Operations/Minutes/2025-03-06

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

OpenStreetMap Foundation, Operations Meeting - Draft minutes

These minutes do not go through a formal acceptance process.
This is not strictly an Operations Working Group (OWG) meeting.

Thursday 6 March 2025, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

New action items from this meeting

  • Tom to add HE IPs as backup after some chef work. [Topic: IP Switch]
  • Grant to present a draft budget at the next meeting. [Topic: 2025 OWG budget]
  • Grant to create statistics on countries and ISPs that the majority of spam accounts on osm.org are created from. [Topic: osm.org accounts: Spam accounts]

Reportage

Rapid editor

Related to 2025-01-23 action item: Grant to check whether Paul wants to pick up responding to Meta [Topic: Rapid editor]s

  • There is someone maintaining Rapid.
  • Meta is looking for some details. Their main issue seems to be the community consultation. The answers probably need to come from the board.
  • Mikel is happy to take the issue up, but wants Paul to have a look.
  • Grant to follow up.

Aarnet servers

Related to 2024-09-19 action item: Grant to confirm that the AArnet servers will be removed and to ask the Australian community whether there is interest in hosting/providing a render server in Australia or Asia/Pacific [2024-09-19 topic: AArnet Servers going away]

Dani Waltersdorfer (Board) is interested in being involved in the communications with them.

IP Switch

Switch other services to Equinix.

Action item

  • Tom to add HE IPs as backup after some chef work.

2025 OWG budget

The board has informally allocated to the OWG the same expense allowance as in the previous year.

Grant has been compiling a list of potential purchases in 2025 https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1181

  • stormfly-04 (Nominatim) needs upgrading.
  • Vector tiles: get a third server. Distributed may help latency. Pre-rendering helps.
  • DB storage, as secondary server CPUs are getting old.

Link shared: https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1181

Action item

  • Grant to present a draft budget at the next meeting.

Vector Tiles

Andy Allan uses a worker queue which does automatic item deduplication of items in the worker queue across runs.

There are various channels where Paul Norman can discuss technical aspects related to Vector Tiles, if he wishes so.

osm.org accounts: Claiming other users’ accounts with no edits

The board received a request from a new user who wanted an osm.org username which was already taken by someone ten years ago, with no OSM edits or diary entries.

  • This is not something that OPS do.
  • There is no official policy on deactivating old accounts.
  • The OPS team had received in the past emails from people who found accounts with a name they often use and are convinced they are theirs.

osm.org accounts: Accounts with unacceptable names

The OWG received an enquiry about unacceptable account names. There is no formal policy yet.

Wikipedia has a policy on usernames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy "Username must be truthful, appropriate, and not foster negative editing activities", however the question of who evaluates these criteria arises.

Additionally, the criterion "must represent you as an individual person", means that every OSM username that is a business name, would be invalid.

osm.org accounts: Spam accounts

  • Spam accounts on osm.org are probably created as parts of a SEO package listing, with backlinks.
  • Spammy notes are automatically cleaned by a script maintained by Frederik Rmm.

Preliminary information:

  • Vietnam: Creation of spam accounts advertising casinos.
  • Pakistan, Bangladesh: SEO-paid creation of spam accounts advertising small businesses.

Action item

  • Grant to create statistics on countries and ISPs that the majority of spam accounts on osm.org are created from.

community.osm.org spam

There were some complaints by community.osm.org moderators regarding the amount of spam messages. The moderators asked OPs to add block words. Spam messages on community.osm.org that get reported by a couple of people, get automatically hidden until a moderator reviews them and kills the account. There was some related discussion during the recent Karlsruhe hack weekend.

Suggestion: Have a username policy.
-Currently we don't have the necessary tools for enforcement.

Any other business

Karlsruhe hackweekend

There was a semi informal discussion during the Karlsruhe hackweekend, BGP was discussed.

HE.net AMS

Sending more mail over Equinix, over time. 50-50 now. Building up the reputation score on IPs before we move them. We had an unhealthy record and we didn't get an alert.

Open Ops Tickets

Review open, what needs policy and what needs someone to help with...

Next meeting

Action items reviewed at the beginning of the meeting

  • 2025-01-23 Grant to check about upgrading the release and dependencies on Ridley [Topic: Mediawiki Upgrade]
  • 2025-01-23 Grant to email proposal on upgrading OOB (currently Raspberry Pi) [Topic: Discussion on upgrading OOB (currently Raspberry Pi)]
  • 2025-01-23 Grant to check whether Paul wants to pick up responding to Meta [Topic: Rapid editor]
  • 2025-01-09 Grant to check whether the links dropped just before the restore. [Topic: AOB: Outage post-mortem]
  • 2024-11-14) Paul to add the cache control headers [Topic: budget]
  • 2024-10-31 Paul to contact OMT about their application to be added as a featured layer on www.osm.org. [Topic: OpenMapTiles application]
  • 2024-10-31 Paul to look where OMT pulls their fonts from and their style file. [Topic: OpenMapTiles application]
  • 2024-09-19 Grant to create a ticket for action item 2024-08-08 OPS to evaluate Fastly Security (DDOS) Protections we could use. [Topic: Cloudflare / Fastly]
  • 2024-09-19 Grant to create an IP blocklist script. [Topic: Cloudflare keep enabled?][2024-09-19 Reportage] - Discussion during 2024-07-25 OPS to make a reasonable evaluation whether to go with Cloudflare, Fastly or none.
  • 2024-09-19 Grant to confirm that the AArnet servers will be removed and to ask the Australian community whether there is interest in hosting/providing a render server in Australia or Asia/Pacific [2024-09-19 topic: AArnet Servers going away]
  • 2024-08-22 Guillaume to make a limited in scale experiment to assess impact and practicality. E.g. look if there are clients that say they support WEBP and don't. [Topic: Fastly image recoding]
  • 2024-08-22 Guillaume to keep OPS in the loop about what Fastly says. [Topic: Fastly image recoding] # 2024-10-17 No news
  • 2024-08-22 Grant to talk to Guillaume on setting up the testing about image recoding and shielding. [Topic: Fastly image recoding]
  • 2024-07-25 Grant to determine the Cloudflare API call to block IPs, in order to deal with scrappers [Topic: Cloudflare keep enabled?] 2024-08-08 update: Briefly discussed
  • 2024-06-27 OPS to do capacity planning for tile.openstreetmap.org [Topic: rhaegel usage?]

Action items that have been stricken-through are completed, removed, or have been moved to GitHub tickets.

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