[OSM-talk] Request for user block

[Lars Francke]

>>Is blocking the account going to be enough to prevent someone from
>>simply signing up for a new account and continuing to do what they
>>were unabbated, seems like a cat and mouse game and the cat is really
>>slow to keep tabs on the mouse.
>
> Maybe a more subtle approach would work, i.e., have a bot remove his edits
> x days after they are saved. That way he can make his changes, show his
> similarly idiotic friends what he has done, and they will be deleted when
> he no longer has an interest in them.

Every project that allows unlimited registration has this problem. It
is not unique to OpenStreetMap. But in a lot of cases it won't be
possible to delete changes after seven days as hundreds (in extreme
cases) of people may have altered the same data. Either way I'm
strongly against _any_ bot that automatically removes data and I very
much doubt that will happen.

A few ways that other deal with this are moderation of new accounts
(this was also discussed previously), E-Mail ban (not very useful), IP
ban (might work), just deleting or blocking the user or "no-oping" all
the actions by blocked users. The last proposal in our case would mean
that every write access to the API would work (it returns a success
code) but all the changes are immediately discarded in the hopes that
he won't notice.

I don't propose any of those as "the" solution to use, I merely list
what I have seen in other projects in the past and I bet there are
more I haven't thought of.

Cheers,
Lars