Reporter: Robert Whittaker
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 9.12pm, Thursday, 5th December 2013]

Before the recent UI change, links such as http://www.openstreetmap.org/?minlon=0.8969&minlat=52.3616&maxlon=1.1020&maxlat=52.3865&layers=C&box=yes containing box=yes would display a yellow/orange rectangle on the screen corresponding to the bounding box given in the link.

The outline rectangle is no longer drawn. This functionality was useful for people wanting to provide a link to a specific area in a wider context, rather than just a single point. (The latter can be achieved with a marker positioned using mlat=* and mlon=* in the URL, but there's now no way to do the former.) The loss of this functionality will degrade the value of existing bookmarks and links that people have created. It will also make linking to OSM less favourable, loosing us valuable exposure. Therefore the functionality should be restored.

The ability to draw such boxes on the map is still present in the code (e.g. in the changeset and history views) so it should just be a matter of interpreting the box=yes part of URL.