After pranksters used Google Map Maker to draw an Android peeing on an Apple Logo and engage in other acts of spammy vandalism, Google has announced that it will temporarily shut down its online map editor while it rethinks its approval process.

The statement, which was first spotted by Search Engine Land, makes it clear that the service isn't going away forever, just shutting down while a new moderation system is under construction. "Given the current state of the [moderation] system, we have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to any of our users to let them continue to spend time editing. Every edit you make is essentially going to a backlog that is growing very fast," Google rep Pavithra Kanakarajan wrote. "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. We have hence decided to temporarily disable editing across all countries starting Tuesday, May 12, 2015, till we have our moderation system back in action."

Google Map Maker is a browser-based online map editor that allows users to add to and edit Google Maps. There are tools for roads, railways, buildings, walking trails, bike paths, parks, lakes, and complex road geometry.

Map Maker doesn't get a lot of press, but it's an important tool for cartography. When Google launched the easy-to-use, crowdsourced map editor in 2008, it basically turned Google Maps into the Wikipedia of maps. The people who know an area best are the locals, the thinking goes, so Google created a tool to allow them to map their area. If a road or building is wrong, you can fix it; if something is missing completely, you can add it. The fact that Google Maps is crowdsourced gives it a leg up on Apple Maps. Google's other big competitor, Nokia, launched its own online map editor in response in 2012.

Map Maker isn't just about putting the newest Starbucks on the map for Google to sell ads against—it has also been used to map previously unmapped areas all over the world. The Map Maker community compiled public information to turn North Korea from a blank white sheet to a detailed map with the location of landmarks, roads, and even gulags. Not all governments in the world provide detailed, public-domain maps, and Map Maker has allowed the locals—mostly in developing countries—to fill in the blanks.

But how did prank images get onto the real Google Maps? Doesn't Google have some kind of approval process? It does, but that process relies on trust. Map Maker edits are done in a sandbox, which users can use to test and save map drafts. When a new user saves an edit, it goes into a queue for manual approval. Once approved, an edit shows up on the public Google Maps and can be seen by everyone.

After a certain amount of approvals, though, active users become "trusted" and their map edits get auto-approved and fast-tracked to Google Maps. In the official statement, Google says that the user who created the "most recent incident" was "a strong user in our community," indicating that the person most likely had auto-approval privileges and suddenly went rogue. One of the recent changes carved "Google review policy is crap" into the map, suggesting the user wanted to make some kind of statement.

Map Maker had more of a filter than Wikipedia, which has no approval process at all and relies on other users to revert malicious edits and ban users.

Google's apology says that Google has been "analyzing the problem and [has] made several changes" but that "fixing some of this is actually going to take longer than a few days."

While "hire lots of people to approve edits" is one solution, it's not a very "Googley" solution, and we bet the company is investigating a better automated approval system.