Forum:Announcements/The technical update blog
A hopefully frequently updated blog (target: monthly) on what's happening behind the scenes on the OpenGeofiction servers.
17 Jun 2026
Nightly server monitoring
A busy spell... As with many internet sites these days the maintenance required to keep on top of bots, crawlers and AI LLM massively distributed scrapers is relentless. Previously the approach was "mitigate, run, wait for the site to be hammered into the ground, re-mitigate". Now there's a proactive process behind the scenes. Nightly a script pulls the previous days logs from the four main impact servers (API, overpass, wiki, data). These are then analysed for patterns (IPs, ranges, queries, user agents), RewriteRules compared against documented rules, and structured report with recommendations created. That report is delivered automatically on the OGF Admin Channel Discord.
This is also giving visibility into the number of user's who are getting "false positive" impacted by the anti-bot rules.
Brothie, the admin bot
Brothie is OpenGefiction's own LLM powered bot. It's running on a Hermes Agent install, normally using a DeepSeek v4-flash model. Most of what it runs is actually plain old - non AI - Python scripts, but a nightly review does run using AI to pick up on trends and problems.
User patrol
The user patrol page now has automated assistance. Twice hourly new user edits are checked to ensure they are mapping in the right areas, with notifications sent out when required.
Revert queue
Bulk reverts used to be done manually using osm-revert-scripts on the util server. Brothie now monitors OpenGeofiction:Revert queue and processes the requested reverts - much more straightforward!
Link templates
Brothie is also monitoring all wiki page edits, replacing bare URL links with appropriate link templates. This may appear "a bit retentive", but it opens up future changes to the URLs used. That simplifies future changes and also opens up another possible way to mitigate scraping attacks.
Overpass
The Overpass server was refreshed, updating it to run on Debian 13. To effect this the backup overpass server was completely rebuilt and then switched in place of the primary one. So, no down time.
Moving toward main server refresh
Starting some small steps toward the long overdue refresh of both the main OpenGeofiction server (we call it the API server) and the version of openstreetmap-website & associated tools which run on it:
- Submitted a PR which makes the GPS traces functionality (which we do not use) optional
- Working on a script (git)bin/applyLocaleSubs.py which replaces all OSM-related terminology with OGF. An alternative would have been to change OSM's locale setup to use tvars for lots of the stuff, but I "read the room" on the likelihood of that being well received!
- Investigating creating files to populate iD with OGF, rather than OSM, relevant presets
Documentation for all this is being maintained on our OGF-private Forgejo git server.