You’ve ignored that, so I’ve sent osm.org/user_blocks/16311 .

Lots of people have commented on your changesets. These will have been emailed to you and you can also see them at https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments.php?uid=10216874 . Please do comment on these changesets in reply.

@gileri - If you’d like to have a wider discussion about the moderation of diary entries, or believe specific punishments should be “hard-coded” into OSMF rules I’d suggest that the forum (perhaps at https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/osmf/41 ) would make much more sense than here.

I’ve hidden four comments above that didn’t actually add any value to the discussion (or replied to those comments and wouldn’t make sense without them).

One of those comments did ask “Now let’s see where the mods stand on the issue”. For completeness we didn’t actually get a report about this (at least not yet) - I just happened to notice that this diary entry had comments and expected problems.

You’re supposed to read the messages on your screen!

I sent osm.org/user_blocks/16298 as a message that you had to read before continuing to edit. Please read it now…

Please see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/have-you-spotted-vandalism-on-openstreetmap-org/114684 at the top of the Help and support area of the forum.

Please see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/have-you-spotted-vandalism-on-openstreetmap-org/114684 at the top of the Help and support area of the forum.

For the recent “straight line” vandalism, see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/the-osm-standard-tile-layer-looks-wrong-white-lines-abusive-comments-etc/111583/305 . If you are aware of other problems (deleting data etc.) please email data@openstreetmap.org .

Actually the osm-carto style is one of most sophisticated map styles out there.

Indeed - it’s designed at least partly as a mapper feedback layer. That’s one reason why it’s a particularly poor choice for our imaginary pizza delivery company - they just want something that shows roads, conurbations and maybe a few other bits and pieces. It doesn’t need to show shops of offices, or the type of farmland, or museums, or…

See here.

For some context about this user’s current status, which may have led to this diary entry, see osm.org/user/Barroszt/blocks .

To summarise, they changed their username to something deemed offensive and started make name changes in Ukraine to old Russian-derived values - see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-about-limit-new-accounts/101656/233 .

Their block was revoked after they promised not to do this again.

They did it again (invalid name changes), and were blocked again, this time for a week.

They did it again (invalid name changes), and were blocked again, and this block is currently in effect with 13 days still to run.

The user has been pestering me and the DWG ticket Ticket#2023102010000113 with requests to be unblocked, but that’s not going to happen until the current block expires.

– Andy from the Data Working Group

We already have factual “this is just what was added” comments from things such as StreetComplete. That’s not so bad, in the context of a StreetComplete changeset, where it’s obvious that someone is answering questions on their phone (because that’s what StreetComplete is).

That would be less useful to generalise to other changesets, because it’s missing the “why”. A completely random sample shows that people do put a fair but of description into changeset comments that simply couldn’t be determined “by AI”, like here.

… and more:

I’ll try and test some QR codes at my local bus stops

There are a few (actually, only 5) examples of departures_board=realtime on phone. I’m not convinced that this is a great tag value but “there is a QR code that you can scan” does seem like useful information to me. I did start adding note tags locally but that’s very incomplete - I soon found out I needed to worry about which stops actually existed and which not first. It’d need integration with one of the mobile editors such as Vespucci or StreetComplete etc. ideally.

I know of some bus stops where the bus_display_name and bus_speech_output_name differs between the two bus companies that serve them.

That’s another good point. I deliberately didn’t use a “:” in bus_display_name or bus_speech_output_name to avoid them looking like different languages but different names used by different bus companies is a different case again.

To address a couple of these questions:

Wouldn’t it be better for the bus route operator to fix such inconsistencies on their end?

It’d be great, but in some cases the work that needs doing is physical changes to infrastucture (removing or marking bus stop poles no longer in use), and replacing missing ones). None of the organisations involved have a bottomless pit of cash or staff to make these sorts of changes with, so it’s understandable that there are discrepancies between (a) the five(!) different sources of bus stop names that I know of and (b) the three different sources of “is this stop actually used or not”. I was a bit surprised about exactly how wrong some of the data is; it may be worth doing another diary entry about that at some stage.

QR code URL in the name is a pretty bad user experience. Font size is small, and to make use of that URL one would have to type it in switching between browser tabs since you can’t select the text from the map. I think such info is better left for details view if they tap on this stop where it can be made into a working hyperlink or at least a selectable text to copy.

“tap on the map to query it” is very much a pull requests welcome sort of thing. If someone wants it badly enough to suggest a leaflet plugin to integrate to do it, I’d definitely be interested. Until then, other sites (not least osm.org itself) can do this already. The small font size thing is only a problem if you can’t zoom in; I find that the overzoomed zoom 25 of zoom 24 tiles at the maps.atownsend.org site is plenty big enough to read, and (unlike osm.org) it’s running a version of Leaflet that tries to zoom rather than fetch on a “two fingered zoom” which makes it pretty easy to read on first load.

… tiny letters are too obtuse to understand without a legend

There is a legend that you can zoom in and out on. It’s actually merged into the data in the middle of Australia.

“letters vs symbols” is an interesting one. Pubs and fast food use symbols for most things, including coloured flashes on the underline for wheelchair access and outside seating/beer gardens. The maps use names into one of four tags (English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and the default “name” tag), so it might have been nice to stay away from letters for that reason (and also not hardcode a currency symbol), but here I used stylised letters because I couldn’t think of a way of encoding e.g. “there is a realtime display here” in a symbol in so few pixels. If anyone can think of a better way of encoding the information without using letters then I’m all ears!

visually impaired people, who probably wouldn’t see the icons anyway

It’s often worth mentioning that people suffer from many sorts of visual impairment - “not being above to read a display or timetable at a bus stop” includes many more “forgot my glasses” than “completely blind”. Also, that’s why I mentioned Garmin Satnavs at the end - if you have control of what names appear in the map you have control of what’s spoken by the device when it tells you something it is navigating to.

@slice0 - can I ask a genuine question?

What makes you think that forum thread is about you? It was started in December. The first reference to anything related to you was in your own post linking to your own diary 17 hours ago. This post was edited to reference this forum thread only yesterday, and that was after the thread had been closed for the reasons described there.

Morocco, Western Sahara, SADR.

If you believe that what is in OSM does not match what is on the ground, I’d suggest discussing it in the forum. Also it’s worth reading this.

Ahem. At the risk of pouring cold water on one of the dumpster fires, it should be noted that the “world-class trolling” comment is here.

I don’t believe that the poster was being entirely serious, given that the next suggestion was “Perhaps you should check the Geneva Conventions to see if :popcorn: is allowed to be used against lawful enemy combatants? I am now wondering if we should send the Red Cross into this thread…”

There’s a long tradition of trying to make serious points through humour - it helps the message get across. See any episode of Last Week Tonight, or going a bit further back, Clarke and Dawe or Beyond the Fringe.

No-one’s harrassing you. People (including me) have been trying to help you understand why the reaction to some of what you’ve been saying and doing has been negative, and trying to help you contribute to OSM in a way that won’t cause such friction.

The last time I looked at the shop key in Britain and Ireland to see what people were using esoteric didn’t trouble the scorers at all. I added rendering support** for new_age because that was used at the time.

With OSM you seem to have to revisit keys at least every couple of years to see what changes there have been…

** on the map style that I look after at map.atownsend.org.uk

Hahahaha.

Where I live, “city itself” has records of lots of things, but they’re not always accurate. For example I know (and now OSM knows) where the bus stops are, but they don’t 100% match where the city thinks they are. Their list is maybe 90% accurate, but that’s no consolation if you’re looking for a bus stop that does not exist.

… so I was going through the diaries as usual, in order to hide the spam, and came across this.

It has all the hallmarks of a spam diary entry - almost entirely content free, apart from the lack of a link to some other site and the fact that it’s written by someone who’s actually edited OpenStreetMap.

May I respectfully suggest that you might want to consider adjusting your communication style so that it’s a bit less likely to confuse in this way? I mean no offence - I’m just trying to be helpful (and you did write “I urge you to reevaluate your relationship with making requests”).

– Andy

(who checks diary entries for spam with a DWG hat on but is writing this in an entirely personal capacity)

With regard to “ease of setup”, the docker guide is probably the closest to a “create a server in one command” that we have. The “sudo apt install” at the top of “manual” instructions actually does almost all of the work for setting things up, but the “extras” such as replication (which there are at least 3 different ways to do, and at least three different sets of servers to do it with).

More information about postgres tuning for larger databases is definitely something that would be useful - earlier versions of the switch2osm guide and the precursors to it did have that but it’s not been something I’ve had a chance to test recently.