Noteisdue
Noteisdue is a bot and corresponding OSM account
- notification
- reopen
- automatic close
This is done by adding "commands" to the first row of your note comment.
Commands supported
The command needs to be in the first line of your comment on a note. All other lines are ignored so you add a normal comment and add a command in the first line.
Currently these commands are supported:
autoclose: tomorrow
Will comment the note that a user requested autoclose, and then close the note when the timespec has been reached.
reopen: 6 month
Closes the note with the comment that a user requested a reopen, and reopens the note once the timespec is reached.
notify: 2 weeks
Comments on a note once the timespec is reached
Timespecs supported
The Noteisdue robot understands timespecs in the format Date::Manip understands.
- tomorrow
- next week
- 72 hours
- 12 weeks
- next year
- 5 month
- 2038-01-19
all work.
Operations and Code
The bot is run by OSM user user:flohoff and walks through all notes every 30 minutes.
Code is in a gitlab https://gl.zz.de/osm/noteisdue and mirrored to github https://github.com/flohoff/noteisdue
History
Origin of the Bots idea was a pretty heated discussion in the German Community in 2023 which spilled over to the English Forum about the intended usage for Notes.
A lot of mappers complained about the bad visibility of "new" notes once a lot of older "tracking notes" are still open, so they demand Notes only be used for short term, basically anonymous only, bug reporting. In my eyes this is just a lack of knowledge about available tooling. If you want real time notification about Notes and their updates use the RSS feeds. I do so by using rss2email to send notifications of new notes in my area to a mailinglist.
I see Notes as a temporary, geographically linked Mailinglist for people interested in that problem. So i create notes for long running construction sites and add public newspaper articles and the like pretty regular so people following a note are kept up to date what the state of the construction is.
My idea was to close the notes and reopen them automatically after time. This turned out to be sub-optimal and people tend to open new notes about construction as the note was not visible anymore. Still - the reopen feature is still there.