On 26/04/2008 23:36, David Earl wrote: > This user has removed or overlaid quite a few roads around > Trumpington, Cambridge, and replaced several streets with cycleways, run > a tertiary road along the river and across a farm track, and generally > made a complete mess of my careful mapping in that area.
The perpetrator has replied, slightly to my surprise. As I had thought, she had no idea that she was changing the live database and she apologises profusely. But this raises once again the ease with which people who don't know what they are doing can wreck things unintentionally. None of the changes I've had to undo in my area seem to have been wanton vandalism: all three incidents have been people playing, and two of them have been after the "play" mode was introduced in Potlatch. We won't stop determined vandals, but we can try to make it harder to make mistakes like this. I've noticed that the "start, play,..." buttons often appear then disappear shortly after in IE without me pressing them (I can't speak for Firefox, I don't use it often enough to tell). I wonder if this is part of the problem - that people may never see the 'play' mode button? Even so, I'd like to suggest we make this rather harder to mess up: what about we put a flag into the user data that says "first timer" that is on to start with and can be changed by that user via the API; and that Potlatch and maybe JOSM put up a warning screen on first attempt at editing which says "you are about to change the OpenStreetMap live map data. Are you sure you are read to do this? If you haven't done this before, please try out editing first in 'play' mode when changes aren't saved" and then three buttons, to proceed, cancel or go into play mode; and on proceed, clear the flag. If nothing else, Richard, can the apparent bug with the mode buttons be fixed and the text make it clearer that live data is being changed when you press start? David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
