an element with many versions paginates to reduce loading time. Click the Older Versions and Newer Versions buttons to see more versions.
• When viewing the details of an element version, a new scrollable navigation bar lets you navigate among versions more easily without accidentally landing on a page you didn’t expect. If there are a lot of versions, it skips some so you can more easily jump around.
• We reorganized the per-changeset statistics on the history page so they’re easier to scan, and these icons also appear on other pages that link to changesets.
• Per-changeset statistics distinguish between elements added, deleted, and modified using a indicator, like in OSMCha. (This only appears on a small number of changesets for now but will become more prevalent later.)
• Click the Wikidata logo next to any wikidata=* or *:wikidata=* tag value to reveal a more user-friendly label, description, and image. This feature is based on the Human-Readable Wikidata browser extension.

Search and directions

• Search terms stay visible in the search bar on the homepage as you open and close sidebar panels until you close the sidebar.
• We fixed the appearance of the “Where is this?” button in the search bar in Firefox.
• The distance unit toggle button can accommodate the longer words in some languages and also distinguishes between American-style miles and feet and British-style miles and yards.
• The map markers indicating the origin and destination of a route include and icons so that you don’t have to distinguish them by color.

Settings and preferences

• If you joined OSM before May 2019, you have an opportunity to review and explicitly accept the terms of use in your account settings. If you joined after May 2019, you already accepted the terms of use when signing up.
• If you haven’t set your home location, the missing map on your dashboard shows you how.
• You can dismiss a popup notification by clicking on the button.
• Fixed an issue where the list of notes for a nonexistent user appeared in an unexpected language.
• Fixed an issue preventing accurate translations of the term “Terms of Use” into some languages.

User profiles

• We fixed an issue preventing localizations from translating the alt text for an unrecognized website.
• We added icons for any links to Mapillary, How Did You Contribute?, and the HOT Tasking Manager in your profile.
• We moved the Location and Organization bits to the sidebar of your user profile.
• We reorganized the Edit Profile page into multiple tabs.

Other changes

• We added a banner for State of the Map 2025 in Manila. See you there!
• Every paginated list, such as GPS traces or diary entries, now includes older and newer and oldest and newest buttons at the top and bottom of the page.
• Fixed an issue where an image at the end of a diary entry could break the page layout.
• Upgraded iD to v2.35.1, v2.35.2, and v2.35.3.
• An error appears as an error if you attempt to send a report to the administrators that lacks the required fields.
• We fixed an issue where the OAuth authorization flow would lose the referrer and wouldn’t reach the right welcome page.
• Fixed JavaScript functionality such as the search results in very old browsers such as Pale Moon and Firefox 85. Note that these old browsers are no longer officially supported.

For developers

• We changed how some third-party tools can authenticate with the website through OAuth. This broke some third-party libraries and tools. Please see our security announcement for guidance on fixing regressions.
• You can customize attribution strings in API responses using new environment variables at compile time.

For contributors

• We added a command for easily registering the required OAuth applications.
• You can contribute SVG images as individual files that get inlined automatically.

Thanks to @Koreller @_martin @Pikse for contributing their first pull requests to the website, to @ZeLonewolf for making his browser extension code available to crib from, and to the MapTiler team for their patience and persistence in getting MapLibre integrated into the site. Meanwhile, @pnorman gets all the blame for dragging us into the modern vector era. Thanks also to our regular contributors, and to all those who took the time to review the pull requests and provide user feedback on them before the changes went live.

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

Faster element lists, more links, prettier alerts

Data browser

• Various element keys’ values link to a relevant webpage. You can suggest more keys to link in the tag2link repository.
• Large relation pages load the list of members on demand after preloading element tags instead of eventually showing a raw gateway timeout error (HTTP 504).
• Long lists of elements load faster due to caching the preferred language setting.
• Pretty much every changeset now shows the enhanced changeset statistics that we enabled recently.
• A changeset’s lists of changed nodes, ways, and relations have scrollable pagination controls, so you can more efficiently navigate among pages of elements.
• We fixed the warning about failing to load an element when viewing a deleted element.
• If you access the website from a shared IP address or if you’re a moderator, you’re less likely to hit a rate limit when fetching OSM data.

Slippy map

• Attempting to view large relations too often used to silently fail and show you an empty map. Now you get a warning about rate limiting along with the element metadata.
• The Map Data layer can highlight elements on both sides of the antimeridian simultaneously.
• We fixed the attribution on vector tile layers.
• The Shortbread and MapTiler OSM layers correctly choose between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters in Google Chrome.
• Dragging the map no longer selects a changeset bounding box that happened to be in the way.
• If you squint at a Retina display, a marker points to the exact spot where you dropped it, not the pixel over to the right.
• Clicking the shadow of a marker no longer selects the marker.
• Note markers have shadows like other markers.
• Only search result markers grow when you hover over them, not other markers such as for notes.

Notes

• Notes listings show a gray marker next to any note hidden by a moderator.
• On a list of a user’s notes, the Next button is disabled if there’s only one page to display.

Authentication

• Added an option to log in using your Apple ID.
• We fixed an error when logging out after flipping through pages of a long list.
• The octocat on the login page changes colors in dark mode.

User profiles

• We fixed links to How Did You Contribute in the social links bar of user profiles.
• Long diary entry titles wrap more elegantly on your user profile page.
• The social link icon for this forum looks slightly different than other OSM-related link icons.
• We fixed a subtle typo in the tooltip for the special icon on the profile page of users who have the importer role.

Editors

• We upgraded to iD v2.36.0.
• We fixed an issue where pressing the ↓ key in iD sometimes scrolled the whole page down, getting stuck down there.

Localization

• The language picker captions every language in English in case you can’t recognize the language’s own name for itself or don’t have adequate fonts for the language. (An upcoming change, not yet deployed, will localize these captions.)
• We added a new localization in Arpitan.
• Raw MediaWiki wikitext syntax no longer appears on the notes page or in e-mail notification subject lines in some languages.
• We fixed another issue preventing accurate translations of the term “Terms of Use” into some languages.

Other user-facing changes

• We fixed the infinity mirror that occurs when you go to accept the contributor terms and click “Rest of the world”.
• When you export an image of the map or download map XML, you get immediate feedback that the export is underway and an alert if it fails for some reason.
• We replaced various browser-based alert boxes with more elegant-looking alert boxes.

For data consumers

• An App Store reviewer will no longer attempt to use your iOS application’s OSM login option and reject the submission for lack of an Apple ID login option.
• We documented the API for searching changeset comments that we introduced back in February.

For developers

Changes that may be relevant to developers who maintain their own instance or fork of openstreetmap-website, but not to the main OSM website instance:

• We added a rake task to backfill enhanced changeset statistics.
• We fixed an issue where changeset create and close operations triggered an assertion failure when using brotli compression.

For contributors

• The documentation for installing, configuring, and contributing to the website codebase got a big overhaul.
• The manual installation guide has been updated to list the current path to use for Postgres on macOS and clarify that you only need to register OAuth applications once.
• docker-compose is configured for interactively debugging a server-side error.
• GitHub Actions dependencies are locked to specific hashes.
• Tests now catch when translators attempt to add unsupported MediaWiki syntax to translations in Translatewiki.net.

The more the merrier

A warm welcome to @jleedev, @larouxn, MAHanupriSAR, @OrichalcumCosmonaut, @pablobm, praszuk, and siyulai21, who made their first code contributions this time around. They join recurring contributors hlfan, kcne, @mapmeld, @Pikse, @placemarkt, tyr_asd, and @user10.

We also need help reviewing pull requests by others, so it’s great to see HolgerJeromin, mapmeld, nenad-vujicic, petr-hajek, and pnorman stepping up.

And we can always use some help translating the software into various languages so mappers can contribute more easily. Thanks to Aegis1009, Albertoleoncio, Arely, Eihel, Elzav, @jemily1, @KX675, L’Arpetani, Modin, MoritzMT20, Sampi│ϡ, संजीव कुमार, Tauqeerkhansurani, and Xhulianoo for joining the translation effort.

Finally, you may have recently seen the Core Software Development Facilitator come up in election discussions. I appreciate the recognition, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t deserve so much credit yet for how much has been moving in the core software projects. That’s really been anton_khorev, mmd, and TomH actively tending to the projects as volunteer maintainers. The other support work I do behind the scenes would not be possible without their cooperation.

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

Tweaks to languages and developer experience

Hello OSM community! My name is Pablo and I am the new Core Software Engineer employed by the OSMF to work full time on the OSM Website. This month it is my pleasure to let you know what’s new.

Let me start by asking: will you be attending State of the Map Europe 2025? It will take place in the city of “jute, jam and journalism”, otherwise known as Dundee, Scotland. If you didn’t hear yet, the banner is now up on the website. I’ll be there, so please come to say hi if you see me!

This month has seen less user-facing activity, and more focus on the development experience. Hopefully that’ll bring us more visible changes in the future! Here’s the summary.

Localization

• We made the website available in the Shan language and the translation is almost complete now! If you are a fluent speaker, you are invited to contribute the missing last pieces of text.
• We have also adjusted how we refer to Egyptian Arabic and Saraiki, to use their proper names.

Usability

• The linguistically-minded changes didn’t end yet! We support so many languages that it can be difficult to find the one we are looking for. To help with this, now you can start typing the name of a language to narrow down the selection. Tangentially, this included a tweak to render the language selector only when required, which may speed things up a little.
• And there was also a corner case where results from Nominatim could be returned in an unexpected language. From now on, we’ll send to Nominatim the user’s preferred language to make sure we get the correct one.
• But enough with languages… What about using the right words? Do you know those modal dialogs with a big “OK” button? OK what? It’s not very descriptive. Perhaps you mean “Close”? Hopefully that’s clearer now.
• Some of you might have been confused by black blocks appearing on the Log In page. Two third parties had their logos rendered improperly on Safari. Fixed now.
• We have also addressed an edge case where the blue marker wouldn’t appear in embed views. Go embed maps on websites now!

Software Development

• We are now making more efficient use of GitHub Actions by disabling fail-fast. This option makes sense in many cases, but not ours.
• We keep on top of maintenance of our main backend stack, ensuring compatibility with future version 4 of the Ruby language, as well as upgrading the website to use Rails v8.0.3.
• There are many other small pieces of Open Source Software that make up the website. Sometimes too many, so this month we removed a couple of Ruby gems that we were not using any more: kgio and logstash. Doesn’t it feel great to shed dependencies?
• On the frontend, we adapted some code to follow the coding standard recommended by the eslint tool.
• There was also an update to our Docker development setup, making sure that it works with “Apple silicon” computers.
• Finally, we have starting adding new tools to help us collect better metrics about the performance of the application. Stay tuned!

This is a community effort

We wouldn’t be able to do this without everyone who makes the OSM community:

• This month’s code contributors were @TomH, amire80, @mmd, @Andy_Allan, rkoeze, @livingwithdragons, and myself (@pablobm).
• Their code was reviewed by @Minh_Nguyen, @HolgerJeromin, @hlfan, MLNW, and larouxn.
• The latest additions to our team of translators are R1F4T, Matus_cz, Tom_Konda, Laquin, Giorgx12, Dheff022, Saimawnkham, Saosukham, Leptictidium, @JanezPavelZebovec, Marphy_123, and Wodsfort.

Thank you all so much!

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

More dark mode, less missing data

Here we are yet again! These are the changes we made to the website since the last update.

User interface

• We updated iD to version 2.37, which includes Dark Mode! This goes hand in hand with new preferences to let you choose different color modes for website, map, and editor. Remember that to see the map in dark mode, you’ll have to select the Shortbread or Transport Map layers.
• We also applied a MapLibre update enabling italics for CJK text. This can be seen on the MapTiler OMT layer (specifically, park labels in that layer).
• We redesigned the contextual menu on the map, with larger, more readable text as well as icons.
• The English version of the the map legend is now called “Legend” (instead of “Map Key”) as that’s the name used elsewhere. This will be different across languages, but may help with consistency across all.
• We now recognise new element tags so that they render with relevant links.
• The buttons in the profile page looked a bit misaligned, so we have aligned them!

Data and API

• We added a confirmation button to warn of a potentially large download when exporting Overpass data.
• When exporting directions, now we serve the correct MIME type, which advises browsers to append the correct extension .geojson on downloaded files. Right now this can be seen on MacOS browsers, with a Windows fix incoming
• We added missing profile details such as social links to the API.
• Also missing no longer is the username in our OpenID integration.
• Tweaks to data handling, ensuring the correct counts of changes in changesets and addressing race conditions in uploads.

Developer Experience

• As usual, we upgraded many dependencies. This included bumping Rails to v8.0.4 as well as removing a lock that prevented minitest from upgrading.
• We enabled ActionMailer Previews, which allow us to… preview emails in development! Much easier than what we were doing until now. This was followed by actually adding the previews.
• We reworked the local installation instructions, making sure they stay up to date and relevant.

Code refactors and cleanups

• We cleaned up the backend test suite a bit, by adding new tests, working around a strange Selenium behaviour, and making sure we don’t rely on implicit order of DB results.
• On the frontend, we refactored how we handle cookies, removed redundant icons, made sure to only run code when needed, and dropped code that gave the impression of support for IE9.
• In the realm of DevOps, we tweaked the Docker config to clean up unused files, removed support for development with Vagrant, and cleaned up leftovers from our old TravisCI setup.
• And finally a bunch of removals, including unused initializers (one and two), unnecessary library loads (un et deux), some files related to Google Webmaster tools, as well as moved TODO comments to GitHub issues.
• (OK, we also added some whitespace to give us better breathing room ).

We have the best contributors

• This month we had first-time code contributions from @Emmanuel_Jolaiya, daishu0000, and pReya.
• Along with old-timers @ENT8R, @TomH, @mmd, @hlfan, @Andy_Allan, rkoeze, @Emmanuel_Jolaiya, @tyr_asd, daishu0000, @Minh_Nguyen, and myself (@pablobm).

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

(Continued from above, which I had to split to work around a limit in the forum software).

• Supported with reviews from @zby-cz, @Anton_Khorev, @pnorman, @amapanda_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ, @Firefishy, danieldegroot2, @aharvey, @HolgerJeromin.
• And joining our roster of translators, this month we welcomed
  @Dzamper, Rkieferbaum, Boro, @Tiptracks, SZ475, Mike is Michi, Ucukor, @Spixi, Larkang, TheRabbit22.

[SimonPoole]

This one confused me …

• We added a confirmation button to warn of a potentially large download when exporting Overpass data

Where are we using Overpass for data export?

Ok found it … Overpass adds a couple of extensions to the output format, I’m not quite clear on if they could potentially cause issues with unsuspecting users or if in the mean time everything supports / ignores them.

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

As it says in the pull request description, if you go to the Export page and click the “Overpass API” link (as opposed to the Export button), it actually kicks off an Overpass API request. This caught me by surprise too.

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

Eye-catching emoji, links that actually link, gifts for working groups

Our core software projects managed to slip in a few more treats before the end of the year:

Slippy maps

• Icons in the map’s context menu more closely match the icons that appear elsewhere on the homepage. (@aNsHuL5217)
• Upgraded the map on the Dashboard to be powered by MapLibre GL JS. It should mostly work the same as Leaflet, but let us know if you run into any problems so we can address them by the time we upgrade the map on the homepage to better support the vector layers without a compatibility shim. (@CommanderStorm)
• Fixed an issue where the map would sometimes zoom out to the whole world when closing the History pane. (@daishu0000)
• An emojified “” in the corner of the map calls more attention to opportunities for supporting OSM financially. (@TrickyFoxy)

Data browser

• References to elements and tags automatically turn into links in any text that we assume to be plain text, such as changeset comments. (@hlfan)
• Fixed the broken link when wikipedia=* is set to a semicolon-delimited list of values. (@gergelypap)
• Fixed broken links when a tag value is set to an incomplete URL or multiple values separated by semicolons. (@hlfan)
• Fixed broken links for some tagging schemes that expect a leading hash (#) character, such as hashtags=*. (@hlfan)
• On a changeset or element history page, some elements are crossed out to indicate that it has been deleted. This indication is now accessible to screen readers. (@TomH)

Directions

• On Windows, exporting directions as GeoJSON now saves the file with the correct .geojson extension. (@HolgerJeromin)
• Fixed the link crediting FOSSGIS for powering the Valhalla routing option. (@SimonPoole)

Moderation

• The interface for suspending and deleting users is clearer and less error-prone (and again further polished). If a DWG moderator confirms a user by accident, they can suspend the user. (@pablobm)
• Suspending a user hides any unresolved issues reported against them. (@TomH)
• Moved the rules for detecting SEO spam accounts out of the public repository to a database that the OWG can update more easily without making it too easy for the spammers to adapt. (@pablobm)

Internationalization

• Upgraded MapLibre so that the Shortbread and MapTiler OMT layers can render some rarer CJK text, newer writing systems like Osage, and some silly things like emoji and mathematical symbols. (@Minh_Nguyen)
• Added a localization in Central Bikol, a language spoken in the Philippines. (Kunokuno, ShiminUfesoj)
• When you search the Internet for pages on openstreetmap.org, various pages will have more descriptive snippets that potentially match your preferred language. (@Andy_Allan)
• A few miscellaneous messages around the website can be translated from English. (@Andy_Allan)

Other changes

• The About page mentions our licensing policy so that the LWG doesn’t have to field so many requests for permission from the media. (@pablobm)
• If your Preferred Website Color Scheme setting differs from your operating system settings, the correct colors appear in the third-party logos on the login page and the context menu for the map on the homepage. (@hlfan)

Behind the scenes

As always, we’re also carrying out many refactors and upgrades to modernize and streamline the codebase. We’re also improving the reliability of automated tests and other development tools. The results aren’t as obvious to all of you, but it makes everything else possible and paves the way for future improvements.

The team is growing! @hlfan is our newest maintainer, after contributing quite a bit over the past year. @HolgerJeromin and I will also be helping out with triaging.

Welcome to our first-time contributors: @CommanderStorm, @gergelypap, and @aNsHuL5217 (who chose our website to make their very first open source contributions)! If any of you have been waiting for the right moment to get off the sidelines and help out, maybe now’s the time. We’ve updated the guidelines for contributors to mention the new core software roadmap and expectations for organizing commits and branches, which will hopefully reduce some potential friction.

Welcome also to our new translators: Anon (German), Asteralee (French and Italian), ExoHyper2026 (Simplified Chinese), Kunokuno (Central Bikol), MeahNunh (Khmer), MonX94 (Ukrainian), Penyuwangi (Indonesian), ShiminUfesoj (Central Bikol), TheRabbit22 (German), Wawrzec (Polish), and Yeager (Swedish). If you , check out all the different projects that are waiting for your translation help, including our website.

And thanks to @awiseman, @CommanderStorm, @HolgerJeromin, @pablobm, and @pnorman for helping our maintainers review pull requests. You help us maintain quality in a growing project.

[silversurfer83]

Thanks for the update and the hard work everybody put into our little project here

My favourite that I already noticed is that $key=$value in CS comments gets turned into links. That is a great upgrade for those pesky commenters like me

Happy Holidays, if applicable

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

More MapLibre progress, more context, fewer bugs

Happy new year to all in the community! Activity in the website has barely paused despite the holidays. To prove it, here’s a list of the latest changes you may have seen this month.

Slippy maps

• The transition from Leaflet.js to MapLibre continues slowly but surely, as we converted the location selectors in the profile page and in the “New Diary Entry” page. (@CommanderStorm)
• This also involved disabling certain features of MapLibre that are not necessarily appropriate in all instances. (@hlfan)
• Plus fixing a bug where tooltips didn’t render properly for MapLibre maps. (@TomH)
• The dashboard map now renders the markers for nearby users in a more sensible order. (@aNsHuL5217)
• The main map now hides banners and menus while initially loading, avoiding a jarring first render. (@TrickyFoxy)
• Icons for map controls are now rendered from standard Bootstrap icons, simplifying maintenance. (@snehaljadhav7317)

Providing more context

• In the layer selector, we added little info links to provide context about each map layer. (@SinghSwayam, @snehaljadhav7317)
• At the bottom of the directions results, we now offer links to see map directions in third party sites (@SykoDaedalus)
• Updated wiki_pages.yml, which helps us link from element tag keys to the correct pages in the OSM wiki. (@mmd)
• Updated messages to manage expectations about contacting our support team. (@TomH)
• On the GitHub issue template, we now point to the right repo for OSM Carto. (@Dimitar5555)

Internationalization

• The language selector now doesn’t break on pressing Enter. (@pablobm)
• We dropped some unused translation strings. (@TomH)

Small features and fixes here and there

• Errors from Overpass API are handled more gracefully, instead of showing a cryptic message. (@SykoDaedalus)
• In rich text fields (eg: comments, diary entries), we improved how we render links, as well as simplified the code for this. (@hlfan, @TomH)
• The heatmap should now show the correct dates across timezones, as well as the correct months on top. (@hlfan)
• We continued adapting our spam filters to catch all sorts of tricks. (@Firefishy)
• The “share” buttons are now more consistent and use up less space in our codebase. (@hlfan)
• For directions, the same start/end icons are now used for the search form and the map markers, improving consistency. (@aNsHuL5217)

For developers

• We updated the documentation on precompiling assets in Docker, customize the Firefox binary, and choosing your Ruby version with rbenv. (@CommanderStorm, @Andy_Allan, @pablobm)
• We adjusted the Ruby code linters (Rubocop, erb_lint). (@Andy_Allan)
• We performed refactors that renamed factory files for consistency, consolidated map configuration code, and ensured that user confirmations are handled correctly. (@pablobm, @hlfan, @TomH)
• We added initial support for Development Containers. (@pablobm)
• Fixed the wee badge that shows our test coverage on GitHub. (@hlfan)
• And as per our announcement last month, @hlfan has been added to the maintainers list. (@Andy_Allan)

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

(Separate post due to Discourse’s limitation on the number of users I can @-mention in one go…)

Additional thanks to @Minh_Nguyen, @HolgerJeromin, @mmd, @Anton_Khorev, @danieldegroot2, and @waldyrious, all of whom helped reviewing the changes.

A very warm welcome to @SykoDaedalus and @snehaljadhav7317, who made their first code contributions to the project, as well as to our new translators: Aindriu80 (Irish), Escargot bleu (French), Grandasse (French), @hangukhistory (Korean), LeoGe25 (German), OwIultra (Persian), Rusjanis (Latvian), Tecbs (Spanish), Username1233219128 (Slovak), and @ZigaD (Slovene).