Continuous Challenges

This was previously a ticket

MapRoulette Challenges are currently designed to be created as a known, finite set of tasks. When all tasks are dealt with, the Challenge is complete.

This is great for some use cases, but the world around us is continually changing and the map is never done.

Let's explore ideas for MapRoulette to support ongoing, or continuous challenges.

The plumbing for the simplest implementation already exists in MapRoulette today: Overpass-based challenges and the option to refresh tasks. If we give challenge makers the tools to automate the refreshing, you have a continuous challenge

But it doesn't stop there. There's (deep?) implications for the UX. We made a contract with the user: Here's a challenge and if you keep working on it, you see the progress bar inch towards completion, and at some point it will be done. We're breaking that contract so we should be deliberate about how we present continuous challenges. That can mean just tweaks to the UX to something much more ambitious.

And then there's integrations. Right now MapRoulette can "do" overpass queries, but for continuous challenges there's a number of other "signal streams" that we could incorporate:

Atlas checks
Osmose
OSMCha
KeepRight

to name just a few. You could envisage a modular approach where we implement "connectors" to external signal streams and we present these as continuous challenges.

See https://github.com/maproulette/maproulette3/wiki/Mapillary-Integration for a related idea for Mapillary integration.