Disable routing functionality or clarify it is OSM-based

[danrademacher]

The OHM website includes OSM default routing capability, like this: https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm_car&route=44.6580%2C-72.4980%3B37.2730%2C-119.9920#map=4/41.21/-96.94&layers=O&date=1791-03-04&daterange=1791-03-04,2023-12-31

While it would be amazing to someday enable historically aware routing, for now we're going to disable that feature.

Says @geohacker:

i think if we take out the routing API in the settings.yml it should go away

We'll try that locally but then also see if we need to change anything on the website frontend -- it would be great if all links to routing disappear based on YML change, but I'll be surprised if it is that easy.

[danrademacher]

As I suspected, disabling the routing endpoints in YML does nothing to the website, which still offers routing as an option:

So I think we'd have to take more significant measures to

• remove the options from the context menu
• disable the Rails directions template
• maybe other things

[jeffreyameyer]

Is the concern that there's a feature on the site that's not working properly, or are people complaining?

I'm not too worried about this - I'd hate to see us spend too much time taking something off of the site that we might be readding / fixing later.

[danrademacher]

NatFoot noted this in OSM US Slack here: https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C2J8FAS9M/p1673935989110419

Not exactly a complaint, but it does seem odd:

Heads up that the router on the main page is still using OSM data to route on and not OHM data. (edited)

Could be one easy fix would simply be to check the localization settings so these say "Directions to/from here (based on OSM)" https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/ohm-website/blob/staging/config/locales/en.yml#L2906-L2907

[jeffreyameyer]

Aha - so is it fair to say that the issue is "OHM routing uses OSM data to plan routes"? (or something like that?)

[danrademacher]

Yes, though that's a lot of words to put into a context menu.

We could add to this string: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/ohm-website/blob/staging/config/locales/en.yml#L2885

Directions courtesy of FOSSGIS Routing Service, based on OpenStreetMap data (present day) and not OHM data.

adding the bold part

[danrademacher]

This came up again on OSM US Slack: https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C2J8FAS9M/p1674555625387399

Tim reported we are working on disabling it. Richard Welty's reply:

please do. in its current form it doesn’t serve any real purpose other than sowing confusion.

[danrademacher]

From a pure code/maintenance perspective, it would be lower overhead to just change locale labels to include a disclaimer than to go through and disable the feature, since that will involve more code variance from upstream. though overall I'd prefer to disable it until and unless we have routing over OHM data.