I also posted this on the Improve OSM blog.

Beta 4 is out in the mean time. Release notes.

We had a disk space issue…Should be solved now. Thanks for reporting!

I agree that it could be improved, but I do think that it is a move in a good direction and will encourage especially new users by making them feel part of the community. Some improvements I can think of..

• Ability to customize the message
• Not sending a message by default when ‘approving’ a changeset if the flag is not ‘review requested’ or ‘new user’
• make it more obvious that a message will be sent as a changeset comment when you ‘approve’ a changeset. At least remind people at first that this is happening.

On the OSM server side you should be able to opt out of emails, perhaps this is already possible, but if not it should be.

Great work on this tool, Wille.

Obviously but very importantly:

• Before copying anything into OSM the license needs to be properly vetted.
• If you are planning to perform any kind of bulk update, the full extent of the Import Guidelines applies.

The Cygnus web interface links to my diary entry that points out these things in big capital letters, but it cannot be stressed enough!

Hi all, Thanks a lot for your thoughtful responses. Here’s a followup I just posted to talk-us:

Hi all,

I haven’t abandoned this thread or thinking about it. It has just taken me a while to read through all the diary comments + what is being said in this thread. I intend to follow up with another diary post where I try to collect this smart crowd’s thoughts and suggestions, but it will probably not until after State of the Map US that I get to this.

In the mean time, I decided to test some of the ideas posted here on a real case: The part of Michigan SR 10 northwest of the I-696 interchange: osm.org/relation/252973#map=13/42.5132/-83.3168

Since 1) this road does not seem to serve an important connecting role in the long distance road network 2) the density of abutters and related driveway / parking exits I judged a downgrade warranted. Please discuss here or on osm.org/changeset/52903464 .

On the topic of tagging for the renderer, two things: 1) A US-specific rendering would be really neat 2) Trunk ‘appendices’ like the one I just downgraded do make rendering at low zooms tricky – you end up with short segments that seem to end in nothing.

Yea, the OSM wiki actually has 40 MPH which perhaps makes more sense. Living in a rural state where speed limits are up to 80 MPH colors my thinking I guess.

Another new diary entry that is related to this topic: Mapping Center Turn Lanes in the United States

Yes, thanks, corrected.

escada: I’ve seen transit – it looks more complex to me than turnlanes:turns for mapping lane connectivity. Can you help me out mapping this intersection using the transit schema? I think relations would be needed, but not sure how to map the transition for example from 1-2-3:

It looks like 1-2 can be done with ways, as indicated below, but I am not sure how to identify that the left turn lanes from 2 to 3 lead to the left two lanes of segment 3.

My recent diary entry with a ‘mapping challenge’ for a complicated intersection is relevant to this topic. I’d appreciate your feedback!

Wow, thanks for all the feedback.

I am happy to see people seem to prefer the turn:lanes approach so far, which is simpler than the relation based schema I have also seen. Mapbox had a blog post that highlighted both.

One thing that would still lead me to want to use relations in some places is my second ‘requirement’ to correctly identify lane connectivity – exactly which (turn) lanes connect to which. So how to map that making a left turn here (1->2->3)

means that you have to go from lane to lane on the consecutive ways like this:

For that you would still need a relation, or is there a simpler / other / better way?

My question is not specifically aimed at CFI mapping. I just chose this intersection because it’s reasonably complex.

Hi,

A lot of US based OSM mappers are on the Slack channel which you can join here: https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/

There is also a US specific mailing list you can subscribe to: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

I removed the Island challenge from this post since it was not made visible in MapRoulette yet. See this blog post for some context.

To clarify how to find the challenge creator for a visible challenge: use the search box (or the map) to identify the challenge you are looking for:

Then click on the marker, which will have a link to the OSM user who created it:

You will see ‘SuperUser’ for older challenges because we did not store creator information in earlier versions.

The challenge creator should be visible when you click the challenge’s marker on the map on the main page. You can use the search box in the top left.

However if you try to apply that to this challenge you will come up blank. The reason why is that the user’s project is not set to ‘visible’ which makes all the challenges that belong to their project also won’t show up. The creator apparently did not intend to make this challenge public yet, and as such I made a mistake to highlight it.

The ‘visibility’ of a challenge only applies to whether it is visible on the map on the main page, and whether it shows up in the search results. It will still show up in the API. The reason why users can’t make challenges completely ‘private’ is exactly what we are talking about here. I don’t want there to be some ‘shadow’ activity that nobody can inspect.

As you can see from the API output the user who created this challenge has OSM ID 5441336.

I realize that it’s not so easy right now to get a complete overview of the Challenges available in MapRoulette. It is one of the priorities to fix this. One thing someone could do in the mean time is to use the MapRoulette API to create an external list of Challenges.

I don’t think this is necessarily a MapRoulette problem, but I do agree that it would be beneficial to have challenges checked for some basic quality standards, so that people who fix things through MapRoulette are properly prepared. That is part of the reason why I asked for someone or a few people to step up and become Challenge admins in my latest MapRoulette newsletter. I don’t yet know precisely how that would work, but I envisage for now that I would provide a weekly list of new public challenges and the users who created them for the admins to review.

In this particular case, I would get in touch with the Challenge creator (there is a link in MapRoulette to their user profile) and ask them to comment here. Any problems with individual mappers making bad edits should be addressed with them. Again, I don’t think that users making questionable edits is specifically a MapRoulette problem. If I were to shut down this Challenge, What is to stop them from just scrolling along the coastline looking for islands to fix in the same way they are doing it now?

MikeN I can’t keep up with these railway mappers!