Discussion: Challenge Flagging System Improvements

Context

We have received a lot of feedback on the topic of accountability and responsibility of Challenge authors in the past few months. A recurring topic is the Challenge flagging system:

• Some people would love to see a voting system, either before Challenges go live or as they are being used
• Some people think the barrier is too high
• The feature is hard to discover (but see documentation
• There is a mental disconnect between placing a flag and the report appearing in a Github issue
• There are three avenues of potential communication about a flagged Challenge:
  1. MapRoulette's native messaging system
  2. The Github issue
  3. OSM's messaging system

Potential Improvements

Flagging / Challenge Page UX improvements

Several things we could address separately or in parallel:

1. Make the communication / "chat" feature more visible
2. Have a public (or accessible to logged in users) account page for every MR user where all challenges and communication options, account status, mapping work, are consolidated
3. Rethink Flag icon - not obvious. Is it Flagging, or Reporting?
4. Consider all possible "actions" on a challenge (Start, Favorite, Report, Clone, Overpass Query, View Leaderboard, Get In Touch) and see how they can be grouped / made more coherent
5. Make flagging internal to MapRoulette

**Focus on lower hanging fruit pending MR redesign **

Challenge authors account limitations

If a Challenge author's Challenges are flagged, their MapRoulette account could be limited, for example:

• Lose the ability to create new Challenges
• Any other Challenges of theirs are disabled or flagged
• They need to get in touch with ...someone... to get their account in good standing again

Process

• Consider giving MR users more agency not just in reporting but also reviewing reports - enable users (all? certain 'level') to review reported challenges and act on them.
• Clearly define (and make visible) the lifecycle of a reported challenge -- reported, waiting for response, improvements suggested, accepted / rejected.
• More rigid rules for challenge freshness in general
  • Authors need to review their challenge once a month (what does that mean) or it will be deactivated
  • Challenges with a too skewed ratio of solved vs other statuses are auto flagged