Saving community-created data for Plugins

[Kai Michael Poppe - OSM]

Hi all,

Once upon a time last year I built a plugin for JOSM that lets you do some fancy FHRS stuff in the UK.

It would seem that some of my educated guesses for the FHRS API returns were wrong. My thoughts then wandered to allowing the users to provide a key/value mapping and save that to "somewhere" for others to access it as well.

The first thing that comes to mind is GitHub (where the plugin code is stored anyway). The downside of that would be that every change requires manual interaction to make the contribution publicly available.

Saving them to any of my server machines (possibly with a special API so that it can be automated by the plugin and also no malicious code can be uploaded) would be the most straight forward thing to do, but then the Plugin relies on access to a machine somewhere far away from the user (even though my small virtual server in a farm in the UK would be quick to access), yet that comes with it's own set of challenges as you all know.

Do any of you guys have any alternative ideas on how to solve this problem?

Thoughts welcome!

Kai