tl;dr the release notes 🙂

The biggest new feature in version 3.3 is the introduction of reviewing other mappers’ tasks. If you would like to have someone else review the tasks you complete, you can let MapRoulette know. If you’re an experienced mapper, you can volunteer to review other people’s work. In this post we explain how this works, and review some of the other goodies that made it into this version.

Reviewing Tasks

As you fix things via MapRoulette, you can indicate that you would like someone else to review your work. Here’s how you do that. When you mark a task as fixed, you will see a new confirmation dialog:

If you check the box ‘Need an extra set of eyes?’, the task will be added to the review queue. You can also set a global preference in your User Settings to have all your work reviewed by default (you can override it for individual tasks if desired).

If you are a more experienced mapper, you may volunteer to review the tasks that your fellow mappers have requested to be reviewed. To enable this feature, go into your User Settings and check the box to volunteer as a reviewer.

Once you’re in, you will see a new item in your user drop down menu.

Clicking this will take you to the review queue, which you can sort and filter in various ways.

You can now go in and review single tasks, or add the currently visible list to your review queue.

When you review a task, your job is to determine if the mapper solved the task the way they said they would. If it is fixed, you should check if the problem that was described in the task was indeed fixed. If the mapper marked it as Not an Issue or Already Fixed, you should verify that there was in fact not an issue in OSM.

If the original mapper’s work looks fine, you can Approve the task. You can also make some additional edits to complete or fix the original mapper’s work, and mark the task as Approved (with fixes). Finally, if you want to give the task back to the original mapper, you can Reject the task. Whatever you choose, you can leave a comment that will be visible to the original mapper.

Especially when you Reject a task, a comment telling the original mapper what they need to improve is very important. If they didn’t fix the Task in the first place, chances are that they won’t be able to fix it a second time without some help!

As part of the review screen, there are some tools available to you that may come in handy: a link to the change in OSMCha, the option to visualize diffs between changes in Achavi, and the option to pull in the Attic data from Overpass.

Notifications and Email

You can now get notified of events in MapRoulette that may be important to you. The notifications will show up in the new Inbox that you can find in the user dropdown menu. If you have new notifications, there will be a red dot:

Currently, MapRoulette will notify you about the following things:

• System messages — important MapRoulette system events, like planned downtime. These will be very infrequent.
• Mentions — Be notified when someone mentions you in a comment.
• Accepted — Be notified when one of your tasks was reviewed and accepted.
• Rejected — Be notified when one of your tasks was reviewed and the reviewer asked you to revise the work.
• Revised — Be notified when one of your tasks was reviewed and accepted, but the reviewer made some OSM edits.

You can set individual notification preferences for each of these in your User Settings. There are four notification levels:

1. Ignore — no notification whatsoever
2. Receive but do not email — you will see the notification in your MapRoulette Inbox, but no emails are sent
3. Receive and email immediately — you will see the notification in your MapRoulette Inbox, and an email will be sent to the address in your User Profile as the event happens
4. Receive and email daily — you will see the notification in your MapRoulette Inbox, and the notification will be added to a daily email digest that will be sent to the address in your User Profile

Right now, MapRoulette does not require email validation, so please make sure that the email address you enter is valid and yours.

Special thanks!

Special thanks to raphaelpe, depth221, and LoicUV for their awesome contributions! 💯 🎉

Don’t forget to check out the release notes for the full list of improvements and fixes.