[OSM-newbies] How to deal with unresponsive new users?

[Bráulio]

Hi Richard,

I too have a problem with a "new" user. I say "new" because he is not new,
but he is doing the same mistakes newbies do again and again (with the
confidence of a veteran). And now he is destroying a lot of relations on my
city/state and substituting them with lots of polygons. The worst thing is
that some of these were from the time we could trace from Yahoo! Imagery
and where Bing has no coverage yet. And I am sure he doesn't even live
here, since he never added a specific POI or street name, only things which
he can see on the aerial images.

As Clay did to his , I sent him some messages. But he never answers them or
changes his editing behavior. I also sent data at osmfoundation.org an email
some weeks ago, but received no response yet. I guess you guys have access
to his email address, so you can send him a message directly to avoid the
spam filter, right? If you wish, I can write one in Portuguese, since I
don't know if he speaks English.

You could also block him if he don't answer. But he is not a bad
contributor, just a misguided one that destroy things constantly. However,
since he is constantly editing, blocking him would be a fast way to avoid
more damage and to bring his attention.


On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Clay Smalley <claysmalley at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I've come across a particular new user who is making a lot of common
>> newbie errors. The first thing I did was send them a friendly message, in
>> which I pointed them to the wiki and the mailing lists, and also pointed
>> out (politely) a few mistakes they made and how to fix them (and that I
>> would fix the mistakes for them).
>>
>
> Hi Clay,
>
> If you don't include a specific invitation to return your email, then they
> might not do it.  I've contacted many users without getting a response.
>
> If you are pointing out mistakes, and fixing them yourself, perhaps that
> is shutting the door on the topic for them?  Perhaps leaving it undone with
> something like:
>
> "you'll find that is is typical to frimmle zipblorts with doodle-znurfs,
> instead, and I'll leave you to try that for yourself.  Be sure to let me
> know how you make out.  Also feel free to ask any questions."    Of course
> the remainder of the email should be appropriately polite, encouraging,
> etc.
>
> Or, all OSM site mail could be ending up in a spam filter.  :-(
>
> So.  I don't know of a guaranteed formula for getting a response.  Try the
> above, if you haven't, yet.  If the user persists as non-responsive, send a
> note to data at osmfoundation.org.  We can try, gently, as well.
>
> _______________________________________________
> newbies mailing list
> newbies at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/newbies/attachments/20130117/9bbfb52d/attachment.html>