Feature request: warning for edits in Ukraine

[casperkersten1@…]

In a discussion on the forum, linked below, it was suggested to warn users about the guideline against editing in Ukraine when they are about to create a changeset in the country. Would it be possible to do this?

Discussion: ​https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/mapping-activities-in-active-war-zones-in-ukraine/7221
Relevant guideline: ​https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93Ukrainian_war

[taylor.smock]

Technically, it would be possible.

Will we? Probably not. JOSM can be used by other organizations for mapping on non-OSM servers, like OpenHistoricalMap, OpenGeoFiction, etc. This means that we cannot hard code a special case, since it could affect non-OSM use cases.

Without some way to query the OSM API for prohibited areas, we are not going to make any changes.

[casperkersten1@…]

Thank you for the explanation. I understand that it would be undesirable to affect non-OSM use cases of JOSM with this special case.

Out of curiosity, what makes it difficult to query the OSM API for specific areas?

[taylor.smock]

1) The fact that an Ukraine relation id might not be stable, and even if it wasn't, the same id may exist on a different server for a different relation (with possibly the same tags for everything but name).
2) I would expect that the capabilities endpoint would have blacklisted areas, like it currently has blacklisted imagery urls (see ​https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/capabilities ). Note: it could be a different api endpoint, but I don't know of any current implementation.