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MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap [video] by raybb

MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap [video] by raybb

MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap [video] by raybb

8 Comments

  • Post Author
    thepuppet33r
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:02 pm

    This is amazing. Much prefer this to helping train autonomous vehicles.

  • Post Author
    barbazoo
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:03 pm

    I’m not sure how effective captchas really are at filtering out bots. But if they do work, I’d much rather have my efforts contribute to a public good like OSM rather than feeding data to Google, which seems to be the default these days.

    If anyone from OSM is listening, it would be great to have a way to flag malicious uses of captchas, like in phishing attempts. The existing captcha platforms make this very hard.

  • Post Author
    fragebogen
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:08 pm

    Fun and potentially useful project, love it! When I tried it though, it was quite often hard to see whether the bounding box is "really" correct, as it hides what's underneath. Maybe some slight opaqueness could help.

    Also, my first image had no bounding box at all. Being met by "Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a building. If not swipe left", it felt like the wording or the UX could be improved by filtering for images that are guaranteed to have such a box.

  • Post Author
    szundi
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:19 pm

    Most demotivated sloppy contributors coming

  • Post Author
    Eduard
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:28 pm

    playing with the demo at https://maptcha.crown-shy.com/ , I had problems recognizing the outlines, as they often were colored similar to their structure (low contrast). Some examples I couldn't find any outline at all.

    Also, seeing a rectangular outlined thing from above, it's often impossible to tell if it qualifies as a building.

  • Post Author
    Kralxxx_666
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 9:35 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    smashah
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 10:31 pm

    What's stopping this work from being used to oppress people?

  • Post Author
    glaucon
    Posted February 13, 2025 at 10:44 pm

    As I said elsewhere I applaud the idea, a couple of comments.

    1. On Firefox on Ubuntu the text is _far_ too faint, to the extent the initial text is essentially unreadable.

    2. I was getting brown coloured areas surrounded by a slightly different brown colour. The outlined area could have been a roof or just some slight change in l and colour. I understand this is why help is needed to classify them but it felt wrong clicking either "Correct" or "Incorrect" … maybe with enough input it doesn't matter ? Not sure.

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