That would be an interesting experiment to conduct. Let me know if that turns up any results. If you find one and modify it, my algorithm won’t tag it, so it will remain undeleted and you continue your experiment.

Doing minute diffs is on the table, but hasn’t been tackled yet. I’m not worried about it being validated hourly by their managers, I’m more worried about it being submitted to search engine crawlers and immediately being indexed. My understanding is that they will crawl on a semi-regular basis though, so even if deleted 24 hours later, I think there is still impact on the search ranking contribution that being on OSM would have.

I’m officially done responding to @Rovastar and @alexkemp. I have nothing more to say to either of them. I suggest others follow my lead (at least on this topic).

@Mateusz Konieczny: DWG is aware of some of my detection methods, but I have made a few enhancements since then. I shouldn’t have said that I wanted to keep it “secret” exactly. More appropriately I don’t want to widely announce it and make it easier for an SEO to evade detection while still contributing junk.

@alexkemp: not sure why you’re down in the weeds arguing about “spoofing IP addresses”. Yes, I understand how IP works. I didn’t feel it was necessary for a networking class explaining the inner workings. The point is, the company directing these changes is purposefully evading detection/blocking by using a disjoint set of IP addresses that can’t be blocked, just as their user accounts can’t be blocked. Maybe it’s VPN, Tor, open proxies, EC2 instances and the like, or Mechanical Turk. I don’t have access to that data. But that’s not the point.

I bet [PBR’s] costume has a skull & crossbones on it. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

@woodpeck: I’ve made a last, best effort, attempt to contact an engineering manager at the SEO company though a mutual LinkedIn connection. I know that he read the message because he checked out my LinkedIn profile on Monday morning. I haven’t heard back from him and will attempt to phone him this coming Monday.

I doubt at this point there is anything that can be said to convince you. You are looking at individual records and refuse to step back and see the bigger picture of thousands of edits that are dumped on us to chase around and fix. It isn’t just that a single record has an abbreviation and is therefore is deleted. It is the SEO company has been asked over and over and over again to improve their behavior and they refuse to listen and adapt or even reply and tell us why they won’t change. That is the behavior that is trying to be corrected, not the fact that you look at records individually and say they each have valid, if slightly wrong, data. If the local community feels as strongly as you do, or if the DWG changes their stance, I’ll back off. Until then, please respect that this is something the locals agree with.

@Rovastar I think it does matter whether you are in the US or not. Many people in the “local” community of mappers (those in the US) are aware of the scale of this one particular company and have desired something be done about it for a long time now. There is a strong precedence of local community guidelines and standards having a heavier impact on decisions. I’m not ignoring your input, it is appreciated, but I think the locals are far more familiar with what is going on and how it affects us.

I’m not sure how you see this as a “troll” and I’m certainly not “boasting” about it here, but instead trying to explain what is going on so that others can understand the background/history and get a better picture of the actions that are being taken.

@Rovastar: I am not a mapper of only 6 days, of course. I’m doing this work under a separate account for two purposes: first to keep my main account uncluttered with this work, and second to isolate myself from a potentially vindictive company that has demonstrated they don’t play by the rules, and one that has ties to in all likelihood, Russia. I have been mapping for over 2 years now and have thousands of edits and have “seen” a large part of this country and have a reasonable idea of what is acceptable and what isn’t. I’m sorry that you think of me as just a troll instead of someone that is trying to make OSM a better and more trusted place.

If you somehow convince DWG that my work here is vandalism, of course I’ll do the right thing and revert my changes. That isn’t something that you’d have to be bothered with. I’m a “good citizen” of our community and respect discussions and consensus decisions. I find it odd that you’re fighting against someone trying to do good in favor of someone clearly trying to make a buck off of OSM.

@alexkemp: Thanks for the perspective. Maybe some day OSM will develop the tools to allow better banning of “bad actors” and this problem will reduced to a trickle. There was a time that I thought we’d never see the end of email spam, but that problem is essentially solved today. And it looks like your battle with forum spam has reached a tipping point in your favor.

@Rovastar: I hear what you’re saying. And yes, they do seem like petty reasons if you were to look at just a single contribution. But step back and look at the bigger picture and you see a pattern of wanton abuse. Of course I don’t go around deleting all data from someone that is new that misuses “Rd”, or someone that accidentally does so. But a company that adds thousands of nodes, refuses to follow up on comments, actively avoids detection and communication is a different thing.

I wouldn’t mind if you actively went through my edits and looked for anything that is wrong. I’d hope you’d have the decency of notifying me first and give me a chance to respond and I’d either discuss it with you calmly if I disagreed or I’d fix it and thank you for pointed out my mistake. That isn’t what is happening here. As I said, many, many attempts have been made to communicate and they’ve refused, even if to disagree and explain why they are doing what they’re doing.

You are more than welcome to bring the DWG into this if you think it is vandalism. I’ve already discussed the situation with them though and they are aware of the issue and support what I’m doing. I also welcome you to bring this to various forums and broaden the discussion.

@Wynndale: I should have put FAQ #5 at the top. The first rule of SEO detection is we do not talk about SEO detection! ;-) But yes, you’re right on the money with your guess. They come from UTC+0300 assuming a 9-5 work day. The headquarters are in SoCal, but my guess is they farm out editing to Russia.