[OSM-talk] Large number of seemingly automated, non-SEO spam edits

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 02:11:53 UTC 2018


The DWG is (now) aware of it :)

There are 8 accounts with changeset comments matching this pattern
right now. Hoping they don't change it once they start getting
blocked.

Toby

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 9:04 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> I haven't seen anything like that in Washington State. Still getting the
> occasional "updated" changeset comment.
>
> Paul - it seems like they should be reported to DWG. The first user on your
> list, Mike Gothie has 83 edits. One was pure garbage. If the others are like
> that I'd report them all.
>
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 5:59 PM, Jack Armstrong Dancer at sprynet.com
> <jacknstacy at sprynet.com> wrote:
>>
>> Same thing is popping up in the Denver, Colorado area. I've sent messages
>> to the new users. If no reply, I will begin deleting.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Paul Johnson
>> Sent: Mar 14, 2018 4:08 AM
>> To: Talk Openstreetmap
>> Subject: [OSM-talk] Large number of seemingly automated, non-SEO spam
>> edits
>>
>> Seem to be getting a large number of spam edits all with comments matching
>> aabbbbbbbb, where a is any single lowercase letter and b is any single
>> digit, have appeared in the last 48 hours.  So far the items being mapped
>> have had name=* matching the same pattern, area=yes, and not much of
>> anything else, and certainly don't seem to be of any value or decipherable
>> to any casual observer.  These have started appearing in Oklahoma, which is
>> why I noticed them in OsmCha.
>>
>> Users that I've noticed so far that are doing this, totalling 261
>> changesets, all fitting this pattern:
>>
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mike%20Gothie
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/t-max
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/ghostsail
>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mrana3
>>
>> I strongly suspect there are more accounts doing this across the US (since
>> the mrana3 one only had a bounding box that intersected Oklahoma, no edits
>> within it, but did have them on either coast), and the oldest account
>> appears to be from March 5, 2018.
>>
>>
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>> talk at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>>
>
>
>
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