Hello SHARCRASH, tomolobla, Digital-line, Digital-circle, and whatever other names you will come up with,

your utter inability and unwillingness to work with each other takes a toll on OSM in Luxembourg. Anyone looking at mapping in Luxembourg from the outside will come to the conclusion that the whole country is in the grip of two bickering egomaniacs.

Both of you have, at different times, claimed to leave OSM for good, with great fanfare but not for long.

We don’t need every animal track in OSM just because there’s something visible on LIDAR. We don’t need two-meter long cliffs because we can. We don’t need people publicly discussing how another mapper might be out of a job or impaired in some way. We don’t need private emails sent to other mappers pointing out that someone else is a dick. And most of all, DWG doesn’t have the capacity to constantly intervene in a juvenile dispute that never ends.

My DWG colleague Andy has asked you time and time again to discuss the issues you have with each other’s mapping in a wider group on the forum and you haven’t done so, instead preferring to send page-long lists of supposed wrongdoings to DWG and barking at each other in changeset comments. This has to stop.

I am blocking all of your accounts known to me for two weeks. If you are operating additional accounts that I do not know of or have missed, then I expect you to refrain from using them during that time too. I also expect you to refrain from creating new accounts to evade these user blocks. Failure to comply will lead to longer blocks and may eventually see you kicked out of OSM.

Due to the way the forum login works, you will not be able to start a forum discussion while you are blocked. Please use this time to collect your thoughts.

After this block is over, and BEFORE you do ANY further mapping that EVEN REMOTELY could be questioned by a sensible mapper, I expect you to write up the mapping issues you have with each other and discuss them publicly on the OSM forum, with the aim of enlisting other community members in finding a solution - answering questions like just how clear something needs to be on LIDAR to be mappable, and what is mappable in the first place - there is global agreement on many things but there is not on mapping half-overgrown rabbit paths or micro cliffs. This is something that requires discussion and the building of a consensus.

If any of you continue with any kind of LIDAR mapping or other super-detailed stuff that raises the eyebrows of an average mapper in Luxembourg, before a solid community consensus on how to use these sources can be established, I will block your accounts again.

If any of you write to us explaining how your block was unfair, how the other person is much worse than you are, and/or how the other person has more sock puppet accounts, I will block your accounts again - the problem here is with both of you, not with one of you.

If any of you bad-mouth the other, or create new accounts mimicking the other’s user names or making fun of them, or indeed do anything that requires DWG intervention, I will block both your accounts again.

Thank you
Frederik Ramm
OSMF Data Working Group
Ticket#2023091410000208