Can someone confirm if it is illegal to do a permanent DoS on MapRoulette servers? 
Let me explain, generating a lot of chalenges, unharmful ones, to much of them so they hide the ohers that do harm…
It’s interesting to see the downvotes on muralito’s post compared to the reactions to MapRoulette Critique - #136 by ezekielf 
None of the Github issues for MapRoulette posted in this thread since beginning of the year have been resolved.
- Mandatory link to discourse-thread before being able to start a challenge · Issue #2563 · maproulette/maproulette3 · GitHub opened Feb 17, 2025
- Voting for new tasks/challenges before they get online · Issue #2564 · maproulette/maproulette3 · GitHub opened Feb 17, 2025
- Consider hiding flagged challenges where report is not yet processed · Issue #2003 · maproulette/maproulette3 · GitHub opened April 2023
Maybe we need a challenge to resolve Github issues? 5 points for finishing the task
Three months later there hasn’t been any new activity on those issues.
Though there’s been plenty of Maproulette-powered corporate-directed editing activity in OSM, so I guess it’s fulfilling its goals!
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It’s been an interesting few months for MapRoulette and the other charter projects…
A shame it hasn’t triggered a decision to shut down Maproulette rather than letting it continue like a zombie, unmaintained but still powering corporate editing…
Maybe it will shut down. Is this what you want?
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I still don’t understand the huge hate from @Jarek towards MapRoulette. Okay, we get it, people using MapRoulette are doing harmful edits in Ontario. However, I believe you are simply having the wrong premises:
1 - only corporate mappers are using MR to create (bad) challenges
2 - people are just clicking “yes” “yes” “yes” without reviewing, just for the sake of points.
I believe these 2 premises are totally wrong. Yep, of course there are people doing that, and of course there are companies using MR. Does it make the total or the majority of cases? I don’t think so.
I won’t crush the numbers and run complex scripts to bring the exact % of corporates using MR or whatever, but just use 3 minutes of your time and take a look at the most recent created projects. You will find that the majority of them are created by regular mappers, not corporate ones. Also, the leaderboard was broken for a long time (IIRC), so I’m not sure you can say that people was just clicking yes to get points and be the world leader with the eternal glory that only OSM provides.
Yes, things could be improved, and yes, there are people mapping wrong stuff. But do you really really really believe that shutting down MR will partially or completely solve this issue (people doing bad edits)? I’m 100% sure that it won’t.
I’ll bring my own perspective here then: I used to use MR, for personal projects, and I still find it very useful. I also created successful (and some not) challenges used by my local community. If it’s shut down, I’m sure I’ll have a hard time finding an alternative solution for that type of mapping that I mainly use in MR (Cooperative Challenges).
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1 - no, but enough of them
2 - yes, enough of them
3 - by design Maproulette invites people who are unfamiliar with a region to edit there
4 - Maproulette takes no effort to ensure or ask users if their “projects” have local consent or meet the organized editing guidelines
Please, do read the thread. I’ve given examples of Maproulette users changing a food supplements store to a fast food, of mapping fords incorrectly, and of deleting crosswalks that had been added per survey. The response from Maproulette operators has been one giant shrug. They don’t feel responsible for encouraging users to edit on another continent and to blindly apply iD presets. They don’t feel responsible for users creating challenges that are just plain wrong, or challenges that violate the organized editing guidelines. They don’t feel that they have to do anything once mistakes are pointed out. Shrug.
I am struggling to name a project less in line with the spirit of OpenStreetMap guidelines.
Here, I’ll quote my second post in this thread, maybe it’ll explain a bit my “hate” (your word) for Maproulette:
Meanwhile several of the wrong fords in Niagara regions I’ve been mentioning since the start of the thread a year ago are still there (example). This is because Maproulette’s model is “we break, you fix”, and no one feels responsible for the mistakes (except Mateusz, who fixed one of them, who isn’t even involved with Maproulette). Earlier on, I asked for help setting up a Maproulette challenge to fix these wrong fords and got no response, either. Their continued existence in OSM is actually comical at this point.
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Oh nice, a checkbox!
So when I load Maproulette.org from Canada and click “Get started”, the second project is New Zealand - Intersecting Buildings, by TomTom, with data sourced on September 10, 2025. Can someone point to where this has been discussed in accordance with the guidelines?
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So when I load https://tasks.hotosm.org from Germany and click “Start mapping”, the first project is Ebola outbreak: DRC 2025 - Buildings in Kasai Province (5), by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), with data sourced on no-one-knows. Can someone point to where this has been discussed in accordance with the guidelines?
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What is enough of them? Don’t you think that what is enough for you, might not represent the reality to other people?
In my region, HOT Task Manager edits are way more harmful than MapRoulette’s. Still, even though I have LOTS of criticism against HOT, I won’t come here complaining every time someone using TM does a bad edit. You know why? Because I can differentiate the mapper and the tool. And I know that I can’t go to HOT main office complain about these edits and make them accountable for those edits, because they are not.
It seems you are forcing yourself to be mad, and that’s fine, but please don’t come here using false arguments or pretending that you don’t know how to use a tool (and again, I understand your frustration about harmful edits).
If you click “Close to Me” MR will be able to go to your place and show the tasks there (I don’t know how they do that and if that works 100%, but I suppose it fetches the city from your OSM profile from what I saw). If it doesn’t work, you can search in the “Location” bar and type whatever region you are looking for. If it still doesn’t work, you can scroll the map until you find the region you are looking for, and loads the tasks there.
Regarding TomTom, I’m not sure how it works in NZ, but in BR and PT (where I’m a forum and Telegram mod), they always post every challenge here and in Telegram as well.
So, again, feel free to be mad as you want, but MR is a very valuable tool, and I think you are barking at the wrong tree.
PS.: I’m not sure if this is what you want, but a 2 min chat with a LLM returned me this working query: overpass turbo . With that query (if it’s what you want) you can easily use that horrible MR tool to create a challenge and fix those errors.
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I have nothing to add beyond what I already wrote in the thread.
As a suggestion, maybe you could let DWG members pause MapRoulette tasks. This would be an intervention equivalent to blocking a mapper and hopefully rare.
(from a DWG perspective)
There are three pieces here - one is the maproulette software itself (and it’s been pointed out above why that hasn’t been updated - it sounds like essentially no-one wants to volunteer to do it for free**), another is the person creating the “challenge” and the third is the person actually making the changes.
Where there is a problem, we try not to come down too hard on the person making the changes. They’re often new to OSM and have been told that what they’re doing is “correct” and “beneficial”, sometimes when it really isn’t, because the challenge itself was poorly described. In the cases we’ve dealt with in the past we’ve often tried to help the challenge creator understand why what the asked people to do was a problem (example here).
If anyone sees a challenge that is causing problems and they aren’t able (or don’t know how) to engage with the person or organisation creating it, please do drop the DWG an email and we’ll see what we can do. The “low level chuntering” (for example around some challenges in Wales over the last couple of years or so) isn’t reflected in people asking us to help.
** which is absolutely understandable - people may very well be in a position where they’d love to be able to do more but really do need to pay the mortgage/rent first.
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Given the gamified nature of the system, I think challenge creators have a big responsibility in ensuring that challenges they create are in line with OSM and local community consensus, and that they provide sufficient instructions/documentation so that those participating will edit appropriately. I also think those running the Maproulette software have a responsibility to make sure that those using it to create challenges act responsibly.
Maybe the simplest solution would be to treat all Maproulette challenges as “Organised Editing”, and therefore explicitly require the challenge creator to follow the existing Organised Editing Guidelines before any challenge is made live.
Of course, this would still need policing somehow, and there’s the tricky question of whether the policing is done pro-actively (challenges require someone to approve them before going live) or reactively (creators are trusted with the ability to make new challenges live). The latter could be helped by having explicit fields in the challenge setup asking for a link to a wiki page where the challenge is documented, and a link to an OSM forum thread where the challenge has been discussed.
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A TomTom representative posted about it in OSM World’s #oceania channel yesterday. Possibly elsewhere too, that’s just one I happened to notice.
Unsure if that meets the guidelines, but they’ve at least made an attempt.
November 2025 now and still no new Github activity on these issues, but luckily MapRoulette is planning a new version! I’m sure the feedback from open Github issues on the current version will be taken into account.
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Yes. Also see my latest post there.
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