Greeter bot

How about a greeter bot for newcommers? It’d send them a PM directing them to the IL Wiki and to these forums.

Sure, good idea. Someone who’s made an edit has shown interest, so it’d be appropriate to reach out to him.

We could also say “Your edit will be visible on the osm.org slippy map in a few minutes”.

How about making a public comment on his first edit (in Israel) rather than a PM?

Yes, comment is better.

From a technical point of view, how would one detect new users efficiently?

Someone whom the greeter bot never greeted before.

Current plan: periodically grab planet.osm diffs, feed them through the following unix pipeline

planet.osm diff | convertion step needed? | osmosis (keep Israel nodes only) | python script 

Python script: extracts userids from xml and for each userid, if not present in an sqlite database, send them a welcome message and save to the db. If present, update their last activity time.

To keep the DB from infinitely growing, anyone who’s last activity is more than 1.5 years ago is removed from the DB. This means if someone does not contribute for 1.5 years and then contributes again, they’ll receive the welcome message again, which is a good thing I think.