Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Alex Kemp]

This is my first post within these mailman lists. Just in case I make 
some mistake that leads to this message not getting placed in the lists 
correctly, the post that I am trying to respond to is at:–

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2019-June/082747.html

1. https://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=50236#p50236 :
• (email) Re: [Ticket#201906221073] Alex: Enough with the Insults 
and Comdemnation (sic)
• 24/06/2019, 23:00: “we have removed your latest diary entry because it 
was considered too offensive”


The discussion in the post linked at top is very one-sided. None of the 
“obnoxious behaviour” can be viewed, since the posts mentioned have been 
removed. Well, joy! Although 12 posts total were deleted by the DWG, 
11 were saved by myself at the time and many of them can be viewed 
elsewhere so that unbiased persons can make up their own mind as to just 
how vile these posts were (not). So, in reverse order:–


(You will be disappointed if you are hoping to read lots of insults 
and/or swearing)


2. https://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=50239#p50239 :
• A Stranger at your Table 2019-06-24
• (the word-for-word post mentioned in [1] above that sparked removal of 
all Spam-info posts in OSM Diaries)


3. https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/308 :
• Github email 2019-06-22: “A maintainer of the @openstreetmap 
organization has blocked you”


4. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary/390252 :
• Post about AST Auto Centre + spam in OSM 2019-06-05, re-posted 
2019-08-06 (spam-related material removed for clarity): “PoI Musings”


5. https://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=50184#p50184 :
• Post about spam in OSM 2019-05-18: “OSM is now within an iteration of 
spam-bot software (such as XRumer)”


6. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary/390418 :
• Post about spam in OSM 2019-05-12, re-posted 2019-07-12: “How to Stop 
the Spam-Storm”


7. https://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=50245#p50245 :
8. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary/390250 :
• Post about spam in OSM 2019-05-06, re-posted 2019-07-12: “Recent Spam 
Attacks”
• (a set of statistics, originated to discover whether the then-recent 
spam attacks were human or bot-attacks)


9. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary/158832 :
• Post about spam in OSM 2019-05-03: “Behold Cassandra”
• (this is the single post about spam in OSM that was NOT removed. Yet.)

10. https://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=50404#p50404 :
• Email to TomH + Firefishy 2019-09-16: opportunity to use/test a 
k-anonymity SFS API (zero response)


In Summary:–

OSM == OpenStreetMap
DWG == Data Working Group

https://www.openstreetmap.org/diary
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/alexkemp/diary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal

A bunch of OSM folks, joined at the tail by the common mental 
disturbance known as Narcissism, got butt-hurt by (in part) the fact of 
my pointing out that they were malignant narcissists, and went postal on 
me. Unfortunately for myself, they
Ⅰ. had controls of levers that allowed them to remove Diary posts that, 
in some cases, had taken me more than 11 hours to research & write, and
Ⅱ. were malignant narcissists, which meant that they would do everything 
in their power to harm me.


If you stand to one side and kind of squint at all of this, and after 
reading all the available posts (above), and especially after reading 
the extract from the email sent to me by one of the executives of the 
DWG (bottom), you now need to re-join your bottom jaw to your top-jaw. 
And yes, this really is Real Life. And it is about to get worse, since 
it appears that some of these folks may be engaging in financial 
mismanagement (at best) and/or corruption (at worst)…


A. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Nakaner/diary/42916 :
• Post about 2017 OSMF Board Elections 2017-12-08: “analysis of the 
candidates”
• Heather Leson: “rarely active mapper … member of the HOT US Inc. … 
would like to introduce a strong code of conduct with an enforcement … 
emphasized her fundraising skills on the HOT board but did not collect 
any money” … et al
• Emails from Nicolas Chavent (co-founder of HOT) + Severin Menard 
(long-time member of HOT) reveal effects of a code of conduct complaint 
within HOT, plus it running out of money whilst Leson was in charge


B. https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SeverinGeo/diary/42854 :
• Post in OSM Diary 2017-12-01: “Leaving the HOT US Corporation”
• Severin Menard: “secrecy and lies were core within the board toward 
the membership … End of September 2015, HOT US Inc should still have 
approximately USD $152,000 for activities still to be done or to be 
returned for one large multiple years project, while the bank account 
was around only USD $10K.”


C. 

Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[dcapillae]

It would hurt a Philosophy student to read that.

Socrates didn't write anything. Plato would write it.

Excuse me for this off-topic.



--
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Mateusz Konieczny]

25 Jun 2019, 11:19 by frede...@remote.org:

> I think that many soft rules, like "you shouldn't use this to post a
> question", can also be developed and enforced by the community without a
> well defined process and without ever being written down. If someone
> posts a question and three others tell them that this was not a good
> idea, they will likely learn, and everyone else who reads the exchange
> will learn, too.
>
I think that using diary entries for questions can be very useful and 
appropriate.

For example https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35437 

that was basically a question "is this a good progress toward improving map 
style, 
or is there something that should be done differently?"

It resulted in a very useful feedback, especially  
"Ok - will try to explain briefly on the problem of too strong colors. (...)" 
but also
other comments.

There only other place where I could reasonably publish this was a Github 
repository,
where it would reach different and smaller group of people - even with 
announcement
on mailing lists.
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Simon Poole]

There is a very big difference between "lively debate", and hurling
insults at individuals. Being of a different opinion than our system
administrators and expressing that, if very long in the tooth and
annoying in its repetitiveness is quite OK, and like most I simply
switched to ignoring the individuals posts. Calling people names is off
limits and doesn't need any additional confirmation in a CoC or whatever.

Simon

Am 25.06.2019 um 10:45 schrieb Harry Wood:
> I definitely support moderation actions on the diaries (or indeed any
> channel) when somebody steps way out of line.
>
> > It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
> > written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
> > spam - were dropped too.
>
> Do you have the option of *editing* a diary entry to delete sections
> of it, or even delete the whole text?  e.g. leaving a message
> "---This section has been removed because it did not meet our
> community standards".
>
> Not saying you should have done so in this case. Just wondering if it
> is an option.
> This would leave the comments. Some of the comments might then lack
> context, but it might still be a better outcome if the discussion was
> useful.
> Weirdly it's also a stronger moderation slap-down. The perpetrator
> suffers the ignominy of this message publicly on display within their
> diary. I've seen this approach a website elsewhere.
> I guess one consideration is that when diaries are moderated away,
> they are actually "soft deleted" whereas *editing* a diary would lose
> the original text.
>
> Anyway...  on the broader principle. At the risk of bringing back the
> "code of conduct" discussion... If we set out somewhere a set of
> community standards in terms of "be nice to eachother", but also the
> types of topics we expect to appear as OpenStreetMap diaries, what
> would we set out?
>
> I think we might decide that the standards of behaviour on the diaries
> should be higher than those of the mailing list. I mean the
> counterargument on the mailing list is always the desire to promote a
> "space for lively debate", but diaries are less of a discussion
> medium, more of a broadcast medium. We don't want to disallow people
> putting forth "political" thoughts or manifestos about the project,
> which inevitably will stray into bad-mouthing groups or even
> individuals on occasions, but in general we want diaries to be more
> carefully worded and well thought out. On balance a diary entry should
> be "respectful", "considerate", and "collaborative" ...but I'm quoting
> from the code of conduct now :-)
>
> We could also say diary entries should "make sense", e.g. minimum
> length. Not just some a few random words. This would allow us to
> delete quite a few weird diary entries from new users which clutter
> things (And they're possibly spammers flagging), but I'd be creating
> more work for moderations with that idea.
>
> We could also say diary entries should not be used a place to pose a
> question, or engage in communication styles which obviously fit better
> on other channels. For example I saw someone post a diary entry asking
> if the tile servers were currently offline. He argued that this was
> the best way to get attention, which may well be true, but it was an
> obvious misuse of the diaries feature to my mind.
>
> Harry
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, 25 June 2019, 00:23:34 BST, Frederik Ramm
>  wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am writing this with my DWG hat on.
>
> The OSM user diaries are not routinely moderated but the DWG has the
> technical means to hide comments or whole posts, and will make use of
> these in extreme situations.
>
> I am writing to inform you that there as been one such situation, where
> a contributor time and time again over recent months used various
> expletives and insults to belittle the work of others in the project.
> He's been told to stop it numerous times; at one point when told that
> insults don't get him anywhere he said that he disagreed, because he had
> actually got a reaction to an insult. In another situation where he was
> told that his message could be heard better if he weren't wrapping it in
> so much bile, he responded "don't tell me what to do".
>
> We first tried to only hide those comments that were absolutely
> inacceptable ("viciuos brat", "violent little shit" etc.) but even those
> messages that were factual were always seasoned with a sentence
> explaining how this and that other person was an idiot, amateur, etc.,
> so in the end we just hid a handful of blog entries altogether. We
> wouldn't normally moderate someone for calling someone else an "amateur"
> but if it's framed by constant, stronger abuse then that lowers the bar
> considerably.
>
> It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
> written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
> spam - were dropped too.
>
> As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
> 

Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Warin]

On 25/06/19 18:45, Harry Wood wrote:


Anyway...  on the broader principle. At the risk of bringing back the 
"code of conduct" discussion... If we set out somewhere a set of 
community standards in terms of "be nice to eachother", but also the 
types of topics we expect to appear as OpenStreetMap diaries, what 
would we set out?


I think we might decide that the standards of behaviour on the diaries 
should be higher than those of the mailing list. I mean the 
counterargument on the mailing list is always the desire to promote a 
"space for lively debate", but diaries are less of a discussion 
medium, more of a broadcast medium. We don't want to disallow people 
putting forth "political" thoughts or manifestos about the project, 
which inevitably will stray into bad-mouthing groups or even 
individuals on occasions,


Err ..no. The discussions should be about OSM, not about people or an 
individual.


I have found going through any outgoing mail, diary and eliminating the 
words 'you', 'they', even 'we' can lead to more objectivity on my part 
and hopefully less personal offence elsewhere.


There are a number of thing I don' like about OSM, trying to change them 
is one thing... abusing others with a different point of view? Not going 
to help.


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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 25.06.19 10:45, Harry Wood wrote:
> Do you have the option of *editing* a diary entry to delete sections of
> it, or even delete the whole text? 

No. This is something the admins can do by fiddling directly with the
database, obviously, but there's no user interface for anyone but the
author doing it. I guess that would not be too difficult to change, but
that would then raise the question of whether we need to keep track of
changes (who made what change when), and thereby potentially open a
feature can of worms. Plus, since users can edit their own diary
entries, they could of course always remove the note saying that
something has been removed... you could argue this could become part of
a constructive process but I don't know, it sounds complicated.

> We could also say diary entries should "make sense", e.g. minimum
> length. Not just some a few random words. 

"Hello I am  and I am standing for election to  of " ;)

> We could also say diary entries should not be used a place to pose a
> question, or engage in communication styles which obviously fit better
> on other channels. For example I saw someone post a diary entry asking
> if the tile servers were currently offline. He argued that this was the
> best way to get attention, which may well be true, but it was an obvious
> misuse of the diaries feature to my mind.

Interestingly we have simply added the feature at some point, without
telling people what to use it for. The term "diary" - and I don't know
how it has been translated - seems to say that the idea was for people
to record what they have experienced (while mapping, I guess?), rather
than being a blog with general comments about the state of the world.
But then again, simply putting the feature out there and see what people
would use it for does have something very OSM-y to it.

I think that many soft rules, like "you shouldn't use this to post a
question", can also be developed and enforced by the community without a
well defined process and without ever being written down. If someone
posts a question and three others tell them that this was not a good
idea, they will likely learn, and everyone else who reads the exchange
will learn, too.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Harry Wood]

 I definitely support moderation actions on the diaries (or indeed any channel) 
when somebody steps way out of line.
> It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments> 
>written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
> spam - were dropped too.
Do you have the option of *editing* a diary entry to delete sections of it, or 
even delete the whole text?  e.g. leaving a message"---This section has been 
removed because it did not meet our community standards".
Not saying you should have done so in this case. Just wondering if it is an 
option.
This would leave the comments. Some of the comments might then lack context, 
but it might still be a better outcome if the discussion was useful.Weirdly 
it's also a stronger moderation slap-down. The perpetrator suffers the ignominy 
of this message publicly on display within their diary. I've seen this approach 
a website elsewhere.I guess one consideration is that when diaries are 
moderated away, they are actually "soft deleted" whereas *editing* a diary 
would lose the original text.
Anyway...  on the broader principle. At the risk of bringing back the "code of 
conduct" discussion... If we set out somewhere a set of community standards in 
terms of "be nice to eachother", but also the types of topics we expect to 
appear as OpenStreetMap diaries, what would we set out?
I think we might decide that the standards of behaviour on the diaries should 
be higher than those of the mailing list. I mean the counterargument on the 
mailing list is always the desire to promote a "space for lively debate", but 
diaries are less of a discussion medium, more of a broadcast medium. We don't 
want to disallow people putting forth "political" thoughts or manifestos about 
the project, which inevitably will stray into bad-mouthing groups or even 
individuals on occasions, but in general we want diaries to be more carefully 
worded and well thought out. On balance a diary entry should be "respectful", 
"considerate", and "collaborative" ...but I'm quoting from the code of conduct 
now :-)
We could also say diary entries should "make sense", e.g. minimum length. Not 
just some a few random words. This would allow us to delete quite a few weird 
diary entries from new users which clutter things (And they're possibly 
spammers flagging), but I'd be creating more work for moderations with that 
idea.
We could also say diary entries should not be used a place to pose a question, 
or engage in communication styles which obviously fit better on other channels. 
For example I saw someone post a diary entry asking if the tile servers were 
currently offline. He argued that this was the best way to get attention, which 
may well be true, but it was an obvious misuse of the diaries feature to my 
mind.
Harry


On Tuesday, 25 June 2019, 00:23:34 BST, Frederik Ramm  
wrote:  
 
 Hi,

I am writing this with my DWG hat on.

The OSM user diaries are not routinely moderated but the DWG has the
technical means to hide comments or whole posts, and will make use of
these in extreme situations.

I am writing to inform you that there as been one such situation, where
a contributor time and time again over recent months used various
expletives and insults to belittle the work of others in the project.
He's been told to stop it numerous times; at one point when told that
insults don't get him anywhere he said that he disagreed, because he had
actually got a reaction to an insult. In another situation where he was
told that his message could be heard better if he weren't wrapping it in
so much bile, he responded "don't tell me what to do".

We first tried to only hide those comments that were absolutely
inacceptable ("viciuos brat", "violent little shit" etc.) but even those
messages that were factual were always seasoned with a sentence
explaining how this and that other person was an idiot, amateur, etc.,
so in the end we just hid a handful of blog entries altogether. We
wouldn't normally moderate someone for calling someone else an "amateur"
but if it's framed by constant, stronger abuse then that lowers the bar
considerably.

It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
spam - were dropped too.

As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
messages, especially because they weren't one-off heat-of-the-moment
posts but a sustained onslaught, far surpassed in offensiveness anything
I've seen on this or any other OSM mailing list in recent years.

I won't say who the user is - those of you who were involved will
recognize it, and those who weren't probably shouldn't waste any time
with it.

Bye
Frederik

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

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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Oleksiy Muzalyev]

Hi,

Socrates,  a Greek philosopher, wrote still more than two thousand years 
ago  "When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser".


That is, soft words if presented in hard arguments can convey the 
message more efficiently. One more person had to learn this precious 
lesson the hard way.


Best regards,
Oleksiy

On 6/25/19 01:14, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Hi,

I am writing this with my DWG hat on.

The OSM user diaries are not routinely moderated but the DWG has the
technical means to hide comments or whole posts, and will make use of
these in extreme situations.

I am writing to inform you that there as been one such situation, where
a contributor time and time again over recent months used various
expletives and insults to belittle the work of others in the project.
He's been told to stop it numerous times; at one point when told that
insults don't get him anywhere he said that he disagreed, because he had
actually got a reaction to an insult. In another situation where he was
told that his message could be heard better if he weren't wrapping it in
so much bile, he responded "don't tell me what to do".

We first tried to only hide those comments that were absolutely
inacceptable ("viciuos brat", "violent little shit" etc.) but even those
messages that were factual were always seasoned with a sentence
explaining how this and that other person was an idiot, amateur, etc.,
so in the end we just hid a handful of blog entries altogether. We
wouldn't normally moderate someone for calling someone else an "amateur"
but if it's framed by constant, stronger abuse then that lowers the bar
considerably.

It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
spam - were dropped too.

As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
messages, especially because they weren't one-off heat-of-the-moment
posts but a sustained onslaught, far surpassed in offensiveness anything
I've seen on this or any other OSM mailing list in recent years.

I won't say who the user is - those of you who were involved will
recognize it, and those who weren't probably shouldn't waste any time
with it.

Bye
Frederik




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Re: [OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Mateusz Konieczny]

25 Jun 2019, 01:14 by frede...@remote.org:

> As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
> messages, especially because they weren't one-off heat-of-the-moment
> posts but a sustained onslaught, far surpassed in offensiveness anything
> I've seen on this or any other OSM mailing list in recent years.
>
> I won't say who the user is - those of you who were involved will
> recognize it, and those who weren't probably shouldn't waste any time
> with it.
>
I just wanted to thank for taking action and using moderation tools in this 
situation.
It was unfortunately required.
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[OSM-talk] OSM user diary etiquette

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I am writing this with my DWG hat on.

The OSM user diaries are not routinely moderated but the DWG has the
technical means to hide comments or whole posts, and will make use of
these in extreme situations.

I am writing to inform you that there as been one such situation, where
a contributor time and time again over recent months used various
expletives and insults to belittle the work of others in the project.
He's been told to stop it numerous times; at one point when told that
insults don't get him anywhere he said that he disagreed, because he had
actually got a reaction to an insult. In another situation where he was
told that his message could be heard better if he weren't wrapping it in
so much bile, he responded "don't tell me what to do".

We first tried to only hide those comments that were absolutely
inacceptable ("viciuos brat", "violent little shit" etc.) but even those
messages that were factual were always seasoned with a sentence
explaining how this and that other person was an idiot, amateur, etc.,
so in the end we just hid a handful of blog entries altogether. We
wouldn't normally moderate someone for calling someone else an "amateur"
but if it's framed by constant, stronger abuse then that lowers the bar
considerably.

It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
spam - were dropped too.

As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
messages, especially because they weren't one-off heat-of-the-moment
posts but a sustained onslaught, far surpassed in offensiveness anything
I've seen on this or any other OSM mailing list in recent years.

I won't say who the user is - those of you who were involved will
recognize it, and those who weren't probably shouldn't waste any time
with it.

Bye
Frederik

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

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