Dear user swimdb,

you have a habit of offering your personal opinion (or referring to the opinion of others) about objects that you add to OpenStreetMap. Your changeset comments read “Important to map authoritarian cults and their environs”, “interesting plots are hatched here at this venue, should be in the map”, “The FBI interviewed a radicalized seditionist here, so it should be represented in the map. Cool!”, “Lots of smaller features added to this hotbed of sexual assault” and so on. You have been asked to stop this a month ago, but ignored that request.

You have a right to your opinion, but you have no right that our servers publish your opinion. Also please understand that OSM is published in Great Britain which has much more stringent laws about the protection of the privacy of individuals.

To make it short, we’re not interested in you political statements. “This was in the news therefore I’m adding it” is the most that is acceptable. You can link to articles but only if they support the facts you are adding - for example, if you add a traffic signal you can link to a newspaper article about a new traffic signal being set up. What you cannot to, is add a building and link to a news article that says whom the FBI has arrested there and why.

If you would like to air your feelings, you are free to create your personal “umap” (umap.openstreetmap.fr) and mark all the places where evil raises its ugly head.

This message blocks your account until you have read it. After that you can continue normally. However if you continue to post opinionated changeset comments we will block your account for longer.

And please don’t try to test the limits by writing ambiguous comments. Some of us at DWG have kids. We know how this works.

Thank you
Frederik Ramm
OSMF Data Working Group
Ticket#2021013110000186