Provide details on changes between OSM updates

It would be great if there was a way to see the details of the changes when a new OSM update is brought into the site. I’m envisaging something really simple such as

  • list of new streets that have been added as part of the update
  • list of streets that have been removed
  • list of streets that have been modified in a way that could change my completion status ( most likely just cases where number of nodes has changed but there may be other cases)

In this way I could easily identify what’s behind the changes in total streets for the city and my own totals of completed / incomplete.

Considering that hundreds of cities are updated every day, that would be a massive report to post every day.

Couldn’t OSM be queried for this? If it can, then coupled with this idea: Update history on a city's page

One could then just query OSM for the change set(s) between dates (I think).

I understand the sentiment and desire for something like this but like Fredrik I can also see how this would be difficult to implement. Besides the sheer amount of data being updated in OSM and eventually into CS each day, how to display it for end users could be tricky.

Would there be a massive page with all changes? Even with a filter/search that probably wouldn’t be a great user experience. Especially since that page would continue to grow each day.

Would there be some sort of notification to users? If this would be a notification on the CS site (similar to FB notifications), that would have to be built because there isn’t something like that currently. If notification went out by email, that could be a massive email for those in larger cities that see a lot of changes; especially since it could be ~6 months worth of updates (depends on how long between a city’s updates).

From there it would have to be decided on when and to whom to send a notification. Anecdotally I believe most striders are working on a single city as their main project. Some may dabble in multiple cities if their main one is complete or small. However most users probably have visited/run in many cities via vacation, travel for work, etc. I myself have ~60 cities progressed according to my CS profile and I don’t consider myself a world traveler. Many of those cities I will never visit again and I certainly wouldn’t want notifications about when they are updated. So there would also need to be some sort of ‘opt-in for X city’ notification built.

If @JamesChevalier could teach his cats how to code this all may be possible but I hear cats are not the best listeners.

1 Like

There have been a recent spat of scientific studies on cats which have upended the conclusion that cats are stupider than dogs. They’ve concluded that it’s really that cats are jerks, and not at all interested in demonstrating their intelligence. (For example: Cats May Recognize Their Own Names—but It Doesn’t Mean They Care | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine)

The problem for James isn’t that his cats are too stupid to code, just that they don’t want to.

1 Like

@fredrik.coulter I was envisaging something more at the city level than a large daily report. If say we have a city with 2000 streets in it. An update runs and now we have perhaps 1990 streets. What I was envisaging was simply some details that would help me to bridge between those 2 numbers. If the current list was stored then, after the update had completed, a simple compare could be done between the 2 lists to produce a short list of the, maybe, 5 new streets that have been added and the, in this case, 15 that have been removed. That would give a basic report. greater sophistication could be added by saving the current list of streets and their respective node course, doing the update and then making the compare. Now you would have the pluses and minuses as before but could also report on any streets that had seen a change in node count ( which would include the case where a new road has been added to the city in the latest update but has the same name as an existing one and hence would not appear in the new streets list). Doesn’t feel to me like a huge amount of additional data, particularly as the changes happen more regularly and hence the change sets are smaller. There would need to be some thought on a good way to present the information.

1 Like

@Marty - I’ve just posted some more thoughts on how I was seeing it work. It’s an interesting thought but I wasn’t envisaging notifications being sent, as you mention we don’t currently have any notifications flowing from the CS site and I’d not see this as compelling enough to warrant creating that infrastructure. I agree that there are cities I care about more than others and I am often on the CS site looking at those, checking results from recent activities, etc. Placing the information in a way that I could access it for the cities that I wanted to on the CS site would be as far as I’d envisaged taking it.

1 Like

Surely if this is needed then it’s an ask to OSM?

1 Like

@richwarne2003 - monitoring the OSM data would certainly provide some information and I’ll investigate some of the options on there. Changes in CityStrides are a combination though of OSM changes and changes in the query used to generate the list of streets, so entries can come and go based on changes here as well as changes in the OSM data. That’s why I was suggesting it as a feature inside CS. I do see however that there would be some advantages to monitoring changes in OSM - that would for example enable you to spot a new street had been added to the city and get it done so that when the CS data is regenerated it is added and you already have it complete.

1 Like

Good point.