@kucai:
Aha! Just met the perfect situation that can only be solved with a Relation:

Ivel Valley School has 2 sites on either side of Biggleswade:

• School campus, Hitchmead Road
• College campus, The Baulk

At the moment they are mapped independently in OSM, and it is difficult for anyone to get to the other campus, or even know that it exists. I’m about to move each campus into a Relation and presto! They will be related & feature within each other’s links.

Hi kucai.

Yeah, one of the very first things that I noticed within OSM was the antipathy of current mappers towards Relations. I was a database programmer, so it was different at my end. For users it makes little difference other than offering more links & inter-links to search with. And that, really, is the point, because without that Relation no inter-links become available.

It’s also called spam.

Your first PNG file (“irantweet”) gives a HTTP:410 (file gone) error. Others are also broken with - presumably - similar problems.

@GinaroZ:

You might want to fix the phone number value in osm.org/way/23367543 - the (0) should not be used, see the wiki.

I tried on my mobile to dial the number in that url. “+44 (0) 1158 500 843” became “+4401158500843” and was not then dialled. Bummer. I tried again with “+441158500843” and it was dialled. Double bummer.

Searching for “(0)” and removing it is a trivial programming effort, but you cannot reason with some folks (I know, being a programmer myself). I will go through those last 50+ entries & remove the “(0)”s, but it is the several thousand other that I worry about.

Thanks for the notification.

@GinaroZ: Worse than you think; every single number I’ve ever tagged is written like that. I’m tagging so that local national humans reading the Telephone number will be reminded to add a ‘0’ (zero) to the area-code if dialling by hand. Then the RFC says do NOT use spaces (use dashes), so it is worse than you think.

Sod it. Any decently written program should be able to parse my digits & dial it correctly, as can humans (no matter how doddery). Modems & MSDOS were able to parse it, so why not the supercomputers in our pockets?

@CjMalone: Thanks. That makes good sense to let it be auto-interpreted (all NG have full boundary relations, since I put them there).

@philippec: It takes far more than that to suppress me. But good to feel your support.

why isn’t OSM indexed by search engines? Why aren’t OSM POIs in search engine results?

Because the OSM map is deliberately de-listed due to concerns over server-load. There is a parable in the bible about hiding stuff, I believe…

The fact that the stuff that I add is not seen does diminish my enthusiasm. The evidence seems to be that others feel the same (lack of volume in daily mappers).

Fernwood School

Of course, it can be rendered (as the link above) but, as you say, “it’s excessively hard to see the contact details on osm.org”. Your suggestion for a response to taps/clicks on PoI is perfectly obvious.

I think that the main reason for little contact info is that there is zero acknowledgement for entering it (only one node will be recognised, even if 200 bits of info are entered into that one node). It has taken me 4 days to enter 40 changesets - hours & hours of work and, apparently, sod all result. The other main reason, I believe, is many folks in OSM are unable to place themselves into other people’s shoes. I was taught during sales’ training to teach myself to think in terms of what that person will want.

There is little point in having a map if it cannot serve up basic information.

@CjMalone: Thanks for this. I’m working my way through NG whilst in Covid-19 lockdown.

What is odd for me is that others do not routinely add contact details to PoI (or at least, not in the areas I’ve edited). A little bit of thought tells you that the main thing that visitors want from a map is links/telephone/etc..

Your Europe & Asia maps are broken. This is the error message for one of them (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found, reported by https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/31/1916-Asia-political-map.jpg):

File not found: /v1/AUTH_mw/wikipedia-en-local-public.31/3/31/1916-Asia-political-map.jpg

Is it asking for authorisation? It is UPLOAD.wikimedia, after all.

Updating the map with the shop is perfect and you seem to have done a good job there. No problem with you adding email address + website URL into the shop address, either. However, putting the shop URL into this Diary is SPAM and you may well get banned as well as your diary entry removed.

I suggest that you edit your diary to remove the spammy link asap (swap it for the shop name).

Hi giggls.
What were the specifics that caused you such a big problem?

Here is the first result on osm:

osm.wiki/GPX

Look for yourself & you are bound to find better references than that.

I’m impressed. Well written, coherent and, in my view, exactly what these diaries are designed for. The argument you set out makes good sense to me.

@Steube
Thank you. It is a relief to find a balanced view within these violent eddies & storms of disagreement. If only I could manage that myself all the time.

Hi @Firefishy

The sysadmin team are successfully mitigating spam via non user-privacy invading methods.

You shot the patient (Diaries) in order to kill the disease. I agree that that does not invade the privacy of those that now cannot find anything within any Diary. Well done, and a Silver Star for creative writing.

Another good method to save bandwidth is to pull all power cords from all servers. Please send my usual commission of $1.2m / day should you decide to make use of this energy-efficient optimal solution.

We receive 1,000s of requests an hour from Googlebot and other search bots. We do not wildly deny content from being index.

This is the Sat, 22 Jun 2019 23:38:58 GMT (and current) update of the OSM robots.txt:

$ cat robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /user/*/diary
Disallow: /user/*/traces/
Allow: /user/
Disallow: /traces/tag/
Disallow: /traces/page/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /edit
Disallow: /browse
Disallow: /diary
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /geocoder
Disallow: /history
Disallow: /message
Disallow: /trace/
Disallow: /*lat=
Disallow: /*node=
Disallow: /*way=
Disallow: /*relation=

Host: www.openstreetmap.org

I count one Allow (redundant, since SEs assume Allow: *) & seventeen Disallow. If that is NOT wildly denying content indexing I tremble at what you may cook up in the future.

It is my understand that Alex is involved with the running of stopforumspam.com and he is very aggressively promoting the service with us.

For the record, I’m one of 2 moderators at StopForumSpam (SFS). The only other staff is pedigree (admin) and none of us are paid. SFS is a community supported, 14 year (I think) operation that acts as saviour to millions of forum/blog websites.

I first got involved in 2009-12-02 at a time when I was blocking all registrations from *@gmail.com in my utter desperation to stop the torrents of spam coming in with accounts using that email address. SFS saved my sanity at a time when I was heading for a physical & emotional breakdown after weeks & months of 24/7 desperation to keep my business, built with the last of my money, online. When I say that it works I know whereof I speak.

I believe that I may have directly promoted SFS perhaps 5 times. There are 160 mentions of ‘spam’ within my current diary listing (including today) and 6 mentions of ‘stopforumspam’. If that is “aggressive promotion” then so be it. I spend large amounts of my time trying to promote OSM and that is because I think it the Bees Knees; similar with SFS.

Alex contacting our hosting company to complain about piwiki is not a cool move on his part.

Explain your evidence for “complain about piwiki” to UCL.

I went through channels to report to OSM that (what appeared to be) 2 x static piwik.osm.org files were missing the response headers that could otherwise reduce the site bandwidth. The response was “nothing to do with us, guv”. So, I traced the operator of that IP & went through channels to ask about a strange file that I had discovered on my computer coming from his location. He agreed that it was from one of their hosted servers and said that he would email me when he had sourced it. Later that day that is exactly what he did.

The man at UCL NoC was a professional, and that is how he acted. Helpful, human, and professional. All I got from OSM were amateurs with overblown emotions. Brats that put the boot in on the first opportunity. If you got any blowback from UCL then stop telling lies & stop sending webbugs to every client. Then all those problems will evaporate.

@Mateusz:
You obviously never read all the section, else you would have realised my intention:

I won’t belong to a club that accepts me as a member
- Oscar Wilde

I have abandoned all hope of receiving Justice at your hands. It is a foreigner at your table.

@Firefishy:
Well I have read & replied to your email.

For the benefit of others, this hyperbolic rapscallion writes:

If you want to remain involved in the project, cut out the abuse and stick to mapping.

Any further unacceptable language or actions from you and I will seek that you are politely asked to leave our project for good.

Politely? Love it.

Apparently, saying that these diaries are being deluged with spam is “unacceptable language”, and be damned with reality. You have not addressed at any point whether my statements are truthful, nor engaged in any discussion with me to understand my motives.

I’m a 20-year professional in these matters & have given a practical, simple step-wise method to deal with the situation which has been proven effective by others, but you have not discussed any of that. In fact, you have not discussed anything at all.

It seems that if it happens inside your head then it is, Ipso Facto, reality without any external checks required. “Always happy to help.” You are not helping.

PS Firefishy:
I notice that you did not answer a single question from my earlier reply. Seems I have touched a nerve.