BruceS

Wow after being the hospital for a couple weeks I have a lot to get caught up on. But at least I was able to get my vote in on this category. Hopefully I will be able to catch up on a few more things in coming days if I can stay awake long enough.

I personally don't approve my own waymarks but there is no rule written or unwritten against approving your own waymarks. I do request officers in categories I lead not to approve their own waymarks as more of a best practice.

As again this thread spiraled out again to personal attacks and is far off topic I am closing this topic.

To clarify a few things: Actually I only have "privileges" in the forums and not the Waymarking site. Lumbricus does not have "privileges" in either place. Waywizard has limited "privileges" on Waymarking site, ie. final approval of category, moving categories within directory, changing icons, changing category titles, approving waymarks in stagnant categories and a few other miscellaneous thing. Any group changes are reserved to Groundspeak.

So do Bear Statues, Dog Statues, and Lion Statues. I am not suggesting we should have a separate category for every animal, but goat statues are actually quite common in Europe (I have pictures of a few). So, if it works for Lions and Tigers and Bears, sorry, Lions and Dogs and Bears, it should work for goats. Or, (as I have seen a number of cow statues too), maybe we could expand it to Farm Animal Statues. The specific animal category pre-date figurative sculptures category. One reason it was created was so there would not be separate categories for each animal.

Actually if there are regular members the first one will automatically get promoted. Only goes to auto-approve if there are no regular members to promote.

I have hidden posts that were leading this discussion off topic and were otherwise not constructive to the discussion at hand.

There have been several forum violations in this thread and it strayed far off topic. I am locking this thread.

Still waiting for my waymarks to be approved. I'm debating whether to update the others until the first ones are approved. Why not update them all that way they can all be approved at once. Makes zero sense to wait.

Thank you.

I think this post covers most of the things that sometimes happens in reviewing Waymarks. My recommendation is not to read more into the comments than intended. The reviewer wants to get your waymark approved once meeting the requirements of the category or they would not have created or volunteered to help review Waymarks in the category. Sometimes the decline notes may be short and be viewed as being terse when in fact they were intended to get to the point of what is needed to fix the waymark and nothing else. If you do not understand what needs to be done to fix your waymark from the decline note contact someone in the group. They should never be taken personal. Also if you have a Waymark declined it is best not to bring it to the forums. It is best to work with the category group to get it approved. First bringing a declined waymark to the forums may bring you sympathy from other forum participants but it probably won't help you get your waymark approved. Second whenever a waymark is brought to the forums only one side of the situation is presented and often there is other information needed to really understand the situation. My final point please keep all political comments out of this forums.

Groundspeak is aware of this problem. It is tied to how a particular Google api appears to have changed how it works which broke this feature. It does not appear that it is difficult to fix on the surface but there is no estimated time it will be fixed.

Groundspeak is aware of this problem. It is tied to how a particular Google api appears to have changed how it works which broke this feature. It does not appear that it is difficult to fix on the surface but there is no estimated time it will be fixed.

The maps seem to be working for me today though they did seem to take a while to load. At first I thought they were not working and then they appeared.

There are no mechanism designed in the site to add new officers if the old do not do so. Yes, Waywizard can have enrollment opened up for closed groups and can have regular members promoted in groups however this must be done as a last resort. It is preferred if the existing group becomes active enough to at least promote one new officer thus it does not appear as if Waywizard/Groundspeak is being heavy handed in this mostly community run endeavor.

Trackman should be a Figurative Public Sculpture, as it is recognizable as a human form. If Trackman is too abstract of a human form for Figurative Public Sculptures then it would likely fit in Abstract Sculptures.

I agree American Civil War graves would be very over prevalent. There are several factors making it so. First the vast number of veterans of this war, over 600,000 died in the War itself and there were millions of other veterans who died after. Second the graves of Civil War veterans were more likely to survive due to a couple of factors which occurred at the time of the Civil War. The Civil War marked the beginning of National Cemeteries in the US. They were created to have more centralized place to bury the Union soldiers kill during the War. They were often located near the battlefields. Thus the reason one sees large number of Union soldiers buried in the south as after the war great effort was taken to collect the remains of Union soldiers from makeshift graves scattered around battlefields and move them for proper burial in the nearby National Cemetery (this include Arlington National Cemetery). Some of these National Cemeteries were relatively small by today's standards for National Cemeteries but still contained thousands of Union Soldier graves. These cemeteries have been continuously been maintained by the US government. The Civil War also coincided with the move to more centralized cemeteries around the country as opposed to scattered family cemeteries and each church having its own graveyard. These more centralized cemeteries had a better chance of being continuously maintained thus the graves preserved.

There are many people who do not ever post in the forums but do read them often. Also when things get posted in the forums, it is easy for others, including friends of leader, to see it and look up the group and inform the leader of the post.

This is the problem with the icons not syncing between the servers. There is a job that is supposed to run automatically to do this but does not run automatically. The job must to be now run manually now by Groundspeak. Once the icon for the most recent category is uploaded Waywizard will request the job to be run.

I often get the feeling that officers and leaders don't realize how frustrating it is for submitters when all of them have gone on "sabbatical". I would hope that they do care. Sometimes there are things that happen in people's lives that take a much higher priority than Waymarking and approving Waymarks. When I was battling cancer I got a couple somewhat rude emails when waymarks were not approved fast enough a "frustrated" Waymarker, I think it might have been a whole 2 weeks.

I will try to answer all the questions in one post. Do I approve my own waymarks: No Do I vote for my own: Yes Do I visit my own: No Do I do exchanges: No If I have not been to the location I will not waymark it. (With the exception of the couple categories that are set up as exchanges) For this reason I do not like how the uncategorized waymarks ended up being set up. Originally the concept was it for more experienced waymarkers to help out newer waymarkers to get a waymark posted and the waymark was going to belong to the original poster. This was changed at the last minute before they went live with uncategorized waymarks. This is not to say that I won't ask another waymarker to get me a certain type of photo of a location that I failed to get when I was at the location myself (I have done that a couple times). I will also ask a local waymarker where I may find an unwaymarked item for a category if I am in their area, particularly if it is an item not easily found on an internet search.

My personal opinion: RitC if I was the group leader for this category and I lead several I would have demoted you and kicked you of of the group by now just for not working with the group and bringing it to the forums with a negative "la la land" opening post. I might promote a person or two or I might just set a reminder in my phone for every week or two to check in case I missed an email. After all this category has had less than 20 submissions in the last year, which is less than many categories get in a week. I doubt Groundspeak will or should take any action toward this group leader except maybe advise him to promote an officer or two as he has reviewed more than half of all waymarks in the category including two in the last month.

My comments are in red above. To help understand the potential broadness of this category this is link to list of just Christian churches, many of which do fall under existing categories.

I agree that accepting Church of Scientology for reason listed and also that this category should be an inclusive category for those not covered elsewhere. I would avoid trying to list the denominations that would be accepted unless it is used only as examples but not limited to. I say this as there are many churches that would not be thought of to include in the list. An example of this would be Polish National Catholic Church based in the US which is not accepted in the Roman Catholic category as they are not in communion with Rome. A much larger group of denominations in the US that do not have a category would be Pentecostal (except Assembly of God). World wide there many other denominations that again would probably be unknown to include in any list, including the fourth largest protestant denomination in the world, Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the only denomination approved by the Chinese government.

Thinking back to some of the less active churches I have waymarked and I would think monthly or seasonally. I have seen many small town/country churches where they only held services monthly. I have seen a few where they only had services in the summer or winter due to lack of heat or air conditioning, these were usually a second usually older building and rest of the year services were elsewhere. I agree the location where only one service being conducted should not be allowed. Now with that being said, this would mean that historic but no longer used would be excluded, which is ok with me, though there may be a way to word it so these could be included.