Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Mike N]

On 3/1/2018 7:36 PM, OSM Volunteer stevea wrote:

Sent to Bright Valley Marketing via their website Contact text box:


  Since there are several SEOs out there doing this, it would also be 
interesting to talk to one of them to find out where they got this idea. 
 If there is some SEO blog that gives the recommendation to advertise 
in OSM, and if we could get that page corrected, it would cut off the 
idea at the source.


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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Sent to Bright Valley Marketing via their website Contact text box:

How can you help me?  More like how can YOU help Bright Valley Marketing?!

OK:  you can stop putting advertising into your clients' OpenStreetMap (OSM) 
nodes.  Phone, website, opening_hours, addr: fields:  those are all OK.  The 
breezy text in the note: field that not only smacks of advertising but actually 
goes way too far and BECOMES advertising, especially in a volunteer and 
non-profit project like OSM:  No.  Absolutely, positively, no.  Also, the 
payment field should not say a single word about financing, especially 
business-offered financing.  This crosses the line into sleazy, many are 
watching what you are doing here.

We are asking you politely to stop doing this.  Starting right now.  Please 
reply to this so I know you have received this message.  I will likely accept 
your apology for abusing our project should you have the honor to offer one and 
it accompanies your understanding to cease and desist these practices.

SteveA
OpenStreetMap volunteer

(A little harsh?  Maybe.  Maybe not.)
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Mike N]

This is a good time to bring up the subject because the recent 
'locksmith' advertising was most bothersome: partly because the 
locksmith industry as a whole in the US is as shady as you can get while 
being barely legal, and partly because I'm sure the physical locations 
had no relevance; almost no one goes to a 'locksmith shop' to get their 
car door unlocked, and many of them just operate out of their residence.


On 3/1/2018 5:44 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

Advertising is often added to OSM in blatant disregard for what we want;
for those adding advertising to OSM, we are just another vehicle to
carry their marketing message across.


  Ironically, OSM in the US is nearly a black hole to advertisers.  As 
I last knew, adding something unique to OSM does not mean that it will 
ever show up in Google.   So I infer that we don't allow Google-bots to 
sniff the OSM changeset list.  If advertisers get things right, the best 
their client could hope for is to attract OSM app users.   If they get 
the factual part wrong, it goes nowhere.


  In this list for my region, I recognize at least 2 people who live in 
the area because they made additional relevant edits that only a local 
would know.   Otherwise, I haven't bothered to remove the advertising 
text because it's only space in the database, and a tiny percentage of 
the overall data.



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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

I phoned a local business owner from Frederik's list and learned he used 
"Bright Valley Marketing" (https://www.brightvalleymarketing.com) out of 
Sacramento, California:  it was they who apparently are the culprit.  The 
business owner was happy to recognize and vaguely seemed to understand the harm 
to both his business and OSM, then encouraged me to remove the ad "from 
whatever seems to be bothering you, Steve."  After I said that we're trying to 
get these kinds of SEO firms to change their business practices, he wished me 
"good luck with that."  Good, honest, done in sixty seconds, actionable and now 
you know, too.

One down.  (Who is going to call Bright Valley and chew their ear off?)  I put 
some good soul into this project (Frederik), what's the script for next?

SteveA

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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Thank you Frederik, thank you Ian.  Yes!  To both of you.

I am glad to see Frederik encourages me to do what I (somewhat timidly, at 
first) already now do in earnest:  sweep up when I see some poop in our map.  
It took me many years to grow my confidence as an OSM volunteer as "somebody 
who knows what he is doing" and I still do this with very reserved pride and a 
touch of caution and trepidation that I might go too far, then I aim for the 
sweet spot of "this is how we map" and it is good.  Please, I encourage all of 
us to stand up straight (even on our tiptoes every once in a while if we must 
reach for mature editing skills) and screw up our courage and confidence to do 
this very important work.  It is vital to the future of OSM.

I would also like Ian to follow up (here, in a week or three) with what he 
learned about "real analytics-based research yielding excellent intelligence 
that this minor-to-moderate problem is N # of SEO firms, and we are watching 
certain IP addresses."  (Or something similar, like a newer wiki page like 
"region-based anti-vandalism skill development").  You know, what smart people 
with good tools do when "paint bombs are being thrown at our canvas."  Let's be 
those smart people and use those good tools, developing them with good dialog 
and documenting what we mean to do.

Happy mapping and have a great day!

SteveA
California
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Ian Dees]

Hi Frederik,

I disagree that this is a "fight". Have we attempted to reach out to the
people running this operation? Have we asked the Operations team to
correlate IP address for the accounts that are created and used once? Have
we looked at what email addresses they use when signing up for clues? It
would be great to have these folks contributing the non-advertising parts
in a manner consistent with the rest of the community, and perhaps they'd
be willing to adjust their practices if we are able to ask them.

Also, your characterization of US mappers being more lax about this is a
little insulting. OpenStreetMappers in the US spend lots of time looking
for this kind of stuff and revert some of the most obvious stuff. Clifford
Snow, for example, has spent a lot of time researching who might be behind
these edits. I look forward to his feedback here, too.

I appreciate the time you've spent putting together this list of nodes.
I'll take a look at some of them, and maybe we can load them into
MapRoulette to help work through the list?

-Ian

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 4:44 PM, Frederik Ramm  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> over the past year or so, I have recreationally hunted down advertising
> on OSM and removed it. In many cases it's a clear-cut situation (there
> were cases where advertising borders on vandalism, with whole streets
> being named after a business), but there have also been situations where
> a local mapper had diligently copied a business's sales slogan into the
> description tag and was then upset to see this removed.
>
> As more and more SEO firms start dumping their stuff onto OSM (and here
> I am not talking about those who actually talk to us and listen, but
> those who don't care), this is becoming a fight that needs to be fought
> by the community as a whole.
>
> With this posting I'd like to start a wider discussion about
> advertising; the reason it goes to talk-us is that the USA are more
> strongly targeted by SEO companies and at the same time the community
> there is still not as big and watchful as in other regions of interest
> to spammers, leading to a relatively high volume of unwanted advertising
> in the US.
>
>
> General rant about advertising
>
> I'll make this short as it's likely the most opinionated part of this
> message. Advertising illustrates a lot of what has gone wrong in western
> societies. There's a war on over attention, and most people are affected
> by it throughout their daily lives - even if you run an adblocker, you
> won't be immune to the attention-grabbing design of web sites and apps
> and games. The films you watch on TV will deliver content that fits
> snugly around the ad breaks. Advertising has crept into the home, into
> schools and kindergartens. Advertising calls you on the phone.
> Advertising's very mission is not to make your life better, but take
> your mind away from what matters, and making you want something.
> Advertising harms rational thought, self-determination, wellbeing, and
> the environment.
>
>
> Advertising != information
>
> It is information if you say "there's a supermarket here named
> so-and-so, and they are open at this time, and this is their telephone
> number, and they sell these products". It is advertising if the products
> or services are described in a way designed to make this particular
> vendor stand out, or designed to make you want to buy. A list of
> products or services can already venture into the world of advertising.
> Example: "Sells ice cream and milk shakes" - not advertising. "Sells
> chocolate ice cream, vanilla ice cream, homegrown blueberry ice cream,
> and caramel fudge ice cream" - this is getting dangerously close to
> advertising (do you taste it in your mouth already?). "City's premier
> spot for delicious organic ice creams, prepared on the premises by our
> Italian chef", well.
>
>
> Rant about advertising in OSM
>
> Advertising is often added to OSM in blatant disregard for what we want;
> for those adding advertising to OSM, we are just another vehicle to
> carry their marketing message across. More precisely, you will usually
> have a business crafting a marketing message, asking another business to
> "manage their online visibility" for a small fee, and that business then
> exploits cheap labour in a sweatshop somewhere on the planet to add the
> marketing message to OSM (and Google Plus, and Facebook, and all the
> yellow pages they can find). Data added to OSM this way consists of a
> factual part (name and type of business, address, opening hours), and an
> advertising part (usually in the "note" or "description" tag, and/or in
> changeset comments and user profiles).
>
> The advertising part itself has no place in OSM, but even the factual
> part is often buggy in a number of ways:
>
> * the address tags don't follow OSM conventions (suite/unit number added
> to addr:street, abbreviations in street names)
> * the placement of the node is wrong (in the middle of the road,
> 

[Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

over the past year or so, I have recreationally hunted down advertising
on OSM and removed it. In many cases it's a clear-cut situation (there
were cases where advertising borders on vandalism, with whole streets
being named after a business), but there have also been situations where
a local mapper had diligently copied a business's sales slogan into the
description tag and was then upset to see this removed.

As more and more SEO firms start dumping their stuff onto OSM (and here
I am not talking about those who actually talk to us and listen, but
those who don't care), this is becoming a fight that needs to be fought
by the community as a whole.

With this posting I'd like to start a wider discussion about
advertising; the reason it goes to talk-us is that the USA are more
strongly targeted by SEO companies and at the same time the community
there is still not as big and watchful as in other regions of interest
to spammers, leading to a relatively high volume of unwanted advertising
in the US.


General rant about advertising

I'll make this short as it's likely the most opinionated part of this
message. Advertising illustrates a lot of what has gone wrong in western
societies. There's a war on over attention, and most people are affected
by it throughout their daily lives - even if you run an adblocker, you
won't be immune to the attention-grabbing design of web sites and apps
and games. The films you watch on TV will deliver content that fits
snugly around the ad breaks. Advertising has crept into the home, into
schools and kindergartens. Advertising calls you on the phone.
Advertising's very mission is not to make your life better, but take
your mind away from what matters, and making you want something.
Advertising harms rational thought, self-determination, wellbeing, and
the environment.


Advertising != information

It is information if you say "there's a supermarket here named
so-and-so, and they are open at this time, and this is their telephone
number, and they sell these products". It is advertising if the products
or services are described in a way designed to make this particular
vendor stand out, or designed to make you want to buy. A list of
products or services can already venture into the world of advertising.
Example: "Sells ice cream and milk shakes" - not advertising. "Sells
chocolate ice cream, vanilla ice cream, homegrown blueberry ice cream,
and caramel fudge ice cream" - this is getting dangerously close to
advertising (do you taste it in your mouth already?). "City's premier
spot for delicious organic ice creams, prepared on the premises by our
Italian chef", well.


Rant about advertising in OSM

Advertising is often added to OSM in blatant disregard for what we want;
for those adding advertising to OSM, we are just another vehicle to
carry their marketing message across. More precisely, you will usually
have a business crafting a marketing message, asking another business to
"manage their online visibility" for a small fee, and that business then
exploits cheap labour in a sweatshop somewhere on the planet to add the
marketing message to OSM (and Google Plus, and Facebook, and all the
yellow pages they can find). Data added to OSM this way consists of a
factual part (name and type of business, address, opening hours), and an
advertising part (usually in the "note" or "description" tag, and/or in
changeset comments and user profiles).

The advertising part itself has no place in OSM, but even the factual
part is often buggy in a number of ways:

* the address tags don't follow OSM conventions (suite/unit number added
to addr:street, abbreviations in street names)
* the placement of the node is wrong (in the middle of the road,
clustered in the desert or on another continent due to some geocoding
cock-up)
* the placement of the node violates the copyright of whatever gecoder
was used to generate it
* the node doesn't have a tag that describes what it is, in OSM terms
(no "shop" or "amenity" or "office" or anything - or at best some
generic office=company tag)
* the node doesn't actually signify any relevant walk-in business but is
just put there to publish an URL or phone number (witness recent
locksmith scam)
* the node uses other unsuitable tags like "Keywords", "Services
offered", "Category", or incorrect opening hours)

Such advertising is regularly added by accounts created solely for the
purpose of adding one single business, and the accounts will usually
have a name derived directly from the business name, and will never
reply to any attempt at contacting them. In very rare cases it might be
an actual business owner adding themselves to the map, but in the
overwhelming number of cases it's just professional spammers.

Advertising also distorts the quality of OSM. If a mapper maps an area,
they will most likely add *all* doctors they encounter and not just
those who happen to pay money to an online visibility enhancement firm.
If we allow advertisers to flood OSM 

Re: [Talk-us] Satus CDP

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Albert Pundt  writes
> Many towns and suburbs in my area are only CDPs, and having proper boundaries 
> for them seems like it'd be useful, especially in more densely populated  
> areas. It's not like there's any fuzziness with them either, since they're 
> defined by the Census Bureau and could only change once every 10 years. Only 
> one U.S. census has occurred in OSM history, so it's not like we'd be 
> constantly updating them. 

Thank you for your perspective Albert, and while you didn't ask a direct 
question, I am left with a couple myself after reading your observations:

Are these actually "towns" (or "cities") and so should be mapped 
boundary=administrative and admin_level=8?
Are these actually "suburbs" and so should be mapped as nodes tagged 
place=suburb inside of cities (which are mapped as the previous sentence)?

Noting in our United States admin_level wiki that a particular state SHOULD map 
with a particular "rungs on the ladder" hierarchy of particular admin_level 
values is useful, since by consensus we took our time to get those correct for 
that particular state.  THEN, there are assigning proper values on those proper 
entities, whether they came from the Census Bureau or need to be created/come 
from some other source.  If a census boundary exactly matches a city or town 
boundary, for example, (though it might prove challenging to discover or verify 
that), well, by all means:  rather than deleting that tagged polygon, we can 
simply change the tags from boundary=census to boundary=administrative, add an 
admin_level=8 tag (perhaps add a border_type=city tag) and be done until the 
next decennial census.

However, that's the tricky part: IS that Census Bureau-produced boundary truly 
the town or city boundary?  Or is it simply (and likely incorrectly) a "Census 
Bureau-produced boundary of census tract agglomerations" rather than a true 
corporate boundary as denoted by the city itself (or its parent state)?  Either 
might be correct, but as of now, data in our map are not sure.  In OSM, I'd 
like the data surely to be what it claims to be.  I don't believe we have that 
today with many Census Bureau boundaries, except that they denote a "boundary" 
of some sort:  sometimes correctly denoted "census" with no admin_level value 
(but should have one on a different and correct polygon), sometimes incorrectly 
denoted "administrative" with a questionable (maybe correct, maybe not) value, 
but on a polygon which is Census Bureau produced and possibly incorrect, 
possibly correct but we don't know that the Census Bureau exactly mapped a 
corporate boundary 

Locally speaking, they might appear to be "better than nothing, at least until 
the next decennial census," but ask yourself:  what are these really denoting?  
If the answer is "we don't know if this is a corporate boundary or not" then we 
must at a minimum change the boundary tag from administrative to census, 
deleting any admin_level tag.  (Taking note amongst ourselves that these 
boundaries are marginally useful at best, especially when there are entities 
like towns and cities that deserve to have their corporate boundaries in our 
map).

We've already achieved consensus that "CDPs are lesser entities."  I'm 
suggesting we go ahead and delete them as noise (except in truly useful 
circumstances absent any "better" data, as in Alaska).  Superseding them with 
better data:  I'm all for that where we can do so.

SteveA
California
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