OpenStreetMap
If you’re not aware, a massive number of accounts have started removing name:ru tags from objects worldwide. Over 4,600 accounts have already been blocked as of the time of writing. I want to bring this situation to the attention of the OSM community that might not use the community forum/discord/etc. and doesn’t know what’s going on.
I don’t really know what to say about this situation or a solution, but it hasn’t been mentioned on-site yet. I hope OSM finds some way to deal with mass-account vandals because mass blocks + detection don’t seem like a sustainable solution, especially with changeset comment abuse, notes abuse, private messages abuse, etc. - the fact that this could happen in the first place is problematic.
(from OSM Discord)
(from OSM Discord)
We are lucky this person is “only” removing Russian names, not something more critical
-snoozingnewt
Discussion
Comment from ManuelB701 on 22 August 2023 at 06:05
Over 4000?! Damn, I knew that the vandal(s) would simply open up a new account when a different one gets banned (alongside spreading the edits out I assume) but this many is still a lot of dedication.
Comment from NeruMarcus on 22 August 2023 at 14:06
I work for a Russian municipal organization that monitors public transport in one of the regions where there have been acts of vandalism with the names of points on the map. The software for tracking maps, in addition to 2GIS, Yandex… uses OpenStreetMap, and about 12 hours ago we began to receive comments that strange things with names began to happen on their maps. Of course, I understand everything, all the same with what is happening in the world, but I don’t understand the point of wasting resources on this.
Comment from dressed-pleasekin on 25 August 2023 at 18:56
While the disruption effect on downstream projects like one that NeruMarcus described is likely to be the goal of the vandals, amount of collateral damage for the project is quite sad to see (and for sure data loss and object history messing up pale in comparison to the comment abuse). I would like to thank those who are working hard on detecting and reverting this - on that scale it really begs to question if problem is solveable without changing the process how accounts and edits are made. It clearly cannot be happening on that scale without automation, so there must be a way to rate-limit that.