[osmsucks]

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.)

[ygra]

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.

[osmsucks]

> 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?

[ygra]

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.