What exactly is the suggestion you're making? That we should ignore Google's terms of use and use Streetview as a source for mapping?

Actually all the evidence is that a lot of it is human driven, not bots.

Only a tiny proportion of the spam ever appears anyway - most of it is stopped dead by our anti-spam systems without ever being seen.

The procedure is set out in the wiki:

osm.wiki/License_violations

In this case it would probably be very hard to pursue the first step of trying to contact Google directly as it would be very hard to reach anybody with any power.

I have drawn your diary post to the attention of appropriate people anyway.

Or carry on using Potlatch 1 which is still available as an option.

To explain to anybody reading this who may be wondering what on earth you are on about, this is the message you get when using the "Export" tab to try and export a map from the mapnik layer.

It's not broken as such, but those exports run on the main tile server and it's main job is rendering and serving tiles for the map so when it is busy (as it generally is during the day) it will refuse to serve expensive export requests in order to be able to keep up with rendering and serving tiles.

It's not just a question of money though - the system administrators are all volunteers and only have a limited amount of time to spend on running everything.

Setting up and running extra tileservers has costs beyond simply financial costs.

You use the same login as on this site - note that it is case sensitive and you will need to have cookies enabled.

We have looked at it before, but we couldn't work out how it was supposed to operator for anything beyond a personal site.

You have essentially identified the problem when you say that you have to spend some money each month in order to be able to receive - how does a group project like OSM decide how to spend the money and then actually do it?

OpenStreetMap is not a person that is sitting there browsing the web and clicking a button when they encounter a site they like!

Well that's two bugs I'll be careful never to fix then! Way to go with the attitude problem.

You don't.

Ah I see, it becomes non-primary where the M2 exists to take it's place.

Is the A2 really not a primary A road (ie highway=trunk in OSM terminology) at that point?

It sounds like a caching bug - I'll take a look...

If he has previously contacted you then he should be listed in your inbox?

I think you'll find that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_way_in_England_and_Wales will explain all. Note that RUPP no longer exists and all RUPPs which were not otherwise reclassified are now Restricted Byways.

Currently deletion is only available to administrators, but we probably should allow people to delete their own posts as well.

It also isn't really deletion - it just hides the post so it isn't shown.

I've hidden your duplicates now anyway.

OSM long since turned into "bots gone wild" I'm afraid, and it's a complete nightmare.

We don't use UK standards really - the names are influenced by UK names because that's where we started out but each country tends to develop it's own mapping from local road types to the different highway types.

Think of the various highway values simply as opaque tokens with a particular hierarchical order rather than trying to interpret the words directly and it will make more sense.

@JohnSmith: That's very unlikely. If you don't what's going on please don't guess - it just misleads people.

@OJW: The problem is almost certainly a caching bug - the diary pages are cached and the language is supposed to be included in the cache key but it sounds like that might not always be working. In fact thinking about it I'm pretty sure I know exactly what the bug is...

Um... So apparently you can access the account you just told me you didn't know how to access. Now why don't you send me a message like I asked and I'll do what you want without to resort to bothering everybody with this.