Continuous Challenges

[mvexel]

This is a bigger ticket for discussion.

MapRoulette Challenges are currently designed to be created as a known, finite set of tasks. When all tasks are dealt with, the Challenge is complete.

This is great for some use cases, but the world around us is continually changing and the map is never done.

Let's explore ideas for MapRoulette to support ongoing, or continuous challenges.

The plumbing for the simplest implementation already exists in MapRoulette today: Overpass-based challenges and the option to refresh tasks. If we give challenge makers the tools to automate the refreshing, you have a continuous challenge

But it doesn't stop there. There's (deep?) implications for the UX. We made a contract with the user: Here's a challenge and if you keep working on it, you see the progress bar inch towards completion, and at some point it will be done. We're breaking that contract so we should be deliberate about how we present continuous challenges. That can mean just tweaks to the UX to something much more ambitious.

And then there's integrations. Right now MapRoulette can "do" overpass queries, but for continuous challenges there's a number of other "signal streams" that we could incorporate:

• Atlas checks
• Osmose
• OSMCha
• KeepRight

to name just a few. You could envisage a modular approach where we implement "connectors" to external signal streams and we present these as continuous challenges.

See https://github.com/maproulette/maproulette3/wiki/Mapillary-Integration for a related idea for Mapillary integration.

[matkoniecz]

We made a contract with the user: Here's a challenge and if you keep working on it, you see the progress bar inch towards completion, and at some point it will be done. We're breaking that contract so we should be deliberate about how we present continuous challenges.

I never seen it this way, but this ca be done by having project for continuous activity that would spawn new challenges ("wikipedia links linking to nonexisting pages - nnew tasks found on 2023-01-16 rescan")

[Noki]

I've been rebuilding challenges via the API for years now and I really support implementing this feature. The phone number challenges all used to have scheduled rebuilds where all open tasks get deleted from time to time and get newly discovered. I got great feedback for that since it discovers new issues but also removes issues that got obsolete because they were fixed outside maproulette. Some users would also love to get notifications for new tasks in a challenge, as their idea is to do all task for specific challenges in their area. I would love to see scheduled challenge rebuilds as a native feature.

[mvexel]

@Noki do you have suggestions of how this feature should work? Should this be defined when the challenge is built? Should you be able to set or change it later? Should not be clear to mappers that a challenge is set to rebuild automatically so they know that new tasks could be added at any time? Should there be some kind of notification that new tasks have been added?

[Noki]

@mvexel You should definitively be able to specify it when the challenge is build and also be able to set or change it later. It would also be helpful to have a "mass edit" on the project that allows to set it for all challenges within the project.

From my experience the Overpass API often runs into timeouts and requires retries or forces you to back down when you try to refresh multiple challenges at once. I would therefore start implementing it as a simple setting "automatically refresh challenge data" and than take all the challenges that have this flag and refresh them over and over again without a fixed schedule.

Here is a scribble on how this could look:

[mnalis]

Should this be defined when the challenge is built? Should you be able to set or change it later?

yes to both.

Should not be clear to mappers that a challenge is set to rebuild automatically so they know that new tasks could be added at any time?

yes, sounds like a good idea. It might also say not only when was challenge created, but also when it was updated (and if it is set to auto-update)

Should there be some kind of notification that new tasks have been added?

Yes, at least if user has it favourited (or by default for any challenge user has taken part of, but with an option to turn off further notifications for that challenge). Similar notification as the one that user receives when the challenge they were part of has been completed (but obviously with different text)