[OSM-talk] Anonymous comments on notes now disabled

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

after two years of discussing the pros and cons, a decision has now been
reached to disallow anonymous comments on notes.

Up until two days ago, anonymous (i.e. not logged-in) users could create
notes and comment on existing notes; the only thing they could not do
was close a note.

Now, anonymous users can *still* create notes, but they cannot comment
on or close existing notes.

In the long discussions leading up to this decision (see
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1543 and
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/1926) we
agreed that anonymous comments on notes are rarely useful, and when they
are, they come mostly from users who have just forgotten to log in. This
was weighed against recent massive spam and vandalism activities which
rendered the notes system near unusuable in some regions. Perversely, it
is much easier to fight a vandal creating new, useless notes (by just
closing them) than it is to clean up their droppings from existing notes.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"