MapRoulette - Next Version feedback

[TheLNL]

When rules are rigid and especially when they are enforced by software (rating system filtering) a human’s tendency is to try and satisfy it technically and not in spirit

The problem here is the same as the problem of bad imports (large magnitude of potentially bad data), so a similar solution should help (set a precedence to get an informal approval from the community before starting a challenge)

DISCLAIMER: I have never used MapRoulette before, so kindly ignore this message if the idea sounds like nonsense

[Smurf]

I’d like to start with basic usability here. I zoom in to my city and see a bunch of green splotches with the number two in them with no way to zoom in further to discern them, and a list of possible problems to fix with no idea how many of each there are. (Please fix both of these.) Also if there are five types of errors and I know that fixing one of them requires me to actually go there, I’d like to de-select / hide that one type. (Please add a “hide” button to each.)

Next, I click on the one that’s of interest I’m immediately zoomed out to the whole of Germany or whatever region the problem covers. Owch. Why the heck do you do that? to me that makes no sense whatsoever. Please turn that non-feature off!

OK now I can zoom back in until I see individual markers. Let’s say there’s a crossing with five of those next to each other. I want to go and edit all of them at once, there’s no point in opening the editor five times on the same spot. Except there’s no way to open iD with all ways / nodes with the problem highlighted or tagged in some way, so I have to switch back and forth between views. (I admit that implementing a way to tell iD to keep a highlight on multiple ways is probably out of scope for this thread …)

After I have completed that, I go back to MR and mark whichever marker as done. Which is fine except that now I get to say “done” four more times, assuming that the “nearby” thing actually gets all five. If the markers in question are more spread out, I’ve seen it go off to a tangent halfway through.

Next, when I’m done with that chore I don’t want to go to the next-closest single node. Instead, I want to find the next cluster and work on that – the trivial reason is that opening iD takes long enough already, but also because often I want to see the global pattern to prevent mis-labelling things.

[mvexel (Martijn van Exel)]

Thanks for sharing @Smurf ! All of the above are on my radar.

Map usability could be much better. I haven’t given that too much attention. I am considering switching from leaflet to MapLibre - some testing suggests that it’s faster when displaying large numbers of points (tasks) and filtering / clustering. Also with a vector tile background you’re not as limited in how far you can zoom in. I agree that you should be able to zoom in far enough that you could see all individual tasks without clustering.

A lot of your concerns fall in the domain of discoverabililty. Some of the things that frustrate you actually are possible to avoid, but the options / settings are too hard to find and it’s not intuitive enough. (For example, we have Task Bundling that lets you take multiple tasks at once and fix them all in one session. Not perfect but it works really well for some people.)

Regarding your comment about iD: I think we should actually have a way for iD to receive multiple targets to select. JOSM remote control can do this, I think it could be built without breaking the current URL parameter contract. Instead of just one id=n12345 you could select multiple features like w179388095,n8863865910. Rapid supports this already (example). @tyr_asd

In general though, the context switching between MR and editor is felt by many users as painful. We added an ‘edit mode’ that uses a built in Rapid editor to prevent having to switch to a different window or tab - it’s not perfect but it’s a start.

Thanks again for your comments.

[mcliquid]

I’ve written down a few ideas. I apologize if these have already been mentioned on GitHub or similar; to be honest, I didn’t check for duplicates. I translated the functions in MR blindly from German to English, so they may be called something different in the original. Thank you for your great work! If I notice anything else while working with MR, I’ll submit it later.

Outdated data in challenges

• Example: MapRoulette or MapRoulette
• Pain point: The data is now over a year old, and much of it has already been updated in OSM. A lot of time is wasted realizing that it is already correct in OSM.
• Solution: Either automatic refreshing or the option to trigger refreshing of tasks even as a non-owner of the challenge.
• Even better: This would also work for GeoJSON challenges.

Limited challenge search by location/region

• User story: I only want to see challenges that are exactly within the boundary of a place or an admin relation so that I can work on tasks there specifically.
• Pain point: Currently, a lot of challenges are displayed in the list on the left that are not even in the Bbox.
• Solution: You specify a specific region (area of an admin relation) and only challenges that are within it are displayed.

Hiding challenges

• User story: I want to be able to hide challenges if I don’t like their content / the tasks.
• Pain point: You often see the same challenges that aim to improve global “minor issues”, for example, but these are too complicated or irrelevant for me.
• Solution: You can hide these challenges for your own user so that they are no longer displayed in the search. (Similar to hiding quests in StreetComplete)

Filtering by “open tasks only”

• User story: I would like to be able to filter the search/map to show only challenges that contain “open” tasks, so that “difficult” or “skipped” tasks are ignored.
• Pain point: Often, tasks in your area are marked as “too difficult,” and then the entire challenge still appears in the list.
• Solution: A checkbox to filter only ‘open’ challenges, which then hides tasks marked as “too difficult” or “skipped.”

Deactivate “Please confirm” dialog when completing a task

• User story: As a user, I don’t want to see the “Please confirm” dialog when completing a task so that I can work faster.
• Pain point: In 99% of cases, no comment or MR tag is entered upon completion, yet the dialog appears every time, requiring just one more click.
• Solution: As a user, I want to be able to disable this dialog globally in MR.

Notification for new challenges in an area

• User story: I would like to be notified when there are new tasks in an area I have specified so that I can actively work on them.
• Pain point: I have to regularly navigate the map and try to manually identify whether new challenges/tasks have been added.
• Solution: I would like to be able to specify an admin-related area and receive a notification as soon as new tasks are created in that area. (Optionally adjustable whether in MR or even by email)

[Mateusz_Konieczny]

@mcliquid

Hiding challenges

• User story: I want to be able to hide challenges if I don’t like their content / the tasks.
• Pain point: You often see the same challenges that aim to improve global “minor issues”, for example, but these are too complicated or irrelevant for me.
• Solution: You can hide these challenges for your own user so that they are no longer displayed in the search. (Similar to hiding quests in StreetComplete)

and presumably option to unhide them?

may be too finicky, but ability to hide all challenges, including future ones, coming from specific user would also be useful

[mvexel (Martijn van Exel)]

@mcliquid first of all thanks for your continued active participation in improving MapRoulette. We’ve had quite a few constructive discussions based on your contributions to the Github issues.

@mcliquid

Outdated data in challenges

We do have a mechanism that makes challenges with no activity invisible after six months. Perhaps it doesn’t work as intended right now.. Will need to look into this. Agree that it’s a major issue. Challenge authors should not just dump tasks and never look at it again. A lot of things we can do to improve here, I think it’s crucial that we get this right.

@mcliquid

Limited challenge search by location/region

The central topic of my original question opening this thread. How can we make discovery better? I am asking a few questions about this in the survey I posted a couple of days ago to find out what the specific common pain points are with it.

@mcliquid

Hiding challenges

Yes, mentioned by a few mappers here already. I agree that a more personalized experience would be useful (saved filters or searches, hiding challenges just for yourself, things like that, open to more ideas here)

@mcliquid

Filtering by “open tasks only”

Yes, perhaps part of the same topic as above. Being able to set your preferences for the individual ‘lens’ on the tasks you see and don’t see.

@mcliquid

Deactivate “Please confirm” dialog when completing a task

I’ve heard that asked a few times over the years. I think it could be a user setting.

@mcliquid

Notification for new challenges in an area

Love that idea!

Thanks for all your suggestions!

[campbelltree]

@mvexel

Yes, I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit, also in the broader sense of how to rate the quality of challenges by MapRoulette users. One idea I am considering is to enable “star ratings” ( to ) that would tell other mappers how the community rates the quality of a particular challenge. There are some issues with an approach like that, most notably:

1. Star ratings tend to skew towards the extremes.

If you do any rating system at all, start out with binary like/dislike - this is where the megacorps and research has been pointing towards. Use a confidence interval calculation so that +10000/-5 is higher rated than +1/-0.

Once that’s already in place, if you want to go more complicated, I’d suggest the “balanced 5-point” rating system: -2 (Something is extremely wrong and this should be removed), -1 (I don’t like it), 0 (no opinion / acceptable / average), +1 (good / i like it), +2 (Extremely good, this should be featured as an example of how to do things on this site)

[mcliquid]

@mvexel

first of all thanks for your continued active participation in improving MapRoulette.

With pleasure! And thank you for the sustainable development of this invaluable tool.

@Mateusz_Konieczny

and presumably option to unhide them?

Yes, that would be good, of course. Since MapRoulette has more space (on the desktop) than StreetComplete, the hidden challenges could also be displayed in a list. That way, you wouldn’t have to display all the challenges at once.

@mvexel

We do have a mechanism that makes challenges with no activity invisible after six months. Perhaps it doesn’t work as intended right now.

It seems so, here is an example with a link: MapRoulette
The sidebar is empty, but this challenge is displayed as points on the map:

And this challenge was last updated on March 11, 2023. In this case, I would assume that the tasks do not appear on the map.

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EDIT / ADDITION: My previous suggestions were only from the perspective of a task completer. Here are a few more ideas for challenge administrators.

More information in Challenge Overview

It would be very useful to have a little more information in the challenge overview. I have illustrated this in a mockup as follows. Next to each challenge, there would be text showing the percentage complete, a display showing how many tasks out of the total number of tasks are still open, when the challenge was last updated, and at the very bottom, a button to update the tasks directly from the overview.
Currently, there is no summary of the status of the challenges in the overview.
Of course, this only works with wide screens or short text. Perhaps the text could be placed in small print below, even if this significantly increases the margin of the lines.

Preview of the Overpass results

I also added a few words to the survey, but here is a little more context:
Currently, you create a new challenge, specify the Overpass query, and let the challenge be generated. If you notice during the first tasks that the query was not perfect, you can no longer edit the Overpass query. Then you always have to duplicate the challenge, adjust Overpass, regenerate it, and delete the previous one.
It would be quite beneficial if you had the option to either edit the Overpass retrospectively (even if this means that the open tasks are automatically deleted) or if you had a short preview of 10-20 random tasks so that you could test the challenge before actually generating it.

Challenge overview: Filtering not entirely clear

User story: I want to view all challenges in a project, both completed and open or archived, so that I can manage my challenges clearly.
Currently, open and active challenges are displayed by default. When I check the “Archived” checkbox, the archived challenges are displayed and the open ones are hidden. If I then also check “Discoverable”, the list is empty. I am unable to display ALL challenges for a project.

[tyr_asd (Martin Raifer)]

@mvexel

Regarding your comment about iD: I think we should actually have a way for iD to receive multiple targets to select. JOSM remote control can do this, I think it could be built without breaking the current URL parameter contract. Instead of just one id=n12345 you could select multiple features like w179388095,n8863865910.

This is already possible (although currently undocumented) in the standalone version of iD: OpenStreetMap – (note the /id/ URL). With the embedded version of iD (/edit/?editor=id), the #id=… parameter is not available in order to not clash with the existing node/way/relation parameters which do indeed only accept a single object. For MapRoulette, you could perhaps simply link to the standalone version of iD, which allows you to use the full spectrum of hash parameters and has the extra benefit of using the screen space slightly more efficiently?!

[Mannivu]

You can view Maproulette task directly in Vespucci. You can activate the by open ing the hamburger menu on the top right, tapping the three dots of the “Task” layer, tap on “Configure” the activate MapRoulette and ok. You should start see MapRoulette task top (they are marked as a circle with an X insieme It, sort of an X-Men logo).

[Paolitosss]

English is not my best language I would like to find Vespucci in the maproulette site, like in the picture

[Mannivu]

Allora ti scrivo in italiano (anche se il tasto qui su Discourse permette di tradurre i messaggi). Penso che quel tasto manchi perché MapRoulette è pensato epr essere usato su PC, non fa mobile (infatti io quella visuale che mostra il tuo Screenshot non l’ho mai vista).

[Paolitosss]

Non ho chiesto il motivo per cui non c’è Vespucci tra gli editor: loro hanno chiesto input, io ne ho dato uno. Visto che MR si può usare comodamente da smartphone mi sembrava utile aggiungere quella cosa, se a loro sembra inutile/complesso amen, continuerò ad usare poco maproulette quando sono a casa come faccio ora.

[Mannivu]

Complesso forse no: basterebbe che, se viene visualizzato tramite web Mobile (cosa che il sito può sapere tranquillamente) venga visualizzato un Link geo: da aprire in Vespucci. Anche se, ripeto, da Vespucci puoi vedere le task MapRoulette così come si vedono i problemi di Osmose.

[Paolitosss]

Il livello maproulette su Vespucci ce l’ho abilitato e lo trovo utile, ma dal sito maproulette posso scegliere la sfidaa cui voglio dedicarmi anche al di fuori di una mia zona di lavoro, sono due cose diverse secondo me

[Mannivu]

Lo sono eccome, non avere un Link rapido dal sito è una mancanza (al momento).

[PCarew_EG (Phil)]

@mvexel

We do have a mechanism that makes challenges with no activity invisible after six months. Perhaps it doesn’t work as intended right now.. Will need to look into this. Agree that it’s a major issue. Challenge authors should not just dump tasks and never look at it again. A lot of things we can do to improve here, I think it’s crucial that we get this right.

Regarding outdated data - a notification or message sent in MapRoulette to the user/challenge owner (which I believe will also send an email if a user is subscribed to notifications) when data becomes stale - say a reminder every 30 days, and a one notifying someone a challenge is about to be archived - would be my suggestion.

Any notification/reminder about the age or staleness of a challenge would be very helpful.

[mvexel (Martijn van Exel)]

@tyr_asd

This is already possible (although currently undocumented) in the standalone version of iD: OpenStreetMap – (note the /id/ URL). With the embedded version of iD (/edit/?editor=id), the #id=… parameter is not available in order to not clash with the existing node/way/relation parameters which do indeed only accept a single object. For MapRoulette, you could perhaps simply link to the standalone version of iD, which allows you to use the full spectrum of hash parameters and has the extra benefit of using the screen space slightly more efficiently?!

Could we iframe the standalone iD in that way like MapRoulette does with rapid currently? That would be perfect because I’m concerned that Rapid will degrade now that it’s no longer maintained.

[osmuser63783]

It would be great if MapRoulette was more mobile-friendly. Both for armchair mapping and for surveying.

It would be great to be able to do some challenges from my phone while lying on the sofa, like the one where you add social media links to restaurants, or website tags to museums. There is already the category of “tag fix” challenges but they are not easy to find or do on mobile.

And then there are challenges that really require local knowledge - like checking whether a restaurant whose website has stopped working still exists. It would be good to be able to quickly discover them when you access maproulette.com from your phone. Have a map view that is centred by default on where you are, and shows nearby tasks. Make MapRoulette a website or app that’s worth opening when you’re out and about, like Every Door or StreetComplete.

This would open up a lot of new possibilities for MR. There are entire countries where almost everyone has a smartphone but not many people have a computer.