[OSM-dev] Changeset replication contains outdated usernames / how to link to user profile by uid

[Sebastian Kürten]

Hi,

I'm using the minutely changeset replication files in order to track
edits happening on a certain topic and am shuffling the information
relevant to me into a database.

Now I experience the following: the changeset XML element contains
attributes "user" and "uid". When a user has changed their username
since that changeset was closed, the replication file still contains
the old username from that time. That makes sense as replication files
don't get changed retroactively. When I retrieve the same changeset via
https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/changeset/ID then it shows the
current username, even for old changesets.

I'm building a UI for that whole thing in order to visualize the
changes recorded. While displaying the changesets, I can naturally link
to the individual changeset using the link pattern mentioned above and I
would also like to link to the contributing user's profile page such as
my own (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/sebkur). However, when the
user changed their name, it's possible I'm creating a dead link.
I found out I can retrieve the current username from the uid by querying
the API like this: https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/user/22917

However I'm wondering if there is any way to link to a user profile by
specifying the user id directly to some endpoint, such as
https://www.openstreetmap.org/uid/22917? I suspect for the website it
wouldn't make much of a difference whether it looks up the profile by
the user name or the user id from the database, but probably there's
just no endpoint that links to users by their id, or is there?

Other websites such as StackOverflow do resolve user ids and I think
that makes a lot of sense for services where the user id is static
while the name may change. (Example:
https://stackoverflow.com/users/1268759 ; observe how the name gets
appended to the URL automatically and you can even change the appended
name and it will be changed back after submitting the URL in the
browser)

Thanks,
Sebastian