The last time I submitted a few months worth of my travels at once after doing a hundred or so of these challenges/questions and got a bunch of notifications lambasting me for not updating the moment I did instead of later. Honestly didn't realise you had to manually submit, thought it just happened automatically.
Was a really rude intro to the community and reminded me a lot of SO or Wikipedia with its gatekeeping.
I've never submitted a single thing since then. If that's how you treat newcomers then I want nothing to do with you.
Of course uploading a few months of changes all at once is going to cause issues, naturally some will conflict with other changes that have been made in the meantime.
There is a setting that disables autoupload. Some people may want to minimise the number of edits made from their account, and some people may not want to leave a trace of locations they've visited together with exact timestamp they've been there.
As someone who belongs to the OSM community, I am sorry that you had this experience. Gatekeeping is an unfortunate byproduct of a crowdsourcing project, it seems.
I hope you reconsider and try again. Many of us are actually here to help.
I've seen some gatekeeping in the OSM community as well. In this specific case, this is also (in my opinion) due to bad tooling. Basically the easiest way to keep an eye on an area is to use a tool that shows changesets whose bounding box includes a certain area. So you could make a single tiny edit in both NY and LA, the bbox would ping a huge swath of the US. This happens all the time, actually. It's annoying, but the way I see it that means we need a better way to see changesets that actually affect a specific area.
> Honestly didn't realise you had to manually submit, thought it just happened automatically.
in my experience, you don't have to manually submit in streetcomplete, and it does happen automatically.
> a few months worth of my travels
Was this travels in your local neighbourhood, going home daily, or one trip to another country or in a very rural area? I'm asking if you had constant data connectivity, intermittent, once daily, or none during that time?
It sucks to have a bad first experience from a Gatekeeping
community. Of course, as newbs, we try to move slowly with small changes first to test the waters. That worked for me, sorry that it did not work for you. I also take the point that was raised about not editing based off months-old data.
Funny, I've had a similar experience, and stopped contributing because of it. My case was even more egregious as autosubmit _was_ enabled on StreetComplete, but unbeknownst to me at the time such submissions are batched, so if you edit local places that you're visiting (vacation) and places far away that you're intimately familiar with (home), it can still end up in one big changeset that spans an enormous geographical area... After that I had a couple of folks breathing down my neck and nitpicking every change -- and one of them tried to support their snark with http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/crybaby.html, which is possibly the stupidest writeup I've ever seen -- no, thank you, I can take my contributions elsewhere.
OpenStreetMap has strict demands on how contributors should structure their changes, but has no way to enforce them. The best it has is having someone review your changesets _after_ they've been already submitted, when it's too late as the "damage" is done. Start implementing a technical solution to problem, instead of disciplining the ones who are volunteering their time trying to curate your dataset for you.
(Also, if StreetComplete is a repeat offender, start a conversation with its devs instead of reprimanding users.)
The devs are unwilling to automatically split changesets spatially. The main reason is that the app is intended to be used on foot, maybe bike, mapping only a small area and doing all that on the ground where you actually are.
So mapping from images or memory runs afoul of that intention anyway.
Granted, that still doesn't solve the case that you may have no connectivity and are basically forced to upload a big batch later. It annoys me a bit as well.
On the other hand, despite how angry the changeset comments may read, this isn't a big deal. Globe-spanning changesets happen all the time and yes, they do annoy local users trying to keep a watch on what happens, but the history on the OSM site isn't really well-suited for that either. Also, with enough other changes, those large changesets also fall out of the history range fairly quickly, except in places where no one maps anyway.
> On the other hand, despite how angry the changeset comments may read, this isn't a big deal.
Then why be angry about it at all? It either is worth gatekeeping about our not, decide.
> Globe-spanning changesets happen all the time
I noticed! But this only makes it worse. That's precisely my point: the requirements are there but can't be enforced and then the matter is addressed with... hostility between contributors? Who's benefiting from this behavior, exactly?
I don't really know. There are guidelines and promoting those guidelines to new users can be beneficial. I do sometimes comment on changesets by other users where this happened with the use of normal editing tools (iD, JOSM) where some more care can really be taken (JOSM even warns about large changeset boundaries). But I try to phrase it as a friendly reminder, not so much a broken rule.
Some things like reverting vandalism or fixing large geometries like coastlines or motorways often make large edits necessary anyway. And often it just happens by accident. I have added some cleanup changes to the wrong changeset more than once and then got a changeset for a whole continent. The immediately visible history on the OSM site soon ceases to show that changeset and another will take its place, so personally I don't see much of a problem to get worked up about.
So my stance is basically: It happens, we can't really prevent it anyway (although I'd love a spatial auto-split in StreetComplete and JOSM – Every Door has it, I think), and as long as the norm is that people try to make smaller changesets, I guess we can live with that.
This is terrible. I have no experience with it myself, but if OSM wants community contributions, they need to make sure that people feel welcome to contribute. Lambasting people for getting something wrong is not helpful. Thanking them and advising them how to do it better next time would be much better.
> Thanking them and advising them how to do it better next time would be much better.
Thanking them and advising is the recommended way to handle this.
Unfortunately, as happens in all large crowdsourced areas, some don't adhere to the recommended ways and "do their own thing", often to the detriment of the project as a whole.
I am always amazed at the effort in UX that StreetComplete has taken. Which sadly is also a reason why rewriting it in something that runs on iOS is a major undertaking. And replacing all those beautifully-designed quest screens with simple key-value pair tables is obviously not a suitable replacement.
This is exactly what I have found! StreetComplete encourages me not only to take regular walks, but also to explore new areas local to me that I haven't previously visited (since, after a while, you need to move to a new area to find 'quests' that you haven't already completed).
I have discovered lots of places in my local area thanks to StreetComplete!
This thing is so much fun! I love wandering around a new area and filling in the details.
One thing I wish it had was the ability to add an entirely new building. I'm currently living in a town that is experiencing massive growth and I'll often see a structure that's still a vacant lot on osm, and I don't think you can add it with StreetComplete.
The easiest thing to do for such cases is to add a note, perhaps with a picture of the building if you're comfortable.
There must be folk who dedicate their time to searching the OSM database for unresolved notes, because whenever I leave a note on StreetComplete mentioning an inaccuracy (e.g: a path where there isn't actually one, a driveway marked incorrectly as a road, etc.) I get an email alert a few days later notifying me that the note has been resolved - often by someone who lives in an entirely different country (and who can use the information I provide in the note plus the satellite imagery to resolve the note).
Was a really rude intro to the community and reminded me a lot of SO or Wikipedia with its gatekeeping.
I've never submitted a single thing since then. If that's how you treat newcomers then I want nothing to do with you.