[Osmf-talk] Anonymous notes on osm.org

[Tobias Knerr]

On 13.11.2012 11:35, David Earl wrote:
> However, what I think people are used to - from sign ups to online
> petitions, across the board, is email verification, like OSM does on
> signing up, but without the actual account creation.

In my opinion, introducing an additional verified-but-no-account class
of users might just complicate things a bit too much. And I would
clearly expect the possibility of anonymous bug reporting - if you set
out to create "something like OpenStreetBugs", then it would be weird to
remove the core feature of OSB, i.e. the really simple interface.

What I would do:

Let users create a bug report anonymously. When they've created it, show
them a popup window thanking them for their report and asking them
whether they want to create an account. This should concisely explain
the benefits, i.e. we can contact them, they get notified when their bug
is fixed - or they can actually fix it themselves.

If they go on to create an account, their bug gets associated with the
new account. If they don't, it remains an anonymous bug.

This has the added benefit that we just might encourage a few users to
click that edit tab and fix it themselves. (For those deciding to
register, we could even show a nice tutorial depending on the category
of the bug - if we include such a field - e.g. "how to change a road's
maxspeed" or "how to edit an address".)

Tobias