Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Jordan Brod]

"Firstly, many rules in OSM are not written down"

So while I get that OSM is an evolving and collaborative effort, don't you
think that having unwritten rules leads to less collaboration and less
civil interactions?  We have a code of conduct for behavior, guidelines for
using the data, import guidelines, etc. Would it not be a good thing to
adopt a set of conduct or guidelines for editing?  Put it in one place and
stick it in the walkthrough for using the browser editor.  Get the voting
members to agree to it so that it has authority.  Otherwise it comes off
as, "Hey a bunch of us don't like this and so we are going to delete it."
That can catch innocent contributors up and they might decide not to
contribute again.

Just for clarification, I don't support putting advertising in the
description or spam.  I just find it a little to vague when things aren't
obviously spelled out and we'll defined.  Looking at the key wiki entry it
simply says "advertising" and "spam" without offering a definition of
either terms.  Someone could put description= "A discount/low price
store".  It may be an accurate description of a thrift store, but it could
also be considered advertising.  Low Price is an often used advertising
phrase.  I know that common sense drives a lot of this and that we are all
using the best of intentions and discretion to work on this, I just want to
make sure it's all crystal clear.  For one thing I don't want to make edits
multiple times or have edits deleted for violating unwritten rules.  I know
my personality and I wouldn't try to fix the area and I wouldn't try to map
in that area again. I would let the rollback stand.

Thanks for the great discussion and for pointing out where that prohibition
was.  Hopefully I didn't upset anyone, I just want to help make the map
better.

On Mar 19, 2018 6:28 AM, "Frederik Ramm"  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 19.03.2018 01:08, Jordan Brod wrote:
> > I went looking for any information printed in guidelines or code of
> > conduct about advertising in the attributes of a feature and I couldn't
> > find where it is approved/prohibited or even mentioned.  Does anybody
> > know where the rule against this is?
>
> Firstly, many rules in OSM are not written down. Just because there's no
> policy that says "don't do X" doesn't mean that X is welcome in OSM, or
> that someone who got their X deleted has a legitimate basis for a
> complaint.
>
> The current situation with written rules is that
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:description
> says "Never use description=* to add advertising messages.", and
> more generally our "How We Map" rules
> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_We_Map) say that what you add
> must be truthful and verifiable, both of which is rarely the case for
> advertising.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 19.03.2018 01:08, Jordan Brod wrote:
> I went looking for any information printed in guidelines or code of
> conduct about advertising in the attributes of a feature and I couldn't
> find where it is approved/prohibited or even mentioned.  Does anybody
> know where the rule against this is?

Firstly, many rules in OSM are not written down. Just because there's no
policy that says "don't do X" doesn't mean that X is welcome in OSM, or
that someone who got their X deleted has a legitimate basis for a complaint.

The current situation with written rules is that
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:description
says "Never use description=* to add advertising messages.", and
more generally our "How We Map" rules
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_We_Map) say that what you add
must be truthful and verifiable, both of which is rarely the case for
advertising.

Bye
Frederik

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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Jordan Brod]

I went looking for any information printed in guidelines or code of conduct
about advertising in the attributes of a feature and I couldn't find where
it is approved/prohibited or even mentioned.  Does anybody know where the
rule against this is?

On Mar 18, 2018 6:42 PM, "Shawn K. Quinn"  wrote:

> On 03/01/2018 04:44 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > 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.
>
> If they are upset about it, tough turkey, it doesn't belong there.
>
> > 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.
>
> My approach this morning was different. I did an Overpass query for a
> huge chunk of Texas (west of San Antonio, then going east including
> Austin, Houston, and most suburbs, going to somewhere east of Beaumont)
> for anything with a description tag. I then saved the layer from JOSM
> and edited each occurrence of the description tag by hand (which also
> made it easier to do things like just change "description" to "name"). I
> made a few other related edits and submitted as changeset 57284276.
> Generally speaking, I purged anything that looked like it was trying to
> sell me on the business, including ad-copy-like descriptions of local
> libraries. I also deleted any description=* that was duplicative of the
> content of name=* or which added no useful information, and added
> appropriate tags where description=* had been used by a sloppy/lazy
> mapper to say things like "bowling alley" or to include opening hours.
>
> By the time I had gotten around to doing this, I had completely
> forgotten about the CSV export, though I was able to go through the
> entire chunk I had exported with my text editor in the span of a
> half-hour or so (I did a search for "description" and just kept hitting
> "next match" when ready to move on).
>
> My Java programming skills are nearly non-existent, but it is tempting
> to (re-)learn enough to write a plugin to automate the process from
> within JOSM, perhaps naming it something like "AdTerminator".
>
> --
> Shawn K. Quinn 
> http://www.rantroulette.com
> http://www.skqrecordquest.com
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On 03/01/2018 04:44 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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.

If they are upset about it, tough turkey, it doesn't belong there.

> 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.

My approach this morning was different. I did an Overpass query for a
huge chunk of Texas (west of San Antonio, then going east including
Austin, Houston, and most suburbs, going to somewhere east of Beaumont)
for anything with a description tag. I then saved the layer from JOSM
and edited each occurrence of the description tag by hand (which also
made it easier to do things like just change "description" to "name"). I
made a few other related edits and submitted as changeset 57284276.
Generally speaking, I purged anything that looked like it was trying to
sell me on the business, including ad-copy-like descriptions of local
libraries. I also deleted any description=* that was duplicative of the
content of name=* or which added no useful information, and added
appropriate tags where description=* had been used by a sloppy/lazy
mapper to say things like "bowling alley" or to include opening hours.

By the time I had gotten around to doing this, I had completely
forgotten about the CSV export, though I was able to go through the
entire chunk I had exported with my text editor in the span of a
half-hour or so (I did a search for "description" and just kept hitting
"next match" when ready to move on).

My Java programming skills are nearly non-existent, but it is tempting
to (re-)learn enough to write a plugin to automate the process from
within JOSM, perhaps naming it something like "AdTerminator".

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn 
http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com

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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Greg Morgan]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:44 PM, Frederik Ramm  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> * Contact the mapper responsible and politely ask them to fix it and/or
> stop adding advertising. In most cases, since these are throwaway
> accounts created by professional spammers, you won't receive a response
> but when in doubt, try it.
>


> * Use the business contact information provided to call/email them and
> ask which SEO firm they have paid to add data to OSM, and explain how
> this volunteer project is damaged by the actions of the SEO firm and
> that this also tarnishes the business reputation. Recommended if you
> like a little fight; some SEO operations have already been stopped from
> abusing OSM that way.
>
> * Should we have some MapRoulette task or OSMCha automatism or OSMI view
> to detect potential advertising?
>



> The data is in CSV format with the columns:
>
> date_last_edited,object,created_by,last_edited_by,name,description
>
>
> http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/us-seo.txt


 Frederik,

Thank you for the cleanup that you have done.  As of late my changesets
have focused on addressing and additional cleanup of Search Engine
Optimization, SEO, spam in Arizona.  In the case of SEO spam you might just
be wasting your time trying to contact them.*  Here are two examples of SEO
spam that I finally deleted.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4784217504/history
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Copper%20Canyon%20Law%
20LLC%C2%A0Tax%20Attorney

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4792771037/history
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Simplified%20Celebration

The first set of links are actually in Arizona while the second set of
links are for a company in Washington State.  I tried contacting the owner
of the first set of links*.  I received no response.  I provide these ids
because it would be interesting if someone can look into the OSM database
and see if these SEO mappers used the same SEO spam email address company
i.e. seosp...@seospamcorp.com.  If so, then a black list filter at the OSM
signup level could be a great tool to fight the spam.  I also wonder if a
black list service such as https://www.spamhaus.org/organization/dnsblusage/
might help or if we can use the service.  I would think that OSM qualifies
at under 100,000 emails/accounts a day.  Anyhow, many months after my
email* and around 11 months in OSM, I finally deleted both of these spam
nodes.  It feels like my email went to the spammers and not the business
owner.  I also wonder about the user account.  Has the spammer still won if
the name is not change to user_x and the contact email removed?  I also
found it interesting that mapper Владимир%20К  thought it important to undo
some of Frederik's changes as can be seen in the history for these nodes.

I am not sure that a MapRoulette task would be of helpful but that may be
worth a try.  Your OSM Inspector address overlay[1] has been a great tool
for hunting down the SEO spammers and advertisement.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4911881645/history

Where your address checker helped on this address was that the house number
was in the general range of address numbers but Camelback Road is way south
of this location.  That address came up as a nice red shinny dot in a
residential area.  Mapillary sequences on Camelback Road would make it
easier to add the address at the correct location verses moving the
address.  Resolution delete.  A MapRoulette challenge for a mapper outside
my local area may take a large effort to correct the address verses my
quick determination. As an example,  Владимир%20К, from Russia could not
determine that these were bad addresses and not worth saving.  In another
set of changes[2], a mapper from Germany could not determine that 1 was the
wrong address number for the area.  We need additional tools with address
number ranges and zipcode boundaries to detect these issues.  Moreover, the
US states need to be treated like individual countries in Europe.  Pascal's
OSM tool does not help me at a state level when the whole US is treated as
one blob.

Several years ago I had two mappers add a bunch of addr:* tags in my
mapping area then disappear.  All those red streets in OSMI made for an
ineffective tool.  The red from the streets reduced the effectiveness of
detecting bad addresses/spam.  I have cleaned up most of these streets
now.   Now I can use OSMI to also detect street names that have been
changed to business names by SEO or other kinds of map spammers.  Of course
that only works if I have address coverage to match.  In this cause, all of
the address nodes would turn red.

The last set of links that I provide you is also number two in Frederiks'
Arizona list. I will soon be deleting this spam. Now people _please don't
click_ on the URL in the node if you do not like birthday suits. I believe
this was really was a yoga place at one time but now is into some other new
age stuff.  Yet this kind of spam is just a redirect to a birthday suite

Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Simon Poole]

While I don't think supporting specific, rather questionable business
models, is something we should expend a lot of effort on, improving the
tooling for individual businesses to maintain an entry in OSM is (and a
serious SEO shop could easily use such tools).

Some may have already had a look at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMyBiz  which is not quite ready
for prime time yet, but due to be released rsn, There's a test instance
running against the dev sandbox, but I need to check with Stefan if we
at this stage should be pointing to it, or not simply waiting for the
release version.

Simon



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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

So many good things being said by so many good people here.  This is OSM at its 
best:  organically growing goodness and correct actions by right-thinking 
people.  Be bold, we might say out loud, as in "I delete spam and even just 
plain bad mapping when and as I see it."  (Whether front door, back door, with 
the help of our fellow mappers at a Mapping Party...whatever).  Thanks to all 
who say and do that!  "Right mapping" is attitude as much as action.

Taking either/or approaches is something we acknowledge as short(er)-sighted; a 
multi-pronged approach including everyman/pedestrian works (like my example), 
as well as the kinds of "some investigations" that Paul mentions – there truly 
are bad actors to whom we must apply our realistic and efficient repairs.  
Smart behavior (analytics log analysis, similar/usual white-hat tools) can 
complement "bread crumb trails to do the right things" approaches, too.  (Good 
dialog happens!)  Wiki as I suggested of a regional flavor (let's start with 
USA) of an "anti-spam/SEO, vandalism skill-building strategies..." is possible, 
similar to what we're saying here, but "sticks to the wall a bit more, 
wiki-searchable by those looking for it."  As will individuals with pride in 
making and keeping our map as spic-and-span as we can.  (The core of why "let's 
everybody keep it nice and clean around here" works).  ALL of the above and 
even more as we develop these strategies.  It's very much like cooperative 
folks living together someplace agreeing to do the cleanup chores in as smart 
and efficient way as we can.  As, that is what successful projects like ours 
do:  cool heads prevail.  What a great dialog, even feels a bit 
historical/epic.  OSM is fantastic, like Rosie the Riveter swinging her fist, 
"We can do this."

Curating this discussion to wiki doesn't seem a lengthy task.  Might we see a 
WikiProject USA/Help fight advertising emerge?

SteveA

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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Paul Norman]

On 3/2/2018 9:40 AM, Clifford Snow wrote:
Sorry for the late posting - I've been working on another project for 
the past few days.


Frederik wrote "You will be surprised about the breadth of marketing 
blurb that has already crept into OSM."


Unfortunately no, I'm not surprised. Marketing is a very competitive 
world. SEO firms are using every trick in the dictionary to improve 
their page ranking.


True, those experienced with SEO firms are probably not surprised.

One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work 
is likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me 
suggest these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the 
changeset comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if 
she could help us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to 
hear from her. Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a 
part of the community, just use us for their gains.


With my DWG hat on I've seen some investigations into some cases. Much 
of what I've seen comes from a number of overseas sources, and there's 
probably a disconnect between the firms people pay and who spams the data.




Frederik suggested we contact the user. I've sent numerous message and 
have not only not had any response, but have yet to see any change in 
their behavior. Frankly it's a waste of my time anymore to attempt to 
contact them.


As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it 
spam=*) it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. 
After which, it's no longer useful and can be deleted.


At this point I generally don't do that, I end up deleting the spam. 
With the location frequently sourced from Google's geocoder, it's 
unusable, many of the businesses don't have physical locations and don't 
belong in OSM, and the users are consistently uncommunicative.


Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing 
a great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be 
good community members.


There are some reputable SEO firms. Unfortunately, the industry tends to 
attract disreputable ones. The disreputable ones are unlikely to follow 
rules. Remember, this is an industry where disreputable companies still 
flood comments sections, user profiles, and anything else they can 
imagine with spam. If they're fine with breaking anti-spam laws, terms 
of service, and other rules, I can't see them following either OSMF 
policies or community expectations, so we shouldn't gear our work around 
them doing that.


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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 11:40 AM, Clifford Snow 
wrote:
>
> To me that leaves us with a couple of choices. One, we continue to develop
> more sophisticated tools to identify and revert the spam or two, we develop
> tools to help SEO firms add data to OSM in a manner acceptable to us.  Or
> maybe some of both. Jason Remillard post has some positive recommendation
> on how to do the first. We should listen to him. One recommendation - make
> what we do very public. If SEO firms realize that they are wasting money
> they may stop. Remember they are very good at figuring out how to
> manipulate search engines. If they can do that, they can figure out how to
> better mask their edits.
>

My vote is both.  Obviously the way things are now, they're not right, but
they're not exactly wrong, either.  Particularly in the US, where address
data is a real pain in the butt to acquire (and something I recently posted
extensively about
,
and I'm pretty certain I've covered here as well already).  The biggest
problems I see with SEO spam is that the tag values often don't conform to
any accepted convention (phone numbers, opening hours, and amenity=* or
shop=* tags seem especially problematic), and description=* or note=*
getting used for really smarmy ad copy, and using a geocoder referencing a
potentially copyrighted dataset we don't have a license to use.


> As for the second suggestion, make it easier for SEO firms to add data, we
> could create a policy and process to accept imports from SEO firms. The
> other web map sites like Google, Bing, Apple etc. all have a process for
> bulk loading data. (And none are the same.) We could do something similar.
> A policy and specialized import guidelines would need to be created.
>

I'm OK with this.  I think two rules definitely should be included as
minimums:

   1. All SEO edits from such companies must come from clearly identified
   accounts.
   2. These accounts must be responsive to comments via the message system
   and changeset comments.

I think we're all in agreement the level of communication we're getting
with the flood of one-off SEO accounts is, to put it generously, terrible.

One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work is
> likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me suggest
> these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the changeset
> comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if she could help
> us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to hear from her.
> Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a part of the
> community, just use us for their gains.
>

If they don't want to play ball, then how about redirecting their entire IP
space to a message explaining our concerns, so it can't be ignored?

As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it spam=*)
> it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. After which,
> it's no longer useful and can be deleted.
>

Not a bad option.  Maybe document that in the wiki?


> Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing a
> great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be good
> community members.
>

Hip hop hooray!  Granted, though, we can't reasonably expect them to police
the entire industry on our database.
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Clifford Snow]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 3:35 PM, Mike N  wrote:

> On 3/2/2018 4:11 PM, Dale Puch wrote:
>
>> It seems like encouraging SEO firms to operate within OSM guidelines by
>> providing an easy way to add the OSM appropriate information in bulk (with
>> data validation) in one step would be a good thing.  Easier to contact,
>> manage and block or revert as needed.
>>
>
>   This is a great idea; the biggest problem is the GeoCoder for use where
> all addresses haven't yet been entered into OSM.
>
> We would need terms and conditions that the vendor agree too, the geocoder
would be one, agreeing that the data they are uploading would licensed ODbL
is another.



-- 
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osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/03/2018 12:32 AM, OSM Volunteer stevea wrote:
> Even as I knew my "contact one SEO/Marketing firm, see what happens" approach 
> was quite pedestrian 

I'd like to think of your approach - contact the business that is
advertised, through the contact channel they voluntarily publish, and
ask whom they've contracted for advertising - as the "front door"
approach which I find preferable to the "back door" of trawling our logs
for IP numbers and trying to find out who's behind it. Firstly, the
"back door" approach is limited to those in OSM who have the requisite
privileged access; secondly, it is likely to land you with
subcontractors who have little interest in a cooperative future vision
because they're just doing what they are told.

So +1 for more people following the front door approach, and compiling a
list of SEO companies and cataloguing their efforts and reaching out to
them to politely requires compliance. In my opinion, this is something
we should do as a community, locally, and not wait for someone to lead
the effort.

I think that "making it easier for them to conform" should have its
limits in us defining and communicating the envelope of acceptable
contribution. Suggesting that it should be us who develop software or
invest time in curating third-party data sets would sound a bit
disingenious to me; next thing that someone suggests is because we're
doing their work for them we should also charge them? I wouldn't want to
go down that route.

And of course the non-confrontational approach can only ever be the
carrot, and there must be a stick to complement it. For every conformant
SEO company there will be a dozen who try to game the system, because
gaming systems is their core business, that's what they do with Google &
Co.; and even if we found some way to keep more advertising from
entering OSM, there's several thousand advertising POIs in OSM in the US
alone and they won't magically go away. So let's roll up our sleeves and
get to work.

Bye
Frederik

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

[Mike N]

On 3/2/2018 4:11 PM, Dale Puch wrote:
It seems like encouraging SEO firms to operate within OSM guidelines by 
providing an easy way to add the OSM appropriate information in bulk 
(with data validation) in one step would be a good thing.  Easier to 
contact, manage and block or revert as needed.


  This is a great idea; the biggest problem is the GeoCoder for use 
where all addresses haven't yet been entered into OSM.


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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Even as I knew my "contact one SEO/Marketing firm, see what happens" approach 
was quite pedestrian in the grand scheme of "fighting advertising," I still 
though it valuable to share with the talk-us list so others could experience it 
too, put on their thinking caps and offer additional approaches.

And we have!  I want to thank everybody for EXCELLENT suggestions on how to 
better approach (and likely solve) this problem, especially the ones that avoid 
antagonistic, confrontational and/or harsh behavior and better lead these folks 
down the garden path of "if you are going to do this, we'll make it EASY for 
you to do it the RIGHT way."  Awesome, everybody!  Let's keep up the good work 
and really follow through on these!

SteveA
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Alan Richards]

I would agree that better tools to help add appropriate information are
likely more helpful then trying to police the endless stream of new bad
edits. If we can guide these users to a tool that allows adding the
information in a constructive manner while restricting the spammy parts
that would go a long way to helping. Would a webform with only a limited
set of fields be enough? Drag a point, add the address, name, business
type, hours and submit.

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Dale Puch  wrote:

> It seems like encouraging SEO firms to operate within OSM guidelines by
> providing an easy way to add the OSM appropriate information in bulk (with
> data validation) in one step would be a good thing.  Easier to contact,
> manage and block or revert as needed.
>
> An idea for catching the throwaway accounts could be a maproulette
> verification for new user edits?  Or a delayed captcha e-mail challenge for
> the 1st edits to stay in OSM?
>
> Dale Puch
>
> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 12:40 PM, Clifford Snow 
> wrote:
>
>> Sorry for the late posting - I've been working on another project for the
>> past few days.
>>
>> Frederik wrote "You will be surprised about the breadth of marketing
>> blurb that has already crept into OSM."
>>
>> Unfortunately no, I'm not surprised. Marketing is a very competitive
>> world. SEO firms are using every trick in the dictionary to improve their
>> page ranking. Thanks to the volunteers that maintain our website(s), OSM
>> goes to great pains to insure that every URL we display on our website is
>> followed by a nofollow reference tag. And they have been doing this for
>> years. For those that aren't aware, it's believed that links to your
>> business from authoritative websites increases brings your website closer
>> to the top of searches. OSM.org has a really high authority rating. But now
>> it seems that the nofollow reference tag isn't enough. According to one of
>> the top SEO firms in the US, believe that search engines now look to see if
>> they are on Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc. They believe this not because the big
>> search companies publish this information but from reverse engineering the
>> factors to contribute to ranking.
>>
>> To me that leaves us with a couple of choices. One, we continue to
>> develop more sophisticated tools to identify and revert the spam or two, we
>> develop tools to help SEO firms add data to OSM in a manner acceptable to
>> us.  Or maybe some of both. Jason Remillard post has some positive
>> recommendation on how to do the first. We should listen to him. One
>> recommendation - make what we do very public. If SEO firms realize that
>> they are wasting money they may stop. Remember they are very good at
>> figuring out how to manipulate search engines. If they can do that, they
>> can figure out how to better mask their edits.
>>
>> As for the second suggestion, make it easier for SEO firms to add data,
>> we could create a policy and process to accept imports from SEO firms. The
>> other web map sites like Google, Bing, Apple etc. all have a process for
>> bulk loading data. (And none are the same.) We could do something similar.
>> A policy and specialized import guidelines would need to be created.
>>
>> Creating a bulk loading policy doesn't mean we don't follow Jason's
>> recommendation for those that don't follow our policy.
>>
>> One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work is
>> likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me suggest
>> these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the changeset
>> comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if she could help
>> us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to hear from her.
>> Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a part of the
>> community, just use us for their gains.
>>
>> Frederik suggested we contact the user. I've sent numerous message and
>> have not only not had any response, but have yet to see any change in their
>> behavior. Frankly it's a waste of my time anymore to attempt to contact
>> them.
>>
>> As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it
>> spam=*) it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. After
>> which, it's no longer useful and can be deleted.
>>
>> Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing a
>> great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be good
>> community members.
>>
>> Best,
>> Clifford
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:21 PM, Ian Dees  wrote:
>>
>>> 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 

Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Dale Puch]

It seems like encouraging SEO firms to operate within OSM guidelines by
providing an easy way to add the OSM appropriate information in bulk (with
data validation) in one step would be a good thing.  Easier to contact,
manage and block or revert as needed.

An idea for catching the throwaway accounts could be a maproulette
verification for new user edits?  Or a delayed captcha e-mail challenge for
the 1st edits to stay in OSM?

Dale Puch

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 12:40 PM, Clifford Snow 
wrote:

> Sorry for the late posting - I've been working on another project for the
> past few days.
>
> Frederik wrote "You will be surprised about the breadth of marketing blurb
> that has already crept into OSM."
>
> Unfortunately no, I'm not surprised. Marketing is a very competitive
> world. SEO firms are using every trick in the dictionary to improve their
> page ranking. Thanks to the volunteers that maintain our website(s), OSM
> goes to great pains to insure that every URL we display on our website is
> followed by a nofollow reference tag. And they have been doing this for
> years. For those that aren't aware, it's believed that links to your
> business from authoritative websites increases brings your website closer
> to the top of searches. OSM.org has a really high authority rating. But now
> it seems that the nofollow reference tag isn't enough. According to one of
> the top SEO firms in the US, believe that search engines now look to see if
> they are on Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc. They believe this not because the big
> search companies publish this information but from reverse engineering the
> factors to contribute to ranking.
>
> To me that leaves us with a couple of choices. One, we continue to develop
> more sophisticated tools to identify and revert the spam or two, we develop
> tools to help SEO firms add data to OSM in a manner acceptable to us.  Or
> maybe some of both. Jason Remillard post has some positive recommendation
> on how to do the first. We should listen to him. One recommendation - make
> what we do very public. If SEO firms realize that they are wasting money
> they may stop. Remember they are very good at figuring out how to
> manipulate search engines. If they can do that, they can figure out how to
> better mask their edits.
>
> As for the second suggestion, make it easier for SEO firms to add data, we
> could create a policy and process to accept imports from SEO firms. The
> other web map sites like Google, Bing, Apple etc. all have a process for
> bulk loading data. (And none are the same.) We could do something similar.
> A policy and specialized import guidelines would need to be created.
>
> Creating a bulk loading policy doesn't mean we don't follow Jason's
> recommendation for those that don't follow our policy.
>
> One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work is
> likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me suggest
> these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the changeset
> comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if she could help
> us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to hear from her.
> Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a part of the
> community, just use us for their gains.
>
> Frederik suggested we contact the user. I've sent numerous message and
> have not only not had any response, but have yet to see any change in their
> behavior. Frankly it's a waste of my time anymore to attempt to contact
> them.
>
> As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it
> spam=*) it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. After
> which, it's no longer useful and can be deleted.
>
> Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing a
> great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be good
> community members.
>
> Best,
> Clifford
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:21 PM, Ian Dees  wrote:
>
>> 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 

Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Clifford Snow]

Sorry for the late posting - I've been working on another project for the
past few days.

Frederik wrote "You will be surprised about the breadth of marketing blurb
that has already crept into OSM."

Unfortunately no, I'm not surprised. Marketing is a very competitive world.
SEO firms are using every trick in the dictionary to improve their page
ranking. Thanks to the volunteers that maintain our website(s), OSM goes to
great pains to insure that every URL we display on our website is followed
by a nofollow reference tag. And they have been doing this for years. For
those that aren't aware, it's believed that links to your business from
authoritative websites increases brings your website closer to the top of
searches. OSM.org has a really high authority rating. But now it seems that
the nofollow reference tag isn't enough. According to one of the top SEO
firms in the US, believe that search engines now look to see if they are on
Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc. They believe this not because the big search
companies publish this information but from reverse engineering the factors
to contribute to ranking.

To me that leaves us with a couple of choices. One, we continue to develop
more sophisticated tools to identify and revert the spam or two, we develop
tools to help SEO firms add data to OSM in a manner acceptable to us.  Or
maybe some of both. Jason Remillard post has some positive recommendation
on how to do the first. We should listen to him. One recommendation - make
what we do very public. If SEO firms realize that they are wasting money
they may stop. Remember they are very good at figuring out how to
manipulate search engines. If they can do that, they can figure out how to
better mask their edits.

As for the second suggestion, make it easier for SEO firms to add data, we
could create a policy and process to accept imports from SEO firms. The
other web map sites like Google, Bing, Apple etc. all have a process for
bulk loading data. (And none are the same.) We could do something similar.
A policy and specialized import guidelines would need to be created.

Creating a bulk loading policy doesn't mean we don't follow Jason's
recommendation for those that don't follow our policy.

One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work is
likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me suggest
these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the changeset
comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if she could help
us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to hear from her.
Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a part of the
community, just use us for their gains.

Frederik suggested we contact the user. I've sent numerous message and have
not only not had any response, but have yet to see any change in their
behavior. Frankly it's a waste of my time anymore to attempt to contact
them.

As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it spam=*)
it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. After which,
it's no longer useful and can be deleted.

Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing a
great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be good
community members.

Best,
Clifford



On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:21 PM, Ian Dees  wrote:

> 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 

Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Jason Remillard]

Hi Frederik


> * Should we have some MapRoulette task or OSMCha automatism or OSMI view
> to detect potential advertising?
>
>
>
Detecting these change sets should be quite straightforward. Here is a
Keras sample that could be easily modified to process change sets. The
model in this example is tiny and could easily be run over all of the
change sets every day with a normal laptop, with no GPU.

https://github.com/keras-team/keras/blob/master/examples/pretrained_word_embeddings.py

The machine learning people are always hungry for more curated datasets.

You have done the hard work already by curating a list of spamy changesets.
Make a central place where we could keep a list of changesets that are
spam, so that if people are interested in writing a changeset spam
detector, the time consuming part is done already.

A github repository with a two CSV file or json file that has the changeset
id, and classification. For now (spam, good), and a python script to
download the changeset dumps and lookup the age/changeset count of the user
into a local directory would be enough.

12455662,spam
12555662,spam
1245155,good

them a

download.py file, downloads and writes out data/spam/,xml and
data/good/.xml

etc

After we have a bot(s) screening all of the change sets for spam, then many
things are possible.

Jason
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 02.03.2018 01:17, Mike N wrote:
> 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.

Yes, the locksmith advertising was one step up again - this wasn't even
"unwanted advertising for a legitimate business" but "unwanted
advertising for a scam". One mapper had verified one of the "local
locksmith" locations in person and found it to be bogus, then called the
telephone number given and was connected to (he said) an "outsourced
answering serivice".

The list I posted does contain a number of businesses that sound a bit
shady - if not outright scams, then at least preying on those in
difficult situations. Loan sharks, lawyers with dubious offers, people
who claim to buy homes for cash and the like. Sometimes it's hard to
tell from the outside.

Bye
Frederik

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

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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 02.03.2018 00:21, Ian Dees wrote:
> I disagree that this is a "fight". Have we attempted to reach out to the
> people running this operation? 

I've come across a lot of edits where mappers had written changeset
comments against one of these one-off accounts, and were met with
silence. It's not normally something the individual mapper would
escalate - they write a comment and then forget about it, or simply fix
it themselves after a while.

I have also (sorry for the "lurkers support me in email" argument)
received positive feedback from mappers about my deleting of
advertising; twice, a mapper wrote to me along the lines of: "I've been
annoyed by this for a while but I didn't dare remove it".

> Have we asked the Operations team to
> correlate IP address for the accounts that are created and used once?

I have on occasion done that with my DWG hat on (when there was a
particular flood of such edits) and it was usually possible to identify
an IP address or email domain which was then blocked. However this is
usually doesn't help for long.

I don't think we're dealing with one single opponent here, I think
there's an industry out there, and even if you successfully stop one
firm from harming OSM, there'll be the next one just around the corner.
If you get one to play by the rules, there will be the next one sensing
a business advantage by ignoring the rules. (Or "being disruptive" in
modern speak.)

> 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.

I don't know. It has never worked when I tried but I might not have
tried hard enough. I think their (and their clients') interests differ
too strongly from ours. Their goal is certainly not making the best map
(or the best geodatabase).

> Also, your characterization of US mappers being more lax about this is a
> little insulting. 

The US mappers are not more lax, but there simply are less of them, and
they are concerned with more important things than watching their home
turf for an unwanted item. Combine this with a more intensive spam
activity in the US than elsewhere (some spammers operate world wide but
many seem concentrated on the US even if they hail from non-US IPs) and
you get the current over-abundance of spam in the US. It's not your
fault, and I'm not pointing a finger - I'm asking for help.

There's certainly things that can be done policy-wise, establishing
rules that can then be communicated to those willing to play by them;
the upcoming directed editing policy will be helpful in outlining
acceptable behaviour for groups who wish to contribute business
information. But that's a different activity; the advertising that we
currently have in OSM must be weeded out no matter what.

Bye
Frederik

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

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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