Gamification

Would the MLS project please consider adding gamification like CellMapper and WiGLE? I expect it would increase contributions.

The gamification features include:

  • On each cell/wifi site, identify the username that originally discovered it plus all users that contributed

  • Leaderboard of top contributors overall and by month

  • Report to each user their contributions (e.g., distinct new cell sites discovered) across multiple devices. (In other words, remove duplicate cell sites if “discovered” on two devices from the same user, and don’t lose stats for a user when moving to a new device.)

  • Report personal ranks (e.g., “you are #151 out of users for the month”)

Users could choose to stay anonymous, either during the contribution phase (like now) or on the public reporting side (which could be retroactive).

A long time ago I participated in the gamification leaderboard portion of the MLS. One day the gamification ranking web server stops working and also removes the Android source code to enter the user’s login to participate in the gamification.

Possible reason against gamification:

  1. Limited software engineering time available to keep this project running. Must remove things that are not essential to reduce engineering time.
  2. Ranking system attracts potential cheaters. Those cheaters don’t care about the integrity of the Wi-Fi database and can use custom MozStumbler to get some extra points by uploading fake/wrong Wi-Fi data.