<p>I have personally been fighting a very persistent vandal over the last year or so, who has created thousands of anonymous notes with bogus content. It is relatively easy to detect and remove them in a somewhat automated fashion. However, this user increasingly takes to vandalising <em>existing</em> notes (typical example: <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/799041" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/799041</a>), effectively making the notes system unusable in their area of interest. Policing these edits is difficult because there's no real-time feed of note comments and no way of deleting individual note comments. Hence the only remedy available is either hiding the note altogether (losing valuable information), or hiding it and creating a new, "cleansed", version, which also loses information about when and by whom the note was first created.</p>
<p>I am therefore, once again, proposing that anonymous users should not be allowed to comment on notes. (I am ok with anonymous users creating new notes.)</p>
<p>I realize that I am trying to introduce a general change to fight a very specific issue but I think that the abuse pattern we're seeing here could easily happen, and has apparently happened, elsewhere.</p>

<p style="font-size:small;-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;color:#666;">—<br />You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.<br />Reply to this email directly, <a href="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1543#issuecomment-405542109">view it on GitHub</a>, or <a href="https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABWnLQ0zTKn6qSdv_6keKUspBsHOS-HNks5uHcJSgaJpZM4NcYws">mute the thread</a>.<img src="https://github.com/notifications/beacon/ABWnLQH6N_ksWVxI805WxbhQkTsS1Yooks5uHcJSgaJpZM4NcYws.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="" /></p>
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