[OSM-talk] xybot edit area size

[Frank Sautter]

Valent Turkovic schrieb:
> But still ideal situation is that bots also use much smaller areas 
> for edits so that you see if some bot has changed something in your 
> area of interest, right?
most bots (and also xybot) do not have any clue about the spatial 
aspects of a way or relation.

normally a osm-xml file is piped through a bot (e.g. perl script). if it 
stumbles upon something fishy (e.g. a multiple consecutive nodes in a 
way) it will correct this problem on this entity. it does not know where 
in the world this problem is. it doesn't have a big database in the 
background which it could query where this entity is located and store 
it until the pipe has reached EOF and then make some handy spatial 
chunks of all its changes.

the next question would be: what is the "right" size of a changeset? 
10m², 100m², 1km², 10km², 100km², 1000km²

the only solution to really fix the spamming of the history tab the way 
the history tab is implemented right now would be to put each change in 
its own changeset. but that's what we had in api 0.5 and would lead 
changesets ad absurdum and i believe a single bot-run should result in a 
single changeset.

in my eyes there are three solutions for the problem of history  spamming:

* evaluate the "bot=yes" flag in changesets in the history tab. in 
consequence all bots should set this tag. drawback will be, that there 
could be malicious bot changes!

* add a bot-flag to bot-accounts and filter those changeset in the 
history. same drawback as above.

* replace the history tab with something like on ito-world osmmapper 
(including the rss-feed of changes)

frank