Should a re-survey be triggered in Germany for postbox collection times?

[j9d3it]

Recently, Deutsche Post has updated collection times for most of their postboxes. I'm wondering if somehow updating the settings for users in Germany to request a re-check could be a good thing to do. User diary about the change here.

[mnalis]

Well, the collection times are by default re-checked every two years:

StreetComplete/app/src/main/java/de/westnordost/streetcomplete/quests/postbox_collection_times/AddPostboxCollectionTimes.kt

Line 23 in 7a1395d

and (!collection_times or collection_times older today -2 years)

and by setting "Resurvey frequency" in StreetComplete "Settings" to "More often"), you can reduce that to one year (it will ask more often for all quests, though, not just postbox collection times).

Other then that, I don't think much could be done from StreetComplete side, as it AFAIK doesn't have a way to change resurvey interval per-country-per-quest. Possible alternatives I see (buy maybe someone else might add their suggestions) :

• SCEE (StreetComplete "Expert edition" fork) has "Set resurvey date and keys" which can be used for exactly what you want; i.e. to force-resurvey only amenity=post_box which were not changed since e.g. 2025-04-04 . While that is exactly what you want, and it looks almost exactly like StreetComplete (until you start enabling more and more of its features), users would need to install that app (only available via F-droid or GitHub; i.e. no Google Play Store), which would probably results much smaller userbase (and a need to advocate for people to use it for that purpose). But for e.g. yourself, it should work nicely.
• In German forum, automated edit of some form might be discussed, if it is known (or extremely likely) that certain collection times are invalid.
• just wait. Currently, out of 59k of postboxes with collection_times in Germany, some 23k (40%) will already be asked for re-survey in StreetComplete with default settings, as they are are older then 2 years. As the time goes by, even more will be reasked, and after April 2027 all of them would've been re-asked anyway.
  Of course, as with SCEE suggestion, just because StreetComplete asks the quest, does not mean that people in every corner of Germany are using StreetComplete, or even that those who do use StreetComplete will solve actually the quest (some might even have the quest disabled as e.g. they are not interested in it).

[j9d3it]

Thanks for the information, I actually don't live in Germany but I thought maybe there was something StreetComplete could do to help the process.

[matkoniecz]

In German forum, automated edit of some form might be discussed, if it is known (or extremely likely) that certain collection times are invalid.

and if it is not certain (or even extremely likely) then SC should not ask

and discussing is it certain or not would be be best discussed by local communities - I have seen attempts to collect that info in global repository and it runs into repeated problems and suggesting bad data