Mateusz Konieczny:

VPN IP addresses (it is not possible to ‘spoof’ an IP address)

Using VPN address (or Tor) are common methods of spoofing IP address to avoid IP bans.

That is a method of hiding the originating address, it does not spoof it. Any webmaster can discover current sources of VPN, or Tor, so they can know when an access IP is being cloaked.

As I understand it, using VPN or Tor to access OSM is NOT a reason for banning users.

So, we are back to PeanutButterRemedy becoming a freelance grammar vigilante, viciously removing edits for bad etiquette, and using every method used by malicious actors to achieve their ends (hiding their name & methods, using a search-bot, unaccountable to anyone…). I bet their costume has a skull & crossbones on it.

The problem, PeanutButterRemedy, is that you do not offer any firm evidence that these map additions are abusive.

Bad Behaviour:

• throw-away OSM accounts for every single edit
• non-verified email addresses
• working email addresses unconnected to creation organisation
• VPN IP addresses (it is not possible to ‘spoof’ an IP address)

Either these need to be fixed at the operation or administrative end of OSM, or ignored. I have not yet heard that any of them are a reason for denying access (please give the link if procedures have changed). And do not misunderstand me - I would encourage OSM to make their inverse a requirement for signing up. Indeed, I thought that the first two were requirements, and cannot understand anyone being allowed to create disposable OSM accounts. However, if OSM allows it, then it is NOT bad behaviour.

Bad Data:

(a list of edits that 90% of all mappers create at one time or another)

Your list of ‘bad data’ is simply laughable. Tell us your real OSM name & I will find a ton of bad edits of this type from you. Your entire assertion falls flat on it’s face at this point.

Communication Failures:

This is your strongest assertion. However, without valid bad data it does not count. We are looking for folks that pollute the map with malicious edits, not folks that cannot spel.

Try to remember the lesson of the Witchfinder General; in the end he declared himself to be a witch. And you, sir, look very much to be causing malicious harm to OSM.

Hi. You write:

There is no reason that SEOs that are well behaved should not be able to contribute to OSM.

That is an oxymoron. There are NO well-behaved SEO companies.

I am a moderator at StopForumSpam and ran a website with a forum full-time for 15 years. SFS was the only reason I was able to continue, as my site was drowning in spam soon after starting.

There are three main sources of spam:

1. Bots such as xrumer
2. Cheap humans (from cheap-labour countries)
3. Owners/admin that do not care & let it all happen

The first has to be handled with automation, in which SFS can play a part.
The second can be stopped with SFS once they are in the database, although some will always get through.
You cannot fix stupid.

SFS uses a crowd-sourced database to store username/email-address/ip of spammers. Forum owners then use pre-written plugins that interrogate the SFS API to reject known spammers. To be effective the admin need to:–

1. Insist on email verification (and hopefully deny throwaway domains themselves)
2. Use firewall hygiene to deny bot scraping
   (in my day very difficult as Google was one of the top speed scapers)
3. Use IP to deny toxic ASN via RBL sites
4. Use email to deny via SFS

5. There are then a vast number of house-hygiene rules to follow:

   • no profile editing privilege until 10+ diary posts
   • no diary editing privilege until 10+ diary posts
   • no links allowed at all until 10+ diary posts
   • ‘hello, nice to be here’ posts ruthlessly deleted
   • and so on & on
6. Finally, and most important, spammers should be reported to SFS. They are then blocked worldwide by every forum that uses SFS. And you will never see them again.

This year was the first year that spammers did not deluge the SFS forum pages. Yes, it has taken 20 years for SFS to fight the spammers on it’s pages to a standstill.

Your map entry for your office is missing full address details. It has your web-address, of course, and I am worried that you may be contemplating spamming OSM. Place full contact details into the map entry, but do not spam these diary entries, nor comments, nor your profile, else they will all get deleted & your username removed.

I have a suggestion that will help yourselves as well as OSM if you accept it…

Why not add each new customer on to the map? It only takes a couple of minutes. You could then publish their map location together with their details & photo (no need to ask, this is open-source, just do it). Perhaps do the entire street! You can even add photos of the house or street so that folks that search can view it. Get ahead of your competitors.

No it doesn’t, Jerry. I want to be able to either see it at the centre of the shape or to be able to confirm the details in the key/value columns but there is, simply, nothing there. The SHP files are an improvement on the GPX because they can contain a phalanx of inter-locking shapes and each shape can be selected individually, whereas the GPX is just one huge line. However, neither has ever shown the attached text, even if it is in the file, which it is with the NCC datasets. The Polling Stations do have text attached to the nodes.

Thanks, Jerry. Before your comment I managed to convert the .shp to a .gpx but it was damn fiddly. I much preferred the plugin and how it looks. My one disappointment is that no text is carried across into JOSM although it is within the shapefile.

I’v used admin_level=11 within the current mapping but agree with you on changing to boundary=political. I also downloaded the polling station locations after reading your comment and have added two for the first ward. However, I have to add nodes as currently I have them as buildings.

Lord, but it is a slow business.

The idea is to map the land yourself. However, just because you do not like the language used does not mean to change it, else you may get banned from OSM. Localise the language, as suggested at wiki:names.

eg

name:en=Karabakh

Place within as many languages as you know are used locally. The map will then pick the language used by the person that is viewing it.

I’ve just added the losses for the last session - much lower than before, but any loss is unacceptable, and points to lousy programming.

Sounds excellent. All the best for your project, and keep us all in the loop, please.

Excellent!

Gosh, but those extents are much bigger than I expected. As it happens, a dividing line for two extents goes clean through the houses that I’m currently adding to the map (would never have guessed it otherwise).

Map date appears to be 2016-05-09. That date is much older than I expected, although young enough for the houses I’m currently working on (but not for the estate that is next to be mapped).

Although Esri is good, appears to be younger than Bing and far better than other Imagery, I still pine to have imagery as good as Google’s. Other people have car- or house-envy, I have imagery-envy.

Hi Léo_M

Since I was working in JOSM using Esri World Imagery (much better than any of the other imagery) I right-clicked on the display & chose “Show tile info”. Annoyingly no Copy available so laboriously typed in the URL & downloaded the tile. The dates in the metadata were entirely for the instant that it was downloaded. What a waste of intelligence.

$ file 260547 260547: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, aspect ratio, density 1x1, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 256x256, frames 3
$ exiftool 260547
ExifTool Version Number         : 10.40
File Name                       : 260547
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 11 kB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2019:03:11 10:35:39+00:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2019:03:11 10:35:39+00:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2019:03:11 10:35:39+00:00

Here’s a couple of help-hints:-

• Getting started (forum)
• Beginners’ guide (wiki)

Hello masowd1407

No-one is stopping you from adding it. If it exists then add the town, to whatever level of detail that you see fits.

Hi @majkaz

Well, that was excellent feedback, and they ignored it. In fact it is worse now, since you can only edit your own blurs; any stupid blurs from any other source must remain.

Hi westnordost

My recall from early days is that yes, it is a so-called intelligent algorithm. I certainly hope so, since that is the reason that I keep plugging away making the edits.

My main worry is that there has been zero feedback (support says “I have fed your comments to the developers”, but nothing other than that) & zero changes to edited photos. This means that I am unsure whether my edits are even connected to Mapillary & their routines at all.

@TheSwavu:
Are you saying that only non-network connected client GPS devices greater than 20 years old will suffer problems on April 6? I certainly hope that you are right, though you may have more belief in software writers than I do.

My recall shortly after the Millennium rollover was that an analogue modem stopped working and Y2K was blamed for that by the driver supplier. I recall distinctly being boggled that (completely seriously) Y2K could stop a modem from squawking.

It is not the Smartphone time that is the issue; as you say, ’phones get their time from the network, not GPS.

the GPS rollover doesn’t affect the ability to provide accurate location data

Clearly you do not understand GPS, else you would understand that the embedded-timestamp within the GPS-satellite server-signal is integral to all client GPS devices being able to derive their location from that signal.

Try How does GPS work?:–

(GPS-satellite signals) are intercepted by your GPS receiver, which calculates how far away each satellite is based on how long it took for the messages to arrive.

Thus, the receiving device needs:

1. To accurately know what time of day it is, independent of the GPS satellite
2. To check that time against the embedded GPS signal time from a number of GPS satellites (speed of light)
3. Between the two to work out each of those satellites’ distance from itself
4. To integrate the whole set of data to calculate it’s own location.

It is at #2 above that the 2¹⁰ allowance becomes an issue.

WhatIsMyBrowser will give some broad feedback on what meta-data your browser shows to servers on the net (although it is not specific enough to distinguish between en-GB & en-US). Mine is Chromium (open-source version of Chrome) and Language Settings are at chrome://settings/languages.

Arul John sucessfully shows that although it misses on how to setup language for Chrome (must be old; advice given for FireFox, MSIE & Opera).

Bah! I forgot to say that these scripts all produce raster results. I have never seen any vector (EPS) results.

Hi there Krijn
I know almost nothing about this, so take my response with a dose of salt.

From some words at the bottom of this GitHub page I am confident that you will need to make use of nik2img.py (a Python script, I believe). There is also some outdated help here.

And, sadly, that is where my help runs out.