A little-known feature of MapRoulette is somewhat hidden away on the Find Challenge page: if you zoom the map in far enough, you see individual Tasks appear on the map.

You can click on the task markers and learn more about the Challenge, and start the Task. Moreover, you can create a Virtual Challenge that contains all the Tasks on the map—useful for a mapping event or to share with your local mapping group!

Thanks to a complete overhaul of the way we load Tasks on the map, we can now start showing them efficiently at much lower zoom levels. That means that you can get an overview of where Tasks are in your geographical area of interest.

You can use the Filters to determine which Tasks you want to show up on the map, for example only Easy ones. And like before, you can create a Virtual Challenge to make the tasks you see on the map into a Challenge to share with your event or group. (You need to have less than 1,000 Tasks visible on the map to be able to create a Virtual Challenge.)

By default, the Tasks are shown as clusters on the map to make the map easier to read. If the number of Tasks shown on the map is reasonably small (currently under 1,000), you will see an option in the top left hand corner of the map to ‘uncluster’ them if you wish. (Unclustering may make the map harder to interact with, because it will now have a lot of markers to keep track of.)

When you play around with this, you will also notice that the Location Filter is gone from the Filters toolbar. Worry not—it’s not gone completely. We received a lot of feedback that the Location filter was confusing to work with, and with the new Task Map display, it made sense to re-think it. Now, when you first load the map, you can ask to show Tasks Near Me (requiring a one-time browser location request), or near a city, town or other named place by using the Search box.

Once you are zoomed in far enough to see Tasks on the map, the Challenge list will automatically be limited to show only Challenges that have Tasks on the current map. If you want, you can change this to still see Challenges everywhere, regardless of what is shown on the map.

As usual, this release contains numerous bug fixes. You can find a full list on the Release page on GitHub.

Happy mapping and let me know your feedback!