[OSM-talk] Vandalism in Trumpington

[David Earl]

On 26/04/2008 23:36, David Earl wrote:
> This user has removed or overlaid quite a few roads around 
> Trumpington, Cambridge, and replaced several streets with cycleways, run 
> a tertiary road along the river and across a farm track, and generally 
> made a complete mess of my careful mapping in that area.

The perpetrator has replied, slightly to my surprise. As I had thought, 
she had no idea that she was changing the live database and she 
apologises profusely.

But this raises once again the ease with which people who don't know 
what they are doing can wreck things unintentionally. None of the 
changes I've had to undo in my area seem to have been wanton vandalism: 
all three incidents have been people playing, and two of them have been 
after the "play" mode was introduced in Potlatch. We won't stop 
determined vandals, but we can try to make it harder to make mistakes 
like this.

I've noticed that the "start, play,..." buttons often appear then 
disappear shortly after in IE without me pressing them (I can't speak 
for Firefox, I don't use it often enough to tell). I wonder if this is 
part of the problem - that people may never see the 'play' mode button?

Even so, I'd like to suggest we make this rather harder to mess up: what 
about we put a flag into the user data that says "first timer" that is 
on to start with and can be changed by that user via the API; and that 
Potlatch and maybe JOSM put up a warning screen on first attempt at 
editing which says "you are about to change the OpenStreetMap live map 
data. Are you sure you are read to do this? If you haven't done this 
before, please try out editing first in 'play' mode when changes aren't 
saved" and then three buttons, to proceed, cancel or go into play mode; 
and on proceed, clear the flag.

If nothing else, Richard, can the apparent bug with the mode buttons be 
fixed and the text make it clearer that live data is being changed when 
you press start?

David