Good reasons to avoid Potlatch

Hello everyone,

I’ve decided to translate my own post in the Brazilian forum. It was written in a moment of intense frustration, but I hope it is received as positive criticism and that it disseminates awareness of the issues. In fact, for a long time I’ve been in full favor of taking Potlatch off of the main website, since we now have iD.

Edit: as I’ve learned that there’s no intention to make Potlatch unavailable, I’d only like to say: it does not matter to me if it stays on, as long as the following issues are better addressed.

I’ve got some some feedback that there’s no intention to make Potlatch unavailable, so this makes these issues a bit more urgent to me. If anyone agrees, please help request better handling of these situations at Potlatch’s issue tracker.

Good summary and I agree with you about some of the issues with P2. Fortunately, Potlatch isn’t the default editor any longer so new users are not too likely to be presented with it. Yes, it would be great if these issues could be fixed and/or iD editor could be made available to those using Internet Explorer.

Personally, I use Potlatch2 simply because I find iD too restrictive and JOSM requires Java which I’ve eradicated from my household over 2 years ago. Although Potlatch requires Flash which carries its own security issues, they’re easier to contain than Java. Flash plugin can be restricted to the browser and by using a browser like Firefox and NoScript, Flash can be restricted to specific websites only, essentially sandboxing the plugin. I use HTML5 video for YouTube these days so Flash is only active on Openstreetmap.org

There are very little reasons to eradicate Java from one’s household. The Java browser plugin should be disabled, sure, but that has nothing to do with Java desktop software such as JOSM.

It’s just another piece of software that has a history of security vulnerabilities that needs to be kept up to date. The worst part is that when updated, it automatically re-enables the browser plugin (at least it used to when I had it last installed). The overwhelming consensus is that unless you need Java, it’s best to simply uninstall it. To me, Java is past its expiration date at the home PC level. Lastly, for too many reasons to discuss here, I just don’t like Java as a programming language.

I don’t have much love for Flash either and if not for Potlatch, I wouldn’t have it installed on my laptop (it’s not installed on my desktop). Unfortunately, the wife’s laptop can get by without Java just fine, but she needs Flash. Firefox and NoScript I trust to control things more than Oracle’s ability to keep their patches coming in a timely manner.

Anyway, this is getting off topic now; sorry for the derail.