MapRoulette Leaderboard: The Community has Spoken!

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

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. Almost half use them at least monthly, and only around 13% never use them at all. We’re happy to see that the Leaderboards are useful to a vast majority of MapRoulette users!

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”, the distribution was fairly even, with about 1/5 of respondents in each importance bracket:

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:

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.