[OSM-talk] Anonymous comments on notes now disabled

[Oleksiy Muzalyev]

On 8/30/19 15:47, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
>
>
>
> 30 Aug 2019, 15:16 by talk at openstreetmap.org:
>
>     On 29/08/2019 22:46, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
>         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.
>
>
>     I don't understand the logic of that. Whether a note is 5 seconds
>     or 5 years old, it's still "existing"  & it's content, irrelevant
>     or no.t will not change over time.
>
> Spam in otherwise useful notes (typically it was vandal adding 
> multiple single letter comments
> in all notes within region) makes using them more frustrating and 
> generates notifications
> to all earlier contributors. I was forced to autodelete all 
> notifications about anonymous comments,
> so many were useless "a" spam.
>
> Useless note can be closed and is quickly gone (afaik within 2 weeks 
> by default - both in JOSM
> and on the website). While many notes with useful reports remain open 
> for months and litter there affects
> more people.

Maybe it was not the vandalism but people trying to understand the 
functioning of the notes & comments system? Posting single letters does 
not look like a malicious vandalism.

It was still possible to give an anonymous visitor a possibility to 
delete his/her test notes (comments) by recording in the browser's 
cookie file an unique ID code of this visitor from say 32 digits and 
characters. And only if the ID code in the browser coincides, only then 
the "delete" button is displayed to the visitor.

Anyway it is not relevant anymore since there will be no more anonymous 
notes & comments.

Best regards,

O.

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