Hot on the heels of last month’s major style updates, we’ve deployed an upgrade of the main OpenHistoricalMap website and server API to match OpenStreetMap’s website and API as of mid-November. This brings in a couple major changes that may impact your workflow.
Basic authentication bites the dust
While editing OHM in JOSM, you may see a cryptic error message such as:
Authentication at the OSM server with the username ‘…’ failed. Please check the username and the password in the JOSM preferences.
If so, you may need to reconfigure your server settings before you can download or upload again. The process should take less than a minute.
Until recently, the only way for JOSM to read and write to the OHM database was by configuring JOSM to send raw user name and password to the server API via HTTP basic authentication. We added support for the more modern OAuth 2.0 protocol last year, and now we’ve disabled basic authentication. To keep everyone’s accounts secure, the server only allows you to authenticate via OAuth. OSM made the same change last year, so if you contribute to both sites, this should make switching back and forth a little easier for you.
If you edit using iD or Go Map!!, you don’t need to do anything; these editors already connect exclusively via OAuth 2.0.
The dawning of the age of dark mode
Do you prefer to map the old-fashioned way – in pitch darkness, holding a flickering candle steady to illuminate a georectified manuscript while you scratch in a building footprint on vellum blueprint paper? If so, you’ll notice that the site now automatically adapts to your operating system’s dark mode setting. For now, the theme doesn’t quite extend to the interactive slippy maps on our homepage, but we’d like to hear from those who’ve been using the dark theme on openstreetmap.org about what works or doesn’t work.
But I want it now
Last month, I mentioned that we’ve been overhauling the pipeline and server setup for rendering map tiles. We may have beat OSM to minutely vector tile generation by a number of years, but we’re still fine-tuning the process to account for some of the large-scale edits that have been taking place lately. To provide you with a little more certainty and calm your nerves, we’ve started to document the expected replication schedule on the wiki.
Many thanks to @erictheise for burning the midnight oil reconciling the upstream codebase with ours, and to @Rub21 for continuing to extinguish fires as they appear. You can help too! If you speak a language other than English, please consider translating the website at Translatewiki.net or proofreading existing translations there. That’ll help make future upgrades a little less painful.