[OSM-talk] is this allowed ?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On 2/7/21 01:18, Dave F wrote:
> Oh, look a naive first contribution amended to valid OSM data instead of
> lazily deleting it.
> 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8397207167/history

Just so people don't get the wrong idea:

I am not the one that deleted this (that would be the effectively
anonymous user_5359), merely the one that wrote a message about it. Yes,
a lot of spammy contributions can be amended to valid data. I can
totally see user_5359's point of view in deleting "contributions" that
have more spamminess than useful data. That said, I have cleaned up some
contributions that appeared to be spam, even finding and moving to the
proper location where I know it.

However, I wouldn't necessarily call these "naive first contributions".
Some are done by professional spam arti-- I mean, marketing and SEO
people who simply don't realize OSM works differently from something
like Google. They see description=* and changeset comments, and they
think "ooh, more places to stuff ad copy". Maybe it should be clearer
what description=* is for, and that changeset comments are nofollow
and/or noindex? Encouraging people to re-use the same accounts instead
of doing spam-and-run would also be nice, but I'm at a loss for how to
do this.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>
http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com