Waywizard

I want to take this opportunity to introduce a new Waymarking admin, Wayfrog. Wayfrog is stepping into the Waymarking admin role after several years of Waymarking experience both as a group leader and officer and Waymark submitter. He will be taking over the lead from me as Waymarking admin and all question that were previously set to me can be set to him. After more than eight years as a Waymarking admin it became time for me to step aside as Waymarking admin due to personal reasons. Due to these reasons I did not feel I was able to serve the needs of the Waymarking community as well I was wanted to or as well as the community deserves. I know I am leaving the community in good hands with Wayfrog. I will be retaining my admin rights to assist Wayfrog as he may need but I do not expect he will need my assistance much.

It is probably coincidental but a couple weeks ago I had a query run to get a list of all categories that had Waymark waiting over 3 weeks, there were 17 on the list. Most had 1 or 2 waymarks waiting, the high was 21 all submitted by same person who was an officer in the category. I cleared the backlog at that time. Some of these categories were managed by officers who are in general quite active but had stepped away for a while due to vacations or other events in their lives. I definitely agree on your second statement, there are officers who log in and don't review at that time. Remember officers in categories are waymarkers too, thus maybe they are posting visits or submitting waymarks themselves. There are categories which get very few waymarks in a year thus if they monitor their emails they may not have to log into the site.

These all have been uploaded. It is caused by the sync issue of the two servers. Any time you see the broken link symbol instead of the old icon it means the icon has been uploaded by the syncing has not take place correctly. I will contact GS development in morning and ask that the sync job be run.

So how do we confirm it's fixed? I have sent an email from my admin account to my regular account and it was successful. I had done that before I posted that it was fixed. I received a message from the manager of development who I work with let me know it was fixed at which time I conducted the test.

The email issue should now be fixed.

Please send me some names to me using my Geocaching.com profile (as currently the Waymarking email system is down) and I will see what we can do to resolve this issue.

I have communicated with the developers on this one. It appears that google has changed how it expects the url to be for these graphics. Thanks Tante.Hossi for pointing out what needs to be fixed.

Groundspeak is aware of the problem. The initial fix that was tried was not successful. It has been escalated however it probably will not be fixed until early next week.

There many categories run by groups where the leader has been inactive for years that are far from abandoned and though this may not be the ideal the group experiences no issues running the category this way. Groundspeak put procedures designed into the site for the removal of officers and leaders in a group. Yes, they are difficult to achieve by design but have been used many times to remove inactive officers and leaders. Thus it would not be proper to step in and bypass these procedures except in the most exceptional of cases. Many times by promoting a new officer these procedures have been used to remove inactive officers or the new officer works with the existing officers to get things fixed either by making changes needed or relinquishing leadership to the newly promoted officer. These changes have been made behind the scenes without fanfare or announcing in the forums their intent to overthrow the inactive leadership. If you look at the ten most active categories you will find that very few are still led by the original leader of the group and I believe only one of these was the original leader replaced by using exceptional procedures. That one was due to the death of the leader and all other officers were sock puppet accounts owned by the original leader. All other leadership changes were done following normal established procedures.

I don't think this situation was thought of when the site was designed and developed. I need to ask for guidance on this from higher ups at the lily pad.

In general it depends on the activity level of the group and the category. Have members of the group been reviewing waymarks but not as frequently as desired then usually the addition of an officer or two will often remedy the problem. Has the category totally been abandoned? Then replacement of leader would be needed. Other times that GS has intervened has been at the death of leader thus not requiring the group to demote individual by vote. Also have intervened when death of the leader when other members of group were inactive family or socks accounts of the deceased leader.

Patience. Sometimes it takes a while for wizard magic to take place. In other words it in the works.

I have approved this one as it was long but it was just one day over 2 weeks, 9/17 was submission date.

WW -- The fishing ports icon looks good, but the FOE and Space Invaders icons are broken. Can you please check them? Thanks I will contact developers to run job that syncs them between servers. The next time you access them they might be the opposite, they were loaded at different times and randomly ended up on different servers. The syncing is supposed to be automatic but not happening.

All the icons have been uploaded.

It is far from Groundspeak denial but rather showing both sides of the history of this category. The leader and others in the category have reviewed most of the waymarks in the category the last year. How long the waymarks other than yours waited before getting reviewed I don't know but if they were longer than a month then why did you let them go that long? The leader or others did the approvals Why wouldn't I be motivated to put my own waymark up for vote? Putting it up for vote forces action on it and 3 days later it is approved. Looking at the approval history in this category it looks like this statement applies to equally to yourself for most months in last couple years.

There are no new officers however 3 out of the 4 officers have been active in the last two weeks. The 4th really has a justifiable reason for not being active lately. There are ZERO waymarks waiting for review. RitC is not last one standing, in fact looking at the waymarks reviewed in the last year he is one of the most inactive officers in the category. The leader is far from inactive having review well over half of the waymarks in the category in last year. If RitC was concerned that his own waymark was waiting too long, he could have contacted the leader or just put his own waymark up for vote. (this sends a email to all officers to vote and the waymark would be approved 3 days later)

The changes are more significant so wanted to post here before I upload to category.

oops sorry about the misnomer. My wizard brain couldn't think of the right category name, though I would get it to the right one in the end.

Make sure you activate the category from the group page once you are done making any final changes to the category description. The category will not be visible until that is done even though it has been approved.

The icon for the android category is being adjusted. The color of the above one is "brighter" than the normal palette of the icons and also will be changed to gif format. I expect the adjusted icon will be uploaded in next few days.

The icon should be working now. The servers sync up after a day or so.

I have uploaded the new icon.

Discussed issue with developer and the problem has been found. The new icons were not syncing between the servers. He has synced them now so the problem should be resolved.

This seems to be a temporary self correcting problem as the icons are back again, though I did see the broken links earlier today. If it breaks again hopefully it will be during the work week during Seattle working hours so I can have development staff look at it when it is actually broken. Hard to trace the problem if the problem does not exist at the time.