Hi all. I have opened two tickets on the MapRoulette issue tracker to cover two new features that are closely related. The first is the ability to “like” a Challenge, and the second is to “Flag” a challenge. Liking should be self-explanatory. Flagging is a way to signal that you think the challenge is confusing / causing bad edits in OSM.
This short blog post on the MapRoulette blog gives some background and links to the issues. If you have opinions or suggestions please discuss on the issue pages. Thanks.
The maproulette process is still fundamentally broken.
Whilst trying to track down some data that had “disappeared” from OSM (someone changed it from what appears to be an accepted, documented value to something else) I tried to find the challenge author in order to find out where (or if) they discussed it with the wider OSM community, as would be required of a “change tag X to tag Y” mechanical edit, which is what this “challenge” is. There appears to be no way to do this.
I was only able to see the challenge after logging in. That gets me to https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/24298, but I can’t see any way there to find out which user is responsible for creating the challenge. Clicking on a bit of grey on the screen that doesn’t look like a link, but is, gets me to https://maproulette.org/browse/projects/47143, but i cannot see which challenges were even part of the project because “No challenges remaining in project”.
I do not want to “get in touch” via the link on MapRoulette . My experience with maproulette challenge authors (and HOT tasking manager task authors) is that any message would just disappear into the void and be ignored.
I do not want to “flag” a challenge within maproulette for the same reason - issues I and other people have raised directly @mvexel seem to have just been ignored.
Soon, adding a comment in the Challenge page will trigger an email to the Challenge owner, making the comments made more visible to the challenge owner. We’re considering making challenges un-discoverable if the Challenge author does not respond within a certain amount of time.
Some possible new improvement opportunities I picked up from your comments:
Make it easier to discover the OSM username for the Challenge owner on the Browse page. Filed as a new issue on Github.
The fact that a Project page linked to from a Challenge page can be empty is confusing. New issue here.
The best way to suggest ideas like this is to open an issue on Github. I’m reading everything related to MapRoulette here as well, but it’s hard for me alone to keep up with all feedback coming in and turn it into issues and, eventually, improvements.
You posited that the MapRoulette process is “fundamentally broken” and were pointing out a few pain points, which I took as suggestions. Like how you can’t easily see who created a challenge from the browse page.
Actually one more question - is there an RSS feed of “new challenges”?
Had it been immediately visible when it was added, a challenge whose entire description was “Replace diplomatic=high_commission with diplomatic=embassy + embassy=high_commission” (an obvious mechanical edit) could have been nipped in the bud.
An update, it is now possible to Flag (or “report”, still not sure what the best term is) challenges. A short blog post by the devs who implemented this is here.