DougK

If the category is expanded, add a new pop-up menu variable for type: Temple, Meeting House, … A category officer(s) could easily edit the existing 78 waymarks and set them all to Temple.

For me, these are too common. Every coastal city, or city on a large river, sea, or ocean is a fishing port. Over-prevalent and therefore mundane.

It seems like August 11 would be a better day to celebrate the birth of Waymarking, as that would be the date of the posting and approval of the very first waymark, WM01. That's a beginning or birthday, not some arbitrary milestone (100, 1,000, 10,000...) along the way.

Almost all are vacuous McDonalds marks. I’m not sure what your interests are, but waymarks can be filtered from any of the 15 major Waymarking departments. Let me suggest these subsets in your area: History Waymarks near Pleasanton Cultural Waymarks near Pleasanton Monument Waymarks near Pleasanton

Here’s the home link: Waymarking Stats Or you can find it at my Profile Page.

Here’s an interesting new global addressing / coordinate system: what3words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3mx3m square, anywhere on the planet. Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address. It’s far more accurate than a postal address and it’s much easier to remember, use and share than a set of coordinates. You could specify to Amazon, which door of your house to leave a package! There’s a free iPhone app already supporting what3words.

Well, that place is in the Mediterranean Ocean, so it’s hard to visit! West turns out in the Atlantic Ocean. South looks to be in South Africa. Then there’s swapping the latitude and longitude. Surely, some will show up on land. It sounds like you’re open to other Math Constants? Golden Ratio, Square Root of 2… ? Let people pick their constants and tell you which ones they found in their waymark posting? It could get pretty bizarre. I’m guessing Coordinate Palindromes wasn’t challenging enough? They are easy to verify, because you can just eyeball them. Plus they have an interesting pattern on the earth. Constants would be more challenging and not have any interesting patterns. IOW, I’m kind of mixed on the idea. I’d probably go find one and be done with the category.

OK, I think that link is better now.

We recently had a question about wildlife protection areas (WPAs) in other countries, particularly, Canada. To me, it makes sense to expand the current category of US National Wildlife Refuges to be a more global National Wildlife Refuges. This would reduce the need for a separate exclusionary category like World-Wide National Parks became and enable more countries to come into this category, rather than create a niche category per country. To participate in this category, a country must have a Nationally designated wildlife protection program. There must be a National government run web site listing their NWRs / NWAs / Protected Wildlife Areas. Such a list would be the verification method of accepting new category submissions. Submissions of other government URLs will be judged by the category officers as to whether it contains a usable list of Nationally designated sites suitable for expanding the category. Privately run / designated areas are not what we are seeking here. The extended category description will contain a table of countries supporting a WPA program. At the start, this table will include US and Canada. The first step in this process would be a request to Groundspeak to simply rename our category, dropping “U.S.”, giving us the more global name of National Wildlife Refuges. A new extended category description is ready to post.

Here some thoughts on point number 2. It can set a confusing trend for future category submissions, when a newbie WMer (I know, flocks of them, right ) peruses a category looking for examples of similar postings to seek or model after. Someone might think the category has already “expanded”. Another question, I’d ask the officers, “Has this been going on since the category beginning or more just recently?” It might help to decide that pruning recent submission is not unreasonable. I would look at how many "got through” and judge whether it’s significant chunk among all category submissions. It it guts the category to re-evaluate them, maybe you have to live with it. If it’s just a few, I believe it’s OK to re-evaluate and decline them, explaining that there was some confusion among officer’s understanding of what qualified. OR, you can call the most questionable submissions to a new group vote and let the officers make a group decision to see if they are in agreement. The submitter may have known they were testing a boundary or tolerance within the category definition and hoping to get a favorable officer. FWIW

You fail to mention what version of Mac OS X and Safari you are running. Today’s Safari 9 has no problems and the mobile version of Safai on your wife’s iPhone is a modern Safari version. If this problem is happening to you on a recent version of OS X, 10.10 or 10.11, the problem is going to be more mysterious. I have this problem with only one of many Macs I use at my house. It is running OS X 10.7.5 with Safari 6.1.6. On this MacBook Air, both Firefox 42.0 and Chrome 47.0 can login to Waymarking.com, just fine. I’ve even created a brand new clean user account on this machine and Safari cannot login to Waymarking on that account. I’ve read many postings, like you, trying to solve this problem, regarding expired certiificates, tweaking MTU settings and other low-level stuff. The one thing I see in Firefox, hovering over the globe in front of the Waymarking URL, on this problem machine, is a tool tip saying that "this machine does not supply identity information". This could be implicating the Groundspeak servers as being substandard in today’s secure Internet. That would be why some secure servers (https) work on your problme machine, but not other. When I’m at geocaching using FireFox on this machine, the same tool tip says “Verified by GeoTrust inc.” While at the Forums login page, the tool tip is the same as the waymrking tip, but the login forums does complete successfully. I just discovered that I have the same problem on a PowerPC Mac Mini running OS X 10.5.8 with Safari 5.0.6. At some not too long ago time in the past, I was able to login to Waymarking.com on this MacBook Air, so something has changed over time. My first guess was that’s its related to security protocols of older Safari versions and possibly expired certificates. It could also be the Waymarking web server changes. Interestingly, I have no problem connecting to geocaching.com on either the 10.5.x or 10.7.x. To me this says that Groundspeak servers (Waymarking.com, geocaching.com and forums.Groundspeak.com) are set up differently with regards to their login security. Perhaps someone at Groundspeak could check into this, given the above information. Try creating a brand new clean user account, on the problem machine and try logging into Waymarking.com from Safari on that account. Also try logging in to geocaching.com and the forums site to see if they succeed. Success for geocaching and forums sites, but still failure for Waymarking, starts to implicate the Groundspeak servers. In the meantime, the alternative I’m using is to set FireFox or Chrome as my default browser, to work around the seeming Safari problem.

I would suggest LEGACY, CLOSED, GONE, MOVED, RELOCATED (whatever) be placed at the title beginning of the waymark title to catch one's eye quickly and also because this brings those waymarks together when you sort a list of waymarks. Changing the coordinates for a moved waymark item, destroys the history and enables muddling of visit photos from two different locations. If a business moves location, it should be waymarked in it's new location. The new location should reference the waymark of the old location. An edit request for the old waymark should be submitted, changing the title to MOVED: <old title> and adding some text to the long description inserting a reference to the new waymark. Pictures for each waymark will be different. Visit photos could then be posted to the appropriate matching location without confusion. That way photos for two different locations would be separated. You could still post a visit photo to the old location, though the business signage may be different from the original waymarked business. This maintains the proper Waymarking history that we talk about. Here's an example of a Bicycle Shop that moved from WM58KY to WMAF37. This is currently happening with Apple Stores as they replace an older store with a newer and more modern store. Here's an example of a bungled job as the reviewer decided to copy the newly submitted information from WMF12H into the old waymark, WM49AP, losing everything about the original store. Here's an example, handled properly, of a an Apple store that moved from WM4AM7 to WMNCXQ. And another Apple store moved from WM49AQ to WMJ1AC. I've also found Decorated Utility Boxes that have been repainted with new artwork. I see these as two different waymarks, historically, whose visit photos should be kept separate to avoid confusion. Some examples here are: WM90G2 repainted to WME92B WMK6XP repainted to WMJM9M WMD4AJ repainted to WMPWW1 I'm not doing this to "run up my numbers", but to preserve history in Waymarking. Another interesting case where this might happen is when one business closes, say an Independent Movie Rental Shops, WM7FFE, becomes some new type of business. A new waymark would be created in some new category, where it would be nice, historically, to link these two waymarks together to show the progress of time. Obviously, visit photos would then be posted to the appropriate waymark for what the business was when the visit occurred.

Why would we waymark a place where access is forbidden?

This proposal looks a lot like the category, Public Access Lands. What would go in the new category that wouldn't fit in Public Access Lands? What are the differences? Should Public Access Lands also be excluded from Protected Natural Areas because of the overlap? What about excluding U.S. National Natural Landmarks?

How about a link on the right column of the home page to see the top 100 way markers and their stats, like they have on ebird the Cornell Lab birding site. They have it for every county. In this case you wouldn't need to break it down by geographic area. Oh, and when you click to update your own stats it always blows up but it does update and you can see it by reselecting profile, then stats. These are pretty rudimentary stats, with web pages generated by some scripts that I run occasionally. The home page already contains links to lists of Waymarkers with over 500 postings (currently 207 known) and Waymarkers with over 1,000 visits (currently 189 known). There is manual sorting involved to order the lists, because there is no published API to access the data programmatically. This fixed ordering will fall out of date until I update the pages each time. The stats don’t become completely unusable, because you can still see all the changes around your stats banner to see roughly where you rank. I presume that by "click to update your own stats”, you are refreshing or reloading the web page. I don’t recommend doing this frequently (many times a day), because the web page updates every stats banner on the page which, from my view of how long this full refresh takes, taxes the Waymarking server heavily. I don’t find that refreshing the stats list page or clicking a banner to get to a user profile ever causes a crash though. I’m not sure what “blows up” for you. An Error Has Occurred Your request has resulted in an error. You may choose to retry your previous request. Or you may tell us what you were doing when this error occurred: This happens when I click on button 'update my post statistics now' on the stat page " The home page already contains links to lists of Waymarkers with over 500 postings" on my home page. the only stats on the home page I see are country/region counts Are there different versions out there? I have an Apple/Mac OS/X safari There isn’t anything you can update on the Waymarking Stats website, other than refreshing pages. This is a personal website that I maintain for the interest of the Waymarking community, separate from Groundspeak’s Waymarking.com site. The error you are encountering is coming from somewhere on the Waymarking.com website. I think I remember seeing a link like that somewhere, but I can’t find it now. Someone at Groundspeak would need to address the failure you’re encountering.

How about a link on the right column of the home page to see the top 100 way markers and their stats, like they have on ebird the Cornell Lab birding site. They have it for every county. In this case you wouldn't need to break it down by geographic area. Oh, and when you click to update your own stats it always blows up but it does update and you can see it by reselecting profile, then stats. These are pretty rudimentary stats, with web pages generated by some scripts that I run occasionally. The home page already contains links to lists of Waymarkers with over 500 postings (currently 207 known) and Waymarkers with over 1,000 visits (currently 189 known). There is manual sorting involved to order the lists, because there is no published API to access the data programmatically. This fixed ordering will fall out of date until I update the pages each time. The stats don’t become completely unusable, because you can still see all the changes around your stats banner to see roughly where you rank. I presume that by "click to update your own stats”, you are refreshing or reloading the web page. I don’t recommend doing this frequently (many times a day), because the web page updates every stats banner on the page which, from my view of how long this full refresh takes, taxes the Waymarking server heavily. I don’t find that refreshing the stats list page or clicking a banner to get to a user profile ever causes a crash though. I’m not sure what “blows up” for you.

This opens up a whole new world of park Waymarking for me! County parks are already accepted into Municipal Parks. From the Municipal Parks and Plazas Description: "For the U.S. county parks are also acceptable."

The stats banner is one thing still not working on the site. It is not working on profile page either. I have been out of the country for a few weeks. My collector scripts were not running to completion, because of Waymarking pages failing to load on a timely basis. With the stats banner not working the top waymarkers / visitors lists are pretty useless. I got discouraged and decided to let the old pages just age. Now that the web site is supposedly more responsive, I will try to update the lists and pages again, sometime soon. I'm just returning from a second European trip and getting back to updating Waymarking Stats. I discovered a change in the Waymarking Stats banner made by Groundspeak and was able to get the lists of leading waymarkers and visitors functioning again. All other pages have been updated as well. Enjoy!

It looks like the Pacific Crest Trail is already covered in Long Distance Hiking Trails. There's a half dozen submissions in that category already.

Well, suddenly today, I just noticed that everything seems to be working again. The above listed functions are all working again for me. Something got better somewhere.

Other than the Waymarking Home Page, the site is virtually non-functioning for me. I get an error pulling up waymark lists for a category, trying to open individual waymarks, trying to review waymarks. Different browsers, different computers, nothing works for me. I'm not even trying to post waymarks anymore.

Waymarking has always been a self-policing site managed by the community, with votes on new categories, then approvals of submissions by category officers, etc. Are you saying you think this is a bad thing? Or that the people in the community who vote and make decisions are elitist? Do you believe there should be any quality standards imposed at the Waymarking site? Do you think the practice being used by the individual making submissions using photos from Google Street View is acceptable?

That was a one-time study done in November, 2014, that I only posted in the Forums. Since it was dependent of when officers logged in, it was quickly out-of-date. I've added a link to the study at the bottom of the main Waymarking Stats page for historical reference. I found the original forum post. It was in the Abandoned Categories thread, since it related to how recently officers had logged in for a category. SilverQuill leads the most categories. Perhaps Lumbricus is an officer in the most categories. The stats banner is one thing still not working on the site. It is not working on profile page either. I have been out of the country for a few weeks. My collector scripts were not running to completion, because of Waymarking pages failing to load on a timely basis. With the stats banner not working the top waymarkers / visitors lists are pretty useless. I got discouraged and decided to let the old pages just age. Now that the web site is supposedly more responsive, I will try to update the lists and pages again, sometime soon.

In other words, without the double negative: "I have the feeling that I could live without this category." I have to agree.

The Garmin line (Colorado/Oregon/Montana/Dakota) has the feature of waypoint averaging. You set the GPSr unit down, start sampling and with an unobstructed sky view, in 30-90 seconds you usually have a coordinate reading that appears to be accurate to 6-10 feet. It's perfect for geocaching. I use it on all small objects, like utility boxes, sculptures, statues, etc, and for most other readings too. Presumably, other modern GPSr units have this capability too. I highly recommend it. I always check the coordinates of submissions. After all, this is a GPS Coordinate based activity and should be as accurate as possible. I find inaccuracies in approved waymarks by glancing at maps and I find this very disheartening. For me, this devalues Waymarking in general. Most objects we waymark, outside of buildings, can often be seen in the satellite view. If the waymark is for a cemetery and the coordinates look to be in a residential neighborhood, something's wrong. For Static Aircraft Displays, I expect to find an airplane in the satellite view, unless it's recently placed. The same is true for Velodromes and many large objects. Entrances to buildings, museums, parks, etc should be reasonable close in the satellite view. For objects near a road, Google Street View can also be used and may have different photos available than the satellite view. Sometimes I see a utility box at the coordinates before it's been painted and sometimes I see the painted box. Sometimes the submitted waymark contains an address as well. I often put that address into Google Maps and see if the map comes to the same place as the posted coordinates. I may also compare data from a supplied website URL to see if it matches. As I've stated before in this thread, if you are not examining the coordinates somehow, you are not giving the activity of Waymarking your best service as a category officer.