What’s new on the OpenStreetMap website?

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

Fixing strange behaviours, producing more reliable backups, and web notifications

Summer is now at its peak in the Northern hemisphere and work slows down… but not for everyone! Development continued on the website, and the month of July (and a bit of August) brought these changes.

But before we get to the list: how many of you will attend State of the Map 2026 in Paris? I, and many in the team, will be there and hope to see you! Please come say hi, tell us all about you and OSM, and ask us any questions.

And with no further ado…

User interface

• We continue to improve how we link to Wikimedia content from the data browser. (@hlfan)
• If you saw a strange behaviour where the map zoomed out unexpectedly when interacting with notes, that should be fixed now. (@hlfan)
• There was another weird bug where the map would disappear after clicking back&forward in some circumstances. Fixed too! (@hlfan)
• Another strange behaviour would leave you with no error message if a note failed to save. Also fixed. (@user10)
• Plus yet another one fixed where you wouldn’t be able to remove a social link in an edge case. (mvanhorn)
• And of course we added a banner to remind everyone of SotM taking place. (@tyr_asd)
• Oh, and one more thing. User notifications. On the website, under “My Notifications”. We said we were reworking how notifications are handled behind the scenes and this is a more tangible result. The functionality is still in flux, we’ll keep you updated as it evolves! (Plus follow-ups: one, two, three, four). (@pablobm)

Behind the scenes

• We continue the road to MapLibre, with small refactors to help reduce the weight of the main change to come. This month, this included a refactor of the ability to move the map when dragging a marker (which now can be used in the diary page too), restructuring confusingly named files, and making use of the facilities we have been building. (@CommanderStorm, @TomH, @hlfan)
• Good moment to remember that there are other instances of the OSM website! The folks at OpenGeofiction contributed two changes to allow configuring features that don’t make sense for them: one is about globally disabling the trace upload functionality, and the other allows customising the links to bulk exports (@wangi’s first contributions!)
• Following up some preliminary work in May, there’s now a functionality for moderators to define “Moderation Zones”: sections of the map where some actions are restricted. For now, these will just ban anonymous notes in these specific zones. (Preceded by one smaller technical change) (@pablobm)
• Facebook. They have a functionality to “forget” all your details in order to follow GDPR and similar regulations. To us, this means sometimes they ask us to delete the links between some Facebook accounts and OSM. This involves manual work, so we implemented an API that should automate the process. (Plus follow-ups: one, two, three) (@TomH)
• And finally, a security fix to prevent attackers from potentially, hypothetically, in very specific circumstances, read files that shouldn’t be accessed. Perhaps. Just in case, we secured it, and then polished the fix (@TomH, @AndyAllan, reported by Turgay Mammadli)

Developer experience

• We refactored some JavaScript code to use “promises”, which if you are not familiar might be less exciting than they sound. They can be great in programming though, so here’s some. (Plus follow-up). (@hlfan)
• We made a lot of changes to convert our custom styles to use Boostrap, plus fixed some issues we created in the process (one, two, three, four, five). (@hlfan)
• We make an effort to follow the framework’s conventions as much as it makes sense, as this makes it easier to upgrade, onboard new contributors, and generally avoid surprises. As part of this, we moved a number of files around to the places they are normally expected to be. (@AndyAllan)
• Also as part of following these framework conventions, we converted some JavaScript code to use Turbo, which is the preferred way to handle async page updates. (@hlfan)
• Following recent changes to how we manage dependency upgrades in the Ruby code, we have made the JavaScript code follow suit. (@TomH)
• For the first time in a while, there was a small change to cgimap, to make sure CI passes in newer operating systems. (@TomH)
• And in order to better comply with our code style checkers, we tweaked some links so that they always provide a destination, even when this is calculated dynamically. (@hlfan)

Beyond the codebase

The website is the main point of access to the OSM database, which is huge, at about 14.8 TB as I write these lines. The folks at the OSM Operations team work tirelessly to keep everything running, and this includes making backups of the data, which not only is useful for disaster recovery, but also serves as the basis of the Planet files that anyone can download.

This adds a complexity: with so much data, full backups could take almost 3 days to create, plus about 3 more days to produce the Planet files. But the whole process must be done in under a week, or that messes up with the schedule for weekly Planet files. The team have been working on improving the situation for a while now, and they have just implemented a change that has reduced considerably the time to create a backup which should solve the problem for the foreseeable future.

Coming up

Now that user notifications are listed on the website, we probably should draw more attention to them. Different sites and apps handle this in different ways, some more subtle than others. We are working on incremental improvements to see how to mark them as “seen”, “read”, or if and how to show a count in the user profile. Stay tuned. Well, you’ll see yourselves anyway!

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

(Splitting in two as usual…)

Thank you!

This work was closely scrutinised by our star reviewers: @HolgerJeromin, Vectorial1024, @Minh_Nguyen, JamesLMilner, GA-Kevin-Codes, @Woazboat, zerebubuth, @mmd, and @Firefishy

Meanwhile, our translators continue to work in making OSM accessible to all, globally. Since last time, the team welcomed these new members: @comfyquiettree (Czech), Penguin, Steenth (Danish), Raos10 (Spanish), Alexgabi (Basque), NClara (French), Koko1998 (Hungarian), PanWor (Polish), Kaartic (Tamil), Addonian1123 (Chinese, Traditional).

[Mateusz_Konieczny]

@pablobm

• Oh, and one more thing. User notifications. On the website, under “My Notifications”. We said we were reworking how notifications are handled behind the scenes and this is a more tangible result. The functionality is still in flux, we’ll keep you updated as it evolves! (Plus follow-ups: one, two, three, four). (@pablobm)

I really hope it is getting us closer to proper notifications for changeset comments.

I see them listed there, but you still get no notification about unread ones. It would be brilliant to have it, some conflicts escalated because someone was leaving comments and other user was not reading e-mail.

[DaveF]

This thread has lost its way, becoming an extension of the problem it was trying to solve:

“To summarize the changes taking place in openstreetmap website, distilling the posts into a more digestible list, mostly focusing on user-facing changes.
If you have any feedback about an individual change described here, please start a new thread”.

If you don’t know how to implement a function of the webpage - start a new thread.
If you want to thank the OP, use the like button.
If you want to have an argument about how much you think you know, use OSM’s Githubs - they appear perfect for that.

I believe this thread should be made read only, accessible to only those who are posting actual website summaries. (yes, I’m aware of irony).

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

Fans of this thread may have noticed that a new recap is past due. August is a slow month for many of us in the Northern hemisphere, plus we attended SotM 2026 in Paris (wish we could have spoken to all of you!). One thing and the other, we are taking a brief break and will make the next issue a bumper one.

Although if you really can’t wait, you can already watch the presentation that @Minh_Nguyen, @Rub21, and myself delivered in Paris. We covered the development of the website, features added in the last year (which will be familiar to readers here), what is on scope and what isn’t, and what drives us to work on OSM.

Construction ahead

See you in a couple of weeks

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

Down with errors, up with fixes, ahead with improving GPS traces

Hello all and welcome back to the recap! It’s been a minute since the last time and, as promised, here’s a bumper issue for all of you dear readers.

UI

• The iD editor is now at version v2.42 (progressing via v2.42.0, v2.42.1, and v2.42.2). This brings new features such as different renderings of highway=track depending on tracktype, the availability of the “circularize” tool on multiple ways that together form a loop, or the update to use version 7 of id-tagging-schema (it’ll download the latest, which right now is v7.2). Check out the release notes for more detail (and the tagging schema’s). (@tyr_asd)

• We ran a periodic update (twice) ensuring that the data view is in sync with the Wiki, linking to the appropriate pages from tags and values. And since we were at it, we also made tweaks to avoid showing deprecated logos. (@Mateusz_Konieczny, plus immHarshitt’s first contribution!)
• The “open note” pins have a slightly new look now. Instead of a cross now they show an exclamation point The intention is to make them look less like problems or buttons that might be closed/removed on click. Also we rephrased the form to add new notes, emphasising that notes will be public and reminding users that content must be descriptive and respectful. (Some of @kmpoppe’s first contributions!)
• Do you remember that annoying behaviour where you zoom out and then you can’t hide the notes until you zoom back in? Not the case any more (@kmpoppe)
• In the notifications page, we are now truncating long pieces of text down to a shorter format. Useful for those changeset comments that turn into essays. (@pablobm)
• In the login screen, the logos of the third party options had gone a bit wrong. Apologies for that, they should be ok now! (@kmpoppe)
• If you have tried leaving an anonymous comment in a region protected by a moderation zone, you will have seen an error that didn’t offer much in the form of solutions. We have rephrased it to be more helpful. (@kmpoppe)
• In the page to register new OAuth 2 applications, it wasn’t clear how each checkbox mapped to its respective underlying permission. We made it more clear now. (@hlfan)
• We found an alternative to some code that was breaking the slippy map in old iPhones. As a bonus, this change also helps a little bit with the upcoming MapLibre migration. (@pablobm)
  • We can’t promise that we’ll support every possible device out there as we don’t have the resources for that. However if you do have issues with a specific device, please let us know (for example under Help and support in the forum) and we’ll see what can be done within our means.
• And we put up a new, shiny banner on the website: an invitation to participate in the 31 Day OSM Challenge. Will you?

Errors

This Summer, the Operations team provisioned a tool to track errors from the application. Some of you involved in software development might be aware of these tools… and suprised that we didn’t have one in place! Choosing these tools and putting them in place is not trivial for resource-constrained non-profits, but we finally got there The chosen tool is GlitchTip, which is Free and Open Source, simple to setup, and compatible with libraries that integrate with the well-known, commercial provider Sentry.

To mark the occassion, here’s all changes related to fixes of errors detected by the tracker:

• But first, the team provisioned the tool in the first place! This was preceded by some discussion, and followed by the set up of the client library, configuring it to send reports asyncronously, and tweaking how much data it should send. (@TomH, @pablobm)
• Now an actual first example: this tool alerted us to how some of you may have not been able to see the notifications page for a couple of weeks That should be fixed now. (@pablobm)
• We could also identify a problem when updating the social links in the user profile. If none were provided, the application would raise an error and behave unexpectedly. Fixed now. (@TomH)
• There were a bunch of malformed requests, most likely from bots, that raised errors in our backend. These included: bogus arguments to search requests, incorrect encodings, requests to edit with invalid editors, requests with invalid element ids, and different variations of providing bad emails on user creation (one, two). (@TomH)
• We also noticed a service misconfiguration, a typo when reading bounding boxes, errors on malformed bounding boxes, and mishandling of some results from Nominatim (plus added additional tests). (@Andy_Allan, @TomH)

Plus some additional errors caught by the team independently:

• We were not showing the Terms of Service correctly, in their French and Italian versions. Fixed now. (@TomH)
• And we fixed another two annoying behaviours, this time with the “Show My Location” button. Now it should disable when refreshing the page and when clicking it for the second time. (imfarhan0105-bits’s first contributions!)

Behind the scenes

• We continue to make small changes with the aim to migrate the slippy map from Leaflet to MapLibre. This time we made a tweak to harmonise their different understandings of zoom levels. (@hlfan)
• Our robots.txt file, which tells automated bots which pages we’d prefer them not to fetch, wasn’t completely clear about some paths. After consulting the appropriate standard we have corrected the situation. (@pnorman)
• We have created an interface to manage ACLs, which we use to block suspicious users from creating accounts in OSM. (@Andy_Allan)
• If you live (as I do) in a left-hand traffic country, you may have seen directions wrongly asking you to U-turn to the left, or take a roundabout in a counter-clockwise direction. This is because OSRM doesn’t contemplate this case yet. While this is sorted, we added support for icons to represent left and right u-turns that might be returned by OSRM in the future. (It was already supported for results from Valhalla and GraphHopper). (@hlfan)
  • Incidentally, if you are interested in getting OSRM to implement this behaviour, you might want to look at the parent issue.
• And we changed how we generate certain pieces of text, specifically in the user blocks page, to make them more useful to translators. (SomSamantray’s first contribution!)

Developer Experience

• We enabled more linting rules (one, two) in the tool Herb, to help us keep our templates clean. (@hlfan, @TomH)
• The code handling social links had some duplication and we streamlined it. (@TomH)
• We also clarified some code around the concept of “current user” in the signup page. (@pablobm)
• We changed the dependabot configuration to ensure it allows upgrades of all Ruby gems, while making a special, more restricted case of upgrading Ruby on Rails. (@Andy_Allan, @TomH)
• Speaking of upgrading Ruby on Rails, it’s now at version 8.1.4. (@TomH)
• Which brings us a good reminder that upgrading software is not trivial, as sometimes this introduces unforeseen incompatibilities that add more work (one, two). (@TomH)
• We also updated the development Docker image to use Debian 13. (@TomH)
• And we addressed not one, not two, but three causes of flakiness in our test suite. (@kmpoppe)

Spotlight: Visibility of GPS traces

Finally, I wanted to bring attention to two changes that we announced in this here forum back in July. They relate to reducing the “visibility” options for uploaded traces, and are some of the fruits of @Rub21’s hard work in the last few months.

First, as part of a long-running effort to revamp and optimise the “GPS Traces” section, we have removed the options to set the visibility of traces as “Private” or “Public”.

Going forward, uploaded traces can only be set as “Trackable” or “Identifiable”. The previous set of options was unintuitive at best, misleading at worst. The reduced set is a much better expression of what users can expect when we publish uploaded traces.

This will still leave the database with a lot of old traces with old visibility settings. In the long term we’d like to avoid this, which leads us to the second change.

We are now providing a new interface for users to bulk-update the visibility of past traces, to bring them in line with the current options:

(And this is the code change).

We don’t expect that every single old trace will be migrated this way, but for now we ask the community to help us reduce the numbers of deprecated records. Over time, the team will decide what to do with the ones that remain, but there’s no deadline.

[pablobm (Pablo Brasero)]

Thank you!

As always, code contributions cannot be complete without the help of our star reviewers, which for this issue also included @Minh_Nguyen, @Anton_Khorev, danieldegroot2, @CommanderStorm, @HolgerJeromin, and @Firefishy

And many in the community can use the website in their own language thanks to the work of our translators. Since last time, their ranks have been augmented by: @Ga99 (Catalan), Bennylin (Indonesian), Blaséd (Romanian), Hanooz, LProfo (Persian), Jajko30 (Polish), JiodoJ (Maltese), @kmpoppe (German), NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh (Vietnamese), @Seb0927 (Spanish), SmallCat10000 (Chinese, Simplified), @shuuji3 (Japanese), @Thomasje (Dutch), أبو هشام (Arabic), and باران (Pashto)

[Fizzie-DWG (Graeme Fitzpatrick)]

@pablobm

• The “open note” pins have a slightly new look now. Instead of a cross now they show an exclamation point

In the last few days I’ve also started seeing that when you pick a Note from e.g. https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes-country?c=Australia, it’s sometimes no longer highlighted when it opens: Note: 5541475 | OpenStreetMap

First noticed this a couple of days ago following a Firefox update so that could also be involved?