Google Temporarily Shutting Down Editing In Map Maker After Incident With Urinating Robot

shutdownAfter issuing a mea culpa over the image of an Android bot urinating on an Apple logo that popped up in Google Maps a few weeks ago, the company now it’ll be temporarily shutting down editing on Map Maker so it can deal with the problem of abuse.

Though the Maps team has made “several changes” since the incident, spam in Map Maker edits has been climbing recently, team member Pavithra Kanakarajan wrote in a product forums post (via The Verge), and it’s too much for them to handle. As it stands now, every edit in Map Maker is reviewed manually, in what can only be a time-consuming process.

To give the Google team time to catch up, the team is freezing all edits starting on May 12.

“We believe that it is more fair to only say that if we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a pause,” Kanakarajan wrote.

It’s unclear when the tool will be live again, but she adds that it’s a “temporary situation and one that we hope to come out of as soon as possible.”

Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing starting May 12, 2015 [Google Product Forums]

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