Map vandalism

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

Just a heads up.

Today I have deleted hundreds of unconfimed one-way segments created today by user AllSpark-LOL
around the Bedfordshire/Cambridgeshire area. These segments have just been created on large swathes of the map, no doubt I haven’t managed to get them all yet.

https://www.waze.com/user/editor/AllSpark-LOL

Any chance we can ban this user from editing?

2

Have deleted a couple that were within my editing area near Alconbury. Luckily relatively easy to spot, at least the ones I saw.
Doesn’t help that the editor is rubbish this morning…

3

The editor profile page is showing zero activity now, so assuming there’s no typo in the user name causing the wrong page to be served up then that would seem to be a remarkably fast response from HQ in reverting their edits…

4

The edits were only done this morning, I jumped on them pretty quick so don’t think the profile page has had a chance to update their handywork. It’s definately the correct profile page

5

Thanks for confirming it is the correct page.
When I’ve used my own page to keep track of an editing session, I’ve not seen any lag between my saving an edit and having it counted against my daily total (at least for the daily heatmap-like display at the bottom of the page).

So to see absolutely zero apparent edit activity from this user, even if their edits had only been made a few hours ago, seems unusual assuming the profile server doesn’t change how it behaves when looking at your own page Vs that of another editor, which I don’t think it does.

6

Can I please have any permalinks for this editor’s activity - even if the permalink is just for an area that’s already been cleaned up.

I would like to see some evidence myself before submitting the ban request.

Some more details about what you’ve removed would also be helpful. “Vandalism” is pretty strong term if they were just drawing loads of segments for points - even if they intersected with real segments, the turns would probably be disabled. Vandalism would only really apply to edits that cause damage to routing - like deleting existing segments, or adding non-existent routes.

7

I’ve had some time to investigate myself and find some of these segments.

  • All of the segments are one-way.
  • They are mostly fairly straight, but they have far more geometry nodes than you would expect from someone drawing segments in WME.
  • They don’t follow any road or rail line and they tend to be split with gaps where they would otherwise cross existing segments.
  • They are spread across a very large area
  • They all have an identical creation time of 05:06:09 this morning
  • This user still has no edits listed on their profile screen
    This looks, to me, like segments paved from the app. That would certainly explain why the user has no edits listed. It’s possible that the identical creation time is the time they were all uploaded. However, their positions make it clear that they weren’t paved by any user in any sort of vehicle. Not even a plane - some of the turns are far too sharp for that.

My conclusion is that these were generated by someone paving in the app and using some form of fake GPS. I haven’t found a single intersection with a “real” segment, so these segments should have no effect on routing.

Since they don’t appear to be created in WME, requesting a ban will be a waste of time. I don’t believe there’s any way that we can request a user be banned from paving in the app - indeed I’m not sure that’s even possible, other than by deleting an app account. In any case, this seems to have been a one-off incident.

I would suggest you delete any segments you find from this user - which is what I’m going to start on now - although the current WME problems are making it extremely difficult to find them all. :roll:

If anyone sees any more segments from this user, we can re-visit the problem.

8

Thanks Iain

Didn’t get a chance to reply last night as was working until midnight.

Do you think this might be some kind of issue with automated or scripted additions to the map? Unlikely I know but not impossible. Not sure why someone might want to do this other than to acquire points or cause damage. Seems odd that all the segments created were created in the same way at the same time…