I’ve been loving CityStrides for the last few years. I’m almost at 100% for my city. However, I found at least one node that cannot be “grabbed” - it’s on the opposite side of a security gate in an industrial site, how can I report a node that should be removed?
All the street data comes from OpenStreetMap.
If something is incorrect in CityStrides, it should be edited in https://www.openstreetmap.org
There’s some helpful info in the wiki category (admittedly not much, though): Wiki - The CityStrides Community
There are also a lot of helpful people if you have questions (or want to ask someone to make the edits for you). You’ll just need to share detailed specifics - city name, street name at least … ideally, links to either CityStrides and/or OSM pages for the street(s) in question.
I’m happy to edit the map for you, just upload a screenshot or a link or whatever.
Hi, Mitch!
Maybe you can help with this street: Toorme - CityStrides
The last two nodes are behind closed gates now. I’m adding a screenshot from my LifeMap so you can see which part was possible to access. Do you need more information to edit the map?
Edits like these are done in the source of the data in CS. That is openstreetmaps. I edited this street there. The gate was already in place, i made the street part behind the gate private. Should be good when the city will update next time and this changed data is uploaded to CS.
Thank you very much!
It would be awesome if we could flag stuff like this in city strides. I’ve cleaned up a few in OSM, but then at least one of those has been “fixed” by another OSM editor at a later time and reappeared in CS. Being able to flag them in CS would make for a better experience than just marking lots of streets manually complete.
That’s not sustainable as a one-person project … I can barely keep up with one source of data - I can’t imagine the pain of managing two.
Adding a way for users to flag a street or node shouldn’t add much work. There’s site users that have volunteered to help with OSM updates. Seems like a win-win to me, no data for you to manage there.
Things like that seem like little/no effort… There’s always more detail than is visible on the surface ![]()
I had a flagging system in the deep past & it produced more data than I could keep up with.
I think there’s a post in Ideas about this, if you’d like to vote and/or add your notes there. I’d be open to at least thinking through it all again
also don’t want to spend time on things that aren’t going to materially improve CityStrides … like, if it works cool, but I’m not hopeful based on past experience.
An idea. I see there are people in CityStrides community who have knowledge and skills to edit OpenStreetMap (OSM) and who also have very kindly helped others by fixing unreachable nodes and unwalkable streets in OSM for them when asked.
Maybe there could be a pinned topic under Support in this forum similar to “Reply here if you have missing activities” but named “Reply here if street or nodes need to be fixed” or something? But it wouldn’t be for James to deal with but for voluntary community members with OSM skills if they happen to have time and energy to edit OpenStreetMap. It would need similar exact instruction what kind of information/links/images to provide if one wants to ask a street to be edited. And similarly replies in that topic would be deleted after one month but without a promise that every request will be dealt with.
As I’m not the one with OSM skills the idea needs feedback from people who actually have the skills and have edited OSM for others before.
The issue with your idea is that reading is hard and time consuming; if one is going to learn exactly how to post node problems to CityStrides, in the correct forum, with the correct formatting, you’d be just as likely to do make the fix in ~CityStrides~ OpenStreetMap yourself. It’s hardly more complicated. So I honestly think basically asking in the support channel on a case-by-case basis is the best solution. I don’t see what the downside is, other than some extra posts that maybe James could just delete once they are solved?
Flagging a street is a start, but probably isn’t enough unless the satellite imagery is nearly perfect. You really need local knowledge. For example, I have a gated street here that could be marked private, but I am pretty sure it’s wide open on the other side. And sometimes the gate isn’t visible either. Or the other day, ONE of the nodes that was on the private side did get “purple”, so would you flag that node? Or would you have to flag every single private node?
Quite sure you meant: “make the fix in OSM yourself”. I would certainly agree to that
Thank you so much @supermitch and @hans1 giving it a thought and commenting on the idea! Yeah, my only reasoning behind it was that then the requests for every street wouldn’t be a separate topic in the forum that crowds the forum and makes harder to find other, more important topics. But looks like it’s good enough as it is and I will go and look into how editing OSM actually works.
OSM may seem hard but it’s pretty straightforward and easy with the browser-based editor. Also gets a little addicting and fun…kinda like CityStrides itself.
That’s a valid issue … It can be quite difficult to find things in here & any kind of cleanup is a good thing.
That’s extra work for me
so the idea of a single catch-all post that auto-deletes after [some period of time] is alluring.
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Jon’s suggestion of pushing this work into the main site does make sense, but also adds extra work for me
… There would need to be a description field on the Flag record … People would need to be able to mark them as completed (at some point, it should be deleted) … We could forgo a verification step where someone else agrees that it’s completed, and instead rely on someone re-flagging it if it’s still wrong - but a problem there is that the issue could be fixed but the sync hasn’t happened yet … People would need to be able to mark them as ‘needs more info’ and at some point (2 or markings? some amount of time?) these would need to be removed as useless … People would need to be able to mark them as ‘stupid’ (obviously, choosing a better term
) for cases where people are just wrong in their idea that something needs to be corrected … If a street is updated from OSM while it has a flag, then the flag should be either removed or identified as possibly stale …
Those are just the edge cases I can think of with ~10 minutes of consideration, so comparing all that effort to “post your issue in the forum and maybe someone will help” sounds so much better to me
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I like a “flag for repair” feature* but I worry it gets abused. Like “oh there’s no clear sidewalk, should be marked pedestrian=no” or whatever. But maybe you could automatically create Forum posts for flags? Then they could be closed on a case-by-case basis?
Agree, OSM editing after a big hike or run is literally half of the fun for me, haha. I especially love adding missing nodes, so that my percentage goes up while everyone else’s go down
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Editing OSM is rather straight forward once you learn the basics. I only play with the basic edits and keep away from the things I believe I should not touch.
As the old proverb says: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”
