Idea: Moderation tools

[impiaaa]

Twice now I've found that someone had opened up one of my "quick-fix" challenges and hit "yes" a few hundred times without reading the instructions. I know it's partly my fault for making a challenge so easy to mess up, but it would still be nice to have better ways to repair or prevent the damage. For example:

• Allow an admin to mark tasks for review, even if the user didn't request it (see also #1068)
• Include the quick-fix changeset in the export CSV
• Button to revert the quick-fix changeset from task review
• Go to a user's profile from Task History, and to their OSM profile from their MR profile
• ~~Filter task list by user or completion time~~ just noticed I can do this with "configure columns"
• Require a minimum editing time
• Revoke points or otherwise penalize bad edits
• Ban users from participating in a challenge (have not needed this yet)

Related issues: #791, #454

[nrotstan]

Thanks for these suggestions, @impiaaa ! The tag-change challenges are pretty new and we're still learning how best to present and manage them. Your feedback is much appreciated.

[mvexel]

Hi,

Before we delve into solutions, I wanted to get a bit more background on your situation. Did you get in touch with the user to figure out their motivations? Do you think there is anything you could have done to prevent this with the current tools available to you in MR?

Out of the solutions you propose, what is the one you think would help challenge owners facing similar issues the most?

[impiaaa]

I haven't reached out to the users about their motivations, but I can. The solution that I came up with to clean up the bigger of the two messes was to use the task CSV to find suspicious task IDs, then the API to find the changesets for those tasks, then the JOSM reverter plugin to revert those changesets, and then the API again to mark the tasks as "skipped."

I'm not sure what I could have done with existing tools to prevent the messes in the first place; after the first one, I added more explicit directions (but clearly not explicit enough); after the second, I changed the challenges to "expert" difficulty. It's been suggested to me to rewrite the instructions again, and I might do that. Another thing that might have helped was to not make them "quick-fix" challenges, and instead ask the user to add the tags themselves in the editor. I had previously made a challenge that mostly just required a "yes"/"no" determined from imagery, but I couldn't make it a tag fix for technical reasons, and it didn't get any spam.

The most likely solution to prevent these situations could be some kind of configurable gate on tasks. The most helpful solution to clean up after these situations would be things like the changeset in the task CSV. However I'll refrain from making any more concrete suggestions until the editors have gotten back to me.

[mvexel]

Thanks for the additional context.

It's hard to strike the right balance. The quick-fix tasks are supposed to be quick, but that comes at a cost. I think some of your suggestions would go a long way to put some safeguards into place. I would love for the quick fixes to be more widely adopted, but we have to be mindful of the potential downsides, such as the ones you experienced.

If I had to rank your suggestions based on a combination of implementation cost and effectiveness / desirability I'd come up with the following ranked list:

1. Include the quick-fix changeset in the export CSV
2. Go to a user's profile from Task History, and to their OSM profile from their MR profile
3. Allow an admin to mark tasks for review, even if the user didn't request it
4. Button to revert the quick-fix changeset from task review
5. Require a minimum editing time
6. Revoke points or otherwise penalize bad edits
7. Ban users from participating in a challenge

@impiaaa if you have time / inclination to chat in person, I would really like to talk more about this topic.

[Korgi2]

Just bumping this thread because I wish for this sort of content to. Had a user spam tasks with RapID when "do not use RapID" was part of the instructions and gained 40k points off of no effort before I privated it all. It would be nice to have some sort of ability to moderate your created tasks to prevent people who either don't do the tasks correctly or ignore instructions.

[nrotstan]

#1012 won't prevent intentional vandalism, but could help to keep less experienced mappers on track (for standard challenges -- wouldn't affect "tag-fix" challenges)

[Korgi2]

bumping this since its been over a year. Tools still desperately needed on occasion.

[mvexel]

@Korgi2 Do you have any specific issues created by mappers using MapRoulette that you can point to? Do you agree with the prioritization I proposed in my comment above?