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] Pokémon Go no officially using OpenStreetMap

[Alan Richards]

As a Pokemon Go player myself, everything I'm hearing in the community this
time around has been a lot more positive, with people suggesting to update
their local neighborhoods with the correct information. I'm not seeing the
same level of fake lakes and parks. Now this may just be the groups that I
get my info from, but I'm hopeful this might bring in some good and useful
updates, and maybe some long-term mappers.

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Toby Murray  wrote:

> On the flip side, this seems to be driving a second wave of pokemon
> players coming to OSM and mapping parks over their homes, changing
> things to footways and such nonsense. It is also driving beneficial
> edits though. Hopefully the helpful users will stick around longer
> than the trolls. Just keep an eye out for random parks appearing on
> the map for a while.
>
> Toby
>
> On Sun, Dec 3, 2017 at 7:22 PM, Bill Ricker  wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 3, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Peter Dobratz  wrote:
> >> I'm not sure how many active OSM contributors also play Pokémon Go, but
> the
> >> game is now officially using OSM for the basemap that players see in the
> >> game (previously was using Google Maps data for the base map).  The
> in-game
> >> about screen has text in the bottom of the License section correctly
> >> attributing OSM.
> >
> >
> > Thank you for sharing this.
> >
> > I was guessing so, when my daughter said a couple of the walking paths
> > in our neighborhood had shown up in the game. ( I haven't added them
> > to GoogleMaps so was pretty sure what map it was :-).)
> >
> > Glad to hear it's properly attributed.
> >
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Re: [Talk-us] Bicycle infrastructure

[Alan Richards]

There's also a whole bunch of bike related tags here:
https://github.com/osmottawa/OSM-Bike-Ottawa-Tagging-Guide

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Spencer Gardner 
wrote:

> You'll probably want to include cycleway=buffered_lane as well. It's
> undocumented but used pretty frequently in some places. PeopleForBikes has
> published a list of OSM tags they use in their Bike Network Analysis tool
> (disclosure: I worked on this project). You can download the list here:
> https://s3.amazonaws.com/pfb-public-documents/OSM.Tags.xlsx
>
> You might also find some other useful resources via the methodology page:
> https://bna.peopleforbikes.org/#/methodology
>
> On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 1:38 PM, Mike N  wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure about the syntax, but there's
>>
>>   cycleway=shared_lane   (for sharrows)
>>
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