If you follow the links within the first bullet point (either official info or unofficial compendium) you will find it stated that it is NOT an offence under section 43 of the Terrorism Act to take photographs, and nor is it a requirement for someone approached by Police to ID themselves. That all came to a head in 2009 because of appalling Police behaviour following stop-and-search powers introduced during the Blair years. Most of the documents linked above have that date, as most of the Force commanders got a hint of the future & quickly decided to change direction.

Policing in the UK depends upon public consent & support. The alternative to this is demonstrated daily within many other countries, most of which are rapidly falling to pieces. It is actually rather interesting:– the only people that are armed to the teeth in Britain are the Police, the Military & the Criminals. And yet, the success of at least two of those depends upon consent from the unarmed mass of the public.

So, the Heads of the Police got the point & in 2009 introduced sensible & sane advice for their front-line folks to follow. Job done.

Well, not quite. Here is a news report from yesterday’s papers:– https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/04/photographer-held-under-anti-terror-law-for-taking-hove-town-hall-pictures

As a postscript to this I will give a snippet from my time last year photographing the central Police Station in Carlton, Nottingham (opposite Carlton Cemetery). I popped in to the counter, presented one of my fast-disappearing leaflets explaining OSM & pointed out that I was about to take a photo of the building to add to the map, and not to worry. They were fine with that.

A couple of things to say about the second walk:–

1. Some of the frames are blurred - my apologies
   When set to ‘auto’ the camera takes far longer to focus than I expect, and in my impatience (when walking) I keep hitting the shutter too early. That fault is only slowly improving at my end.
2. The colour tint sometimes shifts from one frame to the next.
   My best assumption on this is that it is due to the (typically English) weather shifting suddenly above the tree cover from bright sunlight to threat-of-hailstones (a threat fulfilled on a couple of occasions), but I have no definite explanation for this so far.

Gosh, navigating through current Diary entries to get here showed umpteen spam posts. I’ve actually never seen it so bad within OSM.

@imagico: > (spam) you should not blame the admins for that

I do not blame Admin for the presence of spam posts! I’m profoundly grateful for those that spend their time trying to keep the place free of it. If I’m attacking anything, it is the complacent attitude shown by so many towards spam. If Admin are having problems keeping the place free of spam (and 276 spammers left untouched for >2 years speaks of problems) then they need to speak up, set out the issues & suggest directions for solutions. It is obviously far too difficult currently for folks to report spammers and, it seems, far too difficult for anyone to easily & quickly remove them.

@SrrReal: > could there be a way to prevent spamming in comments? And what would be the best way to handle this?

Yes there is. I am a Mod for many years on StopForumSpam (SFS). It is a crowd-sourced site that provides an API to auto-interrogate & discover if subscribers have spammed other sites and, if so, prevent them from registering (best) and/or posting (next best). Sites protected via SFS have seen falling levels of spam in recent years. OSM, however, seems to be experiencing increasing levels of spam. Make no mistake — spammers talk to each other, and once it gets around just how easy any website is to spam they focus on it (low hanging fruit).

I’ve contemplated writing the routines to keep OSM free and have then considered the opprobrium that faces anyone suggesting novel techniques here, and decided that I would rather carry on mapping.

Hi @jinalfoflia

I feel your pain. It is the lackadaisical attitude† from Admin that pains me more than anything.

Consider the wiki link provided by @imagico to report spammers. The top item is a Profile spammer; they register, make not a single edit nor trace, but place a link into their profile; they then make a single Diary post (or comment as you noted) as to obtain a backlink to the Profile. They are nothing but scum that waste server space & clutter up everything that OSM does. Admin cares little about any of this.

Consider the Profile Spammer at the top of the spam report wiki page:–

• Registered 10 February, 2015
• Posted 1 x Diary 10 February 2015
• 0 edits; 0 traces; 1 x Diary

There are 276 spammers reported on that wiki page. The top one is Café Verde Web, and has been in place for > 2 years. Do you really consider that there is any point in adding a new spammer at the bottom of that list? What would be the point?

† Re: lackadaisical attitude:–
Reading through the github links from imagico it struck me yet again that OSM folks seem to find it very easy to convince themselves not to change anything.

Hi @philippec
Well, I’m not going to fuss too much about it since the current rendering doesn’t bother to show it on the map at all.

Hi @Warin61

I’ve added intermittent=yes as that was my experience on the day.

As it happens the culvert as mapped does have layer=-1 just like a ‘normal’ culvert. In fact, in this case the overhead railway is layer=1 & the culvert as built is layer=0, but in the same way as OSM does not render that situation correctly for the meeting of road & rail, I’m quite sure that the culvert would appear wrong, and thus has been ‘wrongly’ mapped (in my experience road bridging over rail gets mapped accurately, but rail bridging over road does not).

With the size of many English roads — and the size of some of the SUVs using them — a school_sentinel positioned in the middle of the road would not last 24 hours. I like the sound of those “silent cops”, though.

boundary=protected_area
operator=Langridge Homes
protect_class=7
protection_title=Tree Preservation Order No. 107
start_date=2009-03-02

…hopefully that does it correct & OK.

Hi @pizzaiolo.

I had a look at boundary=protected_area and I saw protect_class=1 to 99. I mean, if I learn all this stuff will I get a certificate? Then, under United Kingdom it says “due to publishing restrictions, data not on the WDPA”. wtf?

So, I’ll try, but… jeez.

Hiya @Warin61

In fact the people that enjoy his work are his son + daughter-in-law. When I called, he was doing more work on his side & his son/daughter-i-l were both working on the other side (you can see the area that they have cleared if you look closely). Both houses on either bank are brand-new; his house is on the left (as we look at it) & his children’s house is on the right-bank. They are thus living (almost) cheek-by-jowl. That seems to be common in Nottingham; I bought my house from the daughter & son-in-law of the people that (at that time) lived next door.

Thanks, @Andy.

I believe that that map is the one that caused (whoever) to put the name for Gedling at completely the wrong place.

Will you use your contacts to get that first poster deleted, please? (spam).

Thanks for that @TomH. I found Phoenix Farm clearly marked on the 1952 1:1,250 map, and it is exactly opposite Jessops Lane. Sure enough, the farm buildings are on the location of today’s garages. I was also pleased to discover that Manor Farm is the building-with-a-bulge-in-it, just as I suspected.

Those maps are indeed all OS maps, so they probably are the same source maps.

@Stereo: Can Leaflet be used within these Diaries? Because that’s what I was talking about.

@andy mackey: loved that link. I suspected that the USA would drive far more than just cattle. However, I also suspect that the cobblers used something other than nails for geese & turkey boots (not a job I’d like). And what a job driving geese must have been! Next to a cat herder one of the most difficult jobs in the world, I would have thought, and especially during the migration season.

You are, of course, correct @R0bst3r. However, there are lots of non-fatal bugs to fix in terracer but I cannot find any way to include it within a debug session.

My last hope was for an exception to be thrown, and for the stacktrace to be able to auto-switch from JOSM to terracer. No chance.

Hi @Stereo

Well, those ‘developers’ do not yet include me.

I’ve just spent 3 days adding 100 terraces (>200 houses) without an exception being thrown. I’ve also spent weeks & weeks working on JOSM with Eclipse & cannot find any way in which I can debug terracer, largely (it seems in my ignorance) to the decision to use a non-standard ‘Main’ as the start-routine (rather than ‘main’). Even if terracer is clear of fatal bugs it has lots of non-fatal bugs to fix, but I cannot find the way to launch it as part of a JOSM debug session.

I’m going to try netbeans instead, I think.

@R0bst3r

I’ve now spent 3 days adding 100 terraces (sets of houses, NOT 100 individual houses) and it hasn’t thrown an exception at any point. I’m giving up on Eclipse. If I can bugfix with Netbeans then I’ll work on terracer, else will forget it completely (can you tell that I’m truly pissed off?).

@R0bst3r

I’ve just completed adding all the houses I had left from the last survey (17 sets of terraces + 1 set of garages); it was not enough to trip an exception. I’ll have to survey some more & try again.

I placed breakpoints at:-

• OsmPrimitive.java:244 (a certain exception)
• OsmPrimitive.java:988 (previous step in the stacktrace)
• TerracerAction.java:473 (top-level in terracer stacktrace)

As fully expected, it stopped at OsmPrimitive.java:988 before completing startup. I tried stepping through using f5 but eventually had to resume using f8. That also continually stopped at OsmPrimitive.java:988 & eventually I determined that I would commit suicide before ever reaching the point of being able to add another house. So, I toggled the OsmPrimitive.java:988 breakpoint enablement, pressed f8 & added all the houses I had left from my last survey.

Hi @R0bst3r

Sorry for the delay in my response; after ~6 weeks I can finally go to bed & not have an hour of cough cough cough (last night). The night before I could not sleep all night due to my coughing, yet the following night I was OK. Anyway, I’m good now.

There is a full stack-trace in ticket-14261.

• Exception seems to be thrown at OsmPrimitive.java:244 (/josm/core/src/org/openstreetmap/josm/data/osm/OsmPrimitive.java)

    public void checkDataset() {
       if (dataSet == null)
       throw new DataIntegrityProblemException("Primitive must be part of the dataset: " + toString());
    }
  

I’m concerned that if I place a breakpoint in OsmPrimitive.java, then I will have to resume on every single house-creation (it took creating >30 last time before JOSM threw the exception, and took a couple of hours to enter).

The issue, of course, is to know why the dataSet is NUL.

Ah well, I am feeling stronger now, so I’ll have a go after a sleep. What I’m trying to find out at this moment is why previously the debug screens came up when the exception was triggered within JOSM core, but not now when it is triggered by an issue within terracer.

Thanks for your response. I’ll post again when I get some results (I’m hoping to see my grandkids soon so it may be a few days hence).

Hi Stereo

The JOSM behaviour is identical inside or outside Eclipse, in spite of a (small) range of different versions involved. Currently this is: > add ~30 houses using terracer

…and it will then reliably throw an exception every time terracer is used to terrace a building.

The problem, of course, is that the exception comes not from JOSM (which when launched from Eclipse would cause the bug-screens to show). The exception is instead thrown from terracer, and Eclipse just says “nuthin’ to do with me, honey”.