Operations/Minutes/2025-06-12

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 12 June 2025, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Absent

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

New action items from this meeting

  • Tom to look into the plausibility of OSM.org postgres database update: Tom will do a dry-run on a disconnected promoted slave to test the upgrade. Secondary will need to be re-synced after the upgrade. Need to confirm the downstream effect on (planet-dump-ng). [Topic: OSM.org postgres database]
  • OPS to plan a maintenance window for the OSM.org postgres database update. [Topic: OSM.org postgres database update]
  • Grant to reply to Héctor (board) and i) ask whether it is a board request, ii) suggest leaving the technical implementation to the OWG, and iii) asking the board for guidance on how to modify the policy to cover this case.. [Topic:Board question about adding a Wikimedia Italia fundraising banner on osm.org]

OSM.org Postgres database update

Goal: switch pg_dump to zstd for improved performance.

Status:

  • We are currently on Postgres 15.
  • database dump used gztd compression, which is slow and slows the speed that the sump runs at.

Postgres 16: has z-standard compression, and the benchmarks seem significantly faster.

Required time estimate: Probably 1 hour.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • We don't need to upgrade to version 16 first, as last time we went from version 9.5 to version 15. "pg_upgrade supports upgrades from 9.2.X and later to the current major release of PostgreSQL, including snapshot and beta releases" (Source)
  • Last upgrade: took one of the slaves promoted to be a master, test, and then resync from master.

Action items

  • Tom to look into the plausibility of upgrade: Tom will do a dry-run on a disconnected promoted slave to test the upgrade. Secondary will need to be re-synced after the upgrade. Need to confirm the downstream effect on (planet-dump-ng).
  • OPS to plan a maintenance window.

Board question about adding a Wikimedia Italia fundraising banner on osm.org

The banner's target audience is Italian taxpayers viewing osm.org. Their donation would be a tax write off.

Issues

  • It violates the current banner policy, which would need to be changed to allow such a banner.
  • Currently, there is no code to support displaying a regional banner.
  • Could exacerbate tensions with Ad-blocker projects.

Potential options

  • Targeing based on a browser header. There is a proprietary Cloudflare request header for countries that gets forwarded to us, but only while using Cloudflare.
  • targeting based on IP.
    • For the specific banner, IP address would be preferable.
  • Targeting based on the region of the world being looked at.

On IP targeting implementation
We can use the MaxMind GeoIP database on server look-up. Currently, we use MaxMind during the sign-up process to determine whether to display the terms in English, French, or Italian. We have a function called "IP to country" that returns a country code. We would attach a list of countries to the banner in the YAML file. The server would then scan this YAML file and display the banner to users from the matching countries.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • It was unclear whether the email from Héctor was an official board request.
    • Dorothea mentioned that the topic was discussed by the board during the board chat, a few hours ago.
  • Nobody has volunteered to implement a technical implementation yet.
  • This would fall under Microcosm.
  • Running the fundraising for a Local Chapter might be followed by many other similar requests.

Action item: Grant to reply to Héctor (board) and i) ask whether it is a board request, ii) suggest leaving the technical implementation to the OWG, and iii) asking the board for guidance on how to modify the policy to cover this case.

Wiki OSM.org authentication

Proposed by Minh.

osm.org and wiki authentication are currently not linked. mmd had a suggested mechanism for allowing the OSM website to provide authentication to other sites. OHM has just deployed logging authentication through OSM, based on mmd's proposal.

Issues:

  • Legacy issue with mismatched user-names.

On potential integration

  • We could implement this, but it may require some users to manually connect their accounts beforehand.
  • It would be preferable to not connect the accounts using the email address or the OSM username, as usernames can change. Instead, we should use OpenID Connect or an OAuth 2 token that relies on the numeric user ID.
  • Discourse (on community.osm.org) can grant the OSM wiki special permission to access the users' email addresses. For new OSM wiki users, we can automatically populate the email address field during their sign-up process. This requires a special flag that Tom and Grant can set.
  • OSM wiki: We don't need to force users to have the same username on the OSM wiki and osm.org. Historically, many users have had different usernames on the wiki compared to their usernames on osm.org.

Work which would be needed

  • Investigating and handling all edge cases, as OAuth may not be fully functional from the start.
  • Providing long-term support for an additional MediaWiki plug-in to handle the authentication.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • MediaWiki: Administrators cannot easily determine if a user has an email address or search by email addresses through the web interface. This information can only be accessed by directly querying the database.
    • OSM wiki requires an email address to sign-up.
  • OSMF MediaWiki instance: Grant reviewed the logs and found them filled with PHP errors. MediaWiki is reporting issues with the theme using deprecated features.
  • Minh will talk with Yuri regarding the wikibase hack to normalise page titles, as it is blocking a couple of tickets.

Wiki multibyte db conversion testing?

Tom completed the multi-byte conversion.

  • Minh put a call on the forum a couple of weeks ago for people to take a look.

Looking good, but there is a case insensitive / case sensitive issue with Interwiki links and potentially categories.

Issue

Tom ran the "populate into wiki" maintenance script, as part of a fix on the wiki. However, this script loaded many elements that are used by Wikipedia but were not originally present in our setup. Tom then took a new copy of the table from the live server and loaded it onto the test server. The current issue is that we have switched from UTF-8 with a case-insensitive collation to binary without collation. Hence, interwiki links that use a lowercase "w" no longer work because the interwiki table uses an uppercase "W". This change might have affected more than just interwiki links.

  • There is a global configuration option available during MediaWiki installation that determines whether it uses UTF-8 or binary when creating tables.
  • Wikipedia prefers binary and that is now the default setting when installing MediaWiki. The newer OSMF MediaWiki instances (e.g. the DWG one) use binary because they have been recently installed.
  • Tom tried to understand the schema by looking at some of the other wikis that are running in binary mode.

Options

  • Take a MediaWiki dump, modify the char sets / schemas and then reload - might be a better option.
  • Do a dummy install, and dump that schema and then mix the table with the data load from the other one.

Page about interwiki links: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Interwiki

Other links shared:

Tom and Minh still investigating. Ticket will be updated.

Action items reviewed at the beginning of the meeting

  • 2025-05-29 Grant to pass the privacy question to the LWG about publishing a .csv file of user descriptions for suspended or deleted accounts. [Topic: Spam] Done
  • 2025-05-01 Grant to follow-up with Australian hosting again. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues]
  • 2025-05-01 Grant to see if other University offers are still available and what hardware would be required. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues
  • 2025-03-20 Grant to negotiate with HE.net if we can get better cost from them as a fallback link (which he had proposed), to allow budget spend elsewhere. [Topic: HE.net]
  • 2025-03-20 Grant to run an SQL query to identify more email providers used by spammers. [Topic: Spam]
  • 2025-03-06 Grant to present a draft budget at the next meeting.
  • 2024-09-19 Grant to create an IP blocklist script. [Topic: Cloudflare keep enabled Reportage] - Discussion during 2024-07-25 OPS to make a reasonable evaluation whether to go with Cloudflare, Fastly or none.

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

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