Submitted by Someone Else A Great Improvement in the Road Editor

[ErmesT]

Hello Local Guides

Today is a great day for all of us who love adding streets to Google Maps.
All those who are very active in this activity, and in particular all those who participate in the TRAC campaign promoted by @SholaIB , will surely have noticed that, with the increase in participants, the risk of having roads rejected because they are duplicates becomes increasingly higher.
Until now it was not possible to know if someone else was adding roads in the same area.
This resulted in a great waste of time for those mapping the streets, and of results for Google Maps.

But from today things have changed, and now we can also see the edits made by others.

It was with great surprise that upon returning to an area I wanted to complete I saw before me an intricate network of roads awaiting approval. Hovering over it with the mouse the following message popped-up: “Submitted on Mar 254, 2024, by Someone Else”

A long sequence of edits that I personally disapprove of for technical reasons, but very useful to know that there is no point in wasting time adding my edits in the same area.

The fact that they have been pending for two months makes me think that they will probably not be approved, and I will wait until June 26th to verify and possibly complete the work. But I find this information very useful and important to avoid wasting time and overlapping our Roader’s activity.

What do the most active Roaders say? Have you already noticed this improvement?

@Lukas_1 , @MarcoDavoli , @JustJake , @TerryPG ?

EDIT: also makes sure to read: Handle with care: Changes in the Road Editor and how to handle them Where all the recent changes are summarized

[Lukas_B]

Thank you for the information @ErmesT ! I was adding roads earlier today and haven’t noticed this. This is a really great improvement that will help us all.

Thank you Google!

[SholaIB]

Hello @ErmesT

Things are looking up and getting better. I’m so happy about this improvement. Thank you for sharing it with us.

I have always wished for that feature so it’s a dream come true !!! I haven’t noticed it myself but maybe I haven’t gone into someone else’s territory. Let’s see the changes it can bring soonest.

Ermes One thing I wish we can avoid is the thousand of rejection that might come in a few weeks 90 days !!!

Happy mapping

Cheers

[JustJake]

This is great news, @ErmesT . I haven’t seen it in the wild, yet. I suppose that means my secret spots haven’t been located!

[JanVanHaver]

And so the list of news items for an upcoming podcast episode is steadily growing again

Thx for sharing @ErmesT

[ErmesT]

Well, I suppose it is a great news, @Lukas_1 , @JustJake , @JanVanHaver , @SholaIB , but at the moment it has some very bad side effect.

Like for the previous addition of the orange dotted lines, this improvement is slowing down the editor when there is an area with an high concentration of roads.

I was out all day for an event related to the Italian Sustainability Festival, where I was a speaker, and this change popped up on my laptop when, a few hours ago, I had time to upload a few roads. When I moved to an area with a lot of both existing and edited roads, the system started to slow down.

Both Chrome and Firefox crashed a couple of time, and I had to reload the page. The only way to avoid it is to wait for the page to load and the spinning wheel to disappear. It may take several minutes to load the page, even if my connection is pretty fast. I can’t imagine what can happens with a slow connection.

I changed from desktop to laptop to see if the limitation was on the CPU or in the memory, without any improvement.

In fact during the upload of the editor the system is using a lot of CPU and Memory

Once the page is fully loaded (it may takes two minutes) the usage of the CPU is reduced, but the page is using around 2 GB of memory

What I will have to check is if it happens only there are edits made by someone else. What is interesting is that when you move the mouse over a dotted line where the edit was made by someone else, all the edits [made by someone else] are highlighted, as you can see here below.

Another bad thing is that the edits I just made (after waiting two and more minutes for the page to load) are not visible, so I have to be extremely careful to not duplicate or overlap them.

In conclusion, this is potentially a great and really wanted improvement, but I believe that, like for the infamous Oops error, the team will have to work a lot to improve it, because at the moment the implications of this are making almost impossible to add roads. What I will have to check is if this happens only where there are pending edits made by someone else.

Avoiding overtime rejections will be nearly impossible, @SholaIB , without a resulting dramatic improvement in the amount of data the team is able to approve on a daily basis. Despite Morten’s statements, in fact these rejections continue to exist, even if the approval method has already improved a lot, and my daily ratio between accepted and not accepted at the moment [excluding those rejected due to overtime] is 99%

[SholaIB]

Well everything has its disadvantages so @ErmesT … Maybe someday we will soon be able to see who edited the roads. Lol

Yes !!! Its sad really that we can’t help it. I believe there are thousands of rejections coming pretty soon. A bunch of very active members on TRAC this season.

Cheers

[ErmesT]

As you well know, @SholaIB , I reported it long time ago, and I have that kind of rejections almost every day.

Honestly I believe that we should always think about ALL the local Guides, and not only the 47 actually participating to the TRAC campaign, because this will make easier to engage Google in an improvement. There are thousands of Local Guides that are adding roads in the world, and all of them are affected, even if obviously the ones with more contributions are the more impacted by the rejections.

However the only possible solution that I see is in a [slow] improvement of the AI, to make faster and easier the activity of the operators that have to confirm the edits. FYI most of my edits are approved quickly, but recently some was approved even after 80+ days, so do not loose hope till the last day.

I do not want to see “who” made the edit, it is enough to avoid to waste time. But some improvement is absolutely needed, because this change is reducing my and our capacity to edit by 80%

[TerryPG]

This is great news @ErmesT I have not come across it yet .When and if I do I will report here. Thanks for the good news. I am sure this will help us in the future.

[Scheria]

@ErmesT thanks for sharing. I have not seen this yet.

Scheria

[ErmesT]

Hold on the horses, @JanVanHaver , as there are more interesting features related to this matter.

I am just studying and testing all the improvements, and a more detailed post will come soon with all the changes. Some of the are extremely interesting

[PrasadVR]

Hello @ErmesT Thank you for always sharing new features with the community first. This feature going to help us to save time and efforts. Big thanks to Google. Today, I noticed the new feature while editing and wanted to share screenshots here.

Caption: Screenshot-1 showing the new feature by LG @PrasadVR

Caption: Screenshot-2 showing the new feature by LG @PrasadVR

Please note that two Local Guides have edited that road, resulting in two edits appearing dated April 18th and April 12th.

[ErmesT]

Yes, @PrasadVR

This is one of the reason why I wanted to mention the potential risk of duplicates in our last meet-up. More people working on the same edits means a loss of time and more rejections.

Hope this improvement will help everyone to contribute in a more efficient way

[PrasadVR]

You are right sir, @ErmesT ,This new feature helps save time and efforts, and also reduces rejections.

[Raj_Tayade]

This is a big update and really thanks @ErmesT for it. Also what was denied should now appear.

[ErmesT]

Well, @Raj_Tayade , I honestly would say no, at least not now.

The new layer is using a lot of memory, and when you are trying to edit an area where there are a lot of edits “made by someone else” everything become extremely slow, so I would not ask for another layer in this moment, especially because it has no practical use

[TerryPG]

So @ErmesT You mentioned it and sure enough today I found some.

I had almost finished the country of Belize when I bumped into quite a few “edits submitted by someone else”

here’s a screenshot of one of them.

Most of their edits were from the end of February to early March and will expire soon. Is this edit a little too optimistic? thought from other roadsters?

And I almost forgot I had the same issue you did, page took forever to load and I could not move my mouse freely. I thought my satellite internet was experiencing issues.

[JustJake]

Well, @ErmesT , now that I have seen it in the wild, I have to agree with the comment on negative side effects. Some chucklehead drew a highway across an entire village I had been working on, and it was loading so slowly that I will just have to wait until it gets denied (90 days?!?) to be able to get any work done. I’ve also noticed that recent drawings are delayed in showing up on the edit screen.

An unexpected side effect was the feeling of frustration that someone had invaded “my” spots – and likely the other way around, too. I wasn’t prepared for a negative reaction! I’ll get over it as I move down my list of saved areas. But, I’m still going to be extra careful with how much information I divulge about my current editing locales .

[ErmesT]

Ok, @JustJake , I have a wonderful news for you. I just finished to write a new post that is made just to help you with you encountered.

I want to reassure you: you will not have to wait 90 days.

Just make sure to sit down and to have a glass of water near you before to read Handle with care: Changes in the Road Editor and how to handle them

After reading I am sure you will have a glass of wine, or a beer.

Cheers

[ErmesT]

I am contributing in Belize too, @TerryPG , but this is definitely not an edit submitted by me. Too much elaborate, it will never be approved. Fortunately it will disappear in a week or so