MapRoulette has had Leaderboards for a long time. You can access the Global leaderboard for different periods of time right from the MapRoulette homepage.

Me at position 319 on the MapRoulette Leaderboard
The author’s position on the global leaderboard 🙁

If you’re the owner of a Challenge, there’s also leaderboards in your Challenge management dashboard. However, if you go there, you will find that these are currently disabled. This is because we’re investigating issues where the MapRoulette backend system would go into overdrive with most Leaderboard queries, making MapRoulette very slow or even shut down altogether for all users. This is of course unacceptable! We took technical steps to remove some of the “worst offenders”, so that is why Challenge and Project Leaderboards are temporarily not available. Our apologies!

The MapRoulette team started wondering how people actually use the Leaderboards, so we can fix the system in a way that helps most users without causing outages for everyone. Around 150 people responded, and we would like to show you the outcomes.

Firstly, we asked how often you use the Leaderboards. About half of you use them at least monthly, and around 33% never use them at all. We’re happy to see that the Leaderboards are useful to a majority of MapRoulette users!

circle chart showing almost 50 percent of respondents use the MapRoulette Leaderboard monthly or more

We also asked to rank some specific Leaderboard features on a scale from 1 (unimportant) to 5 (essential). When asked about “Seeing the top mappers overall” and “Leaderboards are updated live”, around 65% of respondents found these functionalities at least somewhat important:

You rank the importance of “Choosing different time periods for the Global Leaderboard” a little higher, with more of you considering this an essential feature (26%) and 70% finding this at least somewhat important:

Opinions on the other features were more skewed. Respondents skewed towards higher importance on being able to see their own ranking and having Project and Challenge level leaderboards, with more than 41% of respondents ranking this as essential.

Seeing your own global ranking is also highly valued, with almost 80% of respondents finding this at least somewhat important, and almost 35% found it essential.

Thanks to your responses, we now have a really good sense of how popular the Leaderboards are (very!) and that while none of the features we asked about are unimportant to you, there are a couple that are more highly valued. The most important one being the Project and Challenge Leaderboards: we will make it a priority to bring those back!

Thanks for using MapRoulette and happy mapping!

PS – we also asked you to provide anonymous general feedback about MapRoulette at the bottom of the questionnaire, and we got almost 50 responses on that question. It will take a little more time to work through those, and we thank you for taking the time to write your thoughts down.

This post has been updated reflecting newer responses that came in since the original publication.