Provide an MCP server to handle admin work via Agents not just frontend forms

[tordans]

It would be great if the backend could provide an MCP server that I can connect to in order to do the work that I now do via the frontend forms but from inside my agent chat window.

I recently started doing this for a project I work on and it is not a lot of new complexity in cases where the APIs and auth is already handled, like is the case for maproulette.

[jake-low]

I'll admit that I don't really understand what MCP is useful for or how it's different or better than a traditional HTTP API. But is there a reason such a feature would need to be built into MapRoulette, rather than implemented as a separate third party service which wrapped the public MapRoulette API?

I would also be concerned with the consequences of such a feature. It sounds like it would make it easier to generate text for challenge instructions etc with LLMs, which is definitely not something we want to incentivize. We've put a lot of effort into the challenge creation flow and docs to communicate the importance of good instructions, careful curation of input task data, etc to challenge authors, in order to improve the quality of challenges available in MapRoulette. Letting people ask an AI chatbot to create a MapRoulette challenge for them would undermine that goal.