How can I remove/render without symbols, text and boundaries? stack - osm2pgsql, mapnik, apache, mod_tile

Hey Marcos, thanks for the reply! So that looked really promising, so I tried out adding status:off to a bunch of items (like you did in that example), including amenities and boundaries, and I also commented out the whole amenity.mss file excluding the variables just to be safe. Unfortunately I must either be doing something wrong, as no matter what I do, the changes don't appear (my process is, carto project.mml > mapnik, find and delete all .meta tiles, restart server and renderd, if all fails then I run the osm2pgsql command). At this point, I'm worried I'm not clearing the cached tiles or perhaps I'm running it differently to you. Any ideas?

I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about the rest of your stack. What I do locally is to edit the style with a text editor and check changes in kosmtik. Once I'm happy with my changes I might do some rendering or otherwise wait for the next opportunity to do it (I only render places that I go visit or maybe the city where I live).

At this point, I'm worried I'm not clearing the cached tiles

Tiles might still be cached locally, to protect against that request them locally from a new incognito browser window (close any other incognito browser windows and create a new one).

To see what is actually in the database for a particular OSM object, try this (as the user who owns the database)

psql gis
gis=> select * from planet_osm_polygon where osm_id=142724406;
gis=> select * from planet_osm_line where osm_id=142724406;
gis=> select * from planet_osm_point where osm_id=142724406;

nodes will be in planet_osm_point, unclosed ways and relations in planet_osm_line, and closed ways and relations in planet_osm_polygon.

You can look at the tags in there to see what tags are "escaping into the database" for a particular feature. You can also do things like this:

select count(*) from planet_osm_line where name='High Street';

Hey @SomeoneElse, I tried playing around with some of that stuff you suggested but I'm going to be honest, this is far beyond me.

Really not where to start or what to do. I really appreciate your advice/assistance. Might just have to leave it here for now.