[OSM-talk] Has anyone cracked the code yet?

[ajt1047 at gmail.com]

Over the last few months there have been lots of single-character note 
comments - initially in China and Russia, but recently more widespread 
(see for example http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/369774 ).  The 
single-character comments seem to include cyrillic characters, which may 
suggest that they're related to the Russian-language "bridge detector" 
that adds notes such as http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1056574 , but 
it's difficult to see why someone's adding these note comments.

Related, there's an issue raised over at github about the wider issue of 
allowing anonymous note comments 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1543 (not 
specifically just these).

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what benefit there might be to 
someone adding these?  About the only thing that I can come up with is 
that it's an OSM API test - people clone a project and run it, and the 
result is these notes (a bit like the OsmApi "My First Test" nodes that 
keep appearing near "null island").

Best Regards,

Andy