Razak

Think you can have up to 4 coords per waymark... the main coord and 3 variable coords. This can be set currently if the category owner offers the variable.

While I feel for them on that respect... I can't very well be an officer in 50 categories... my inbox gets filled quickly enough already=P And it isn't like I don't watch the category recruition threads to offer my help to those I do like... spamming my inbox with unasked for or even explained requests surely doesn't help endear me to the category that I already likely passed up...

In the last week I've recieved 2 invites to groups/category proposals that I wouldn't really likely be interested in being part of. (might submit waymarks but wouldn't likely join the group.) What is odd to me is that neither of these invites did I post any interest in previously, they don't have any accompanying message to tell me why they invited me, and I think one of em wasn't even on the first page of category recruitment threads when it invited me. Do these sorts of random invites happen to others? Or am I somehow the only one? If this is how group owners are doing business I am going to wonder about the practice of even allowing group owners to spam like that.

I like the idea as well, I would suggest a better category name... one with less slashies. Maybe Museum Marine Vehicles?

I like the category except any time you have a subjective word like "Interesting", it is likely to cause problems, much like the word WOW for old virtual caches. A more objective criteria (age or size) may be more useful. I do totally agree... wish someone could figure out better more objective usage of wording.... Because for instance what if a small post office was created last year in bunghill California, and it is almost universally considered one of the coolest post offices anyone has ever seen... this post office would never find a waymark which is a small problem of the age/size criteria... not to mention you also have the problem of extremely boring old, or big post offices being added (and there are many of them)... While I agree the vagueness of WoW and "Interesting" is a bit perplexing, so is the all-encompassing "50 years old" or "1000 sq ft" solution. Both have severe problems! The size/age requirements leave the solution to these problems up to the waymarker which if you want interesting is bad more often than not. The Interesting solution leaves it up to category owners but here we also have an issue where I don't think there is a group vote option for approving waymarks... I this type of solution would help the interesting/wow waymarks immensely... if 2 of the 3 members approve a waymark because it is interesting... I am more confident that it actually is and that good ones won't be passed up. (because they would be more universally accepted than just one guy saying "That doesn't look cool to ME") I do think we need a solution to this interesting problem.

I was going to let this one die if I was the only one interested in such a group, but RJMK (or is it RMJK?) joined the group after the email started working again so we only need one more officer and I'll give the thread a bump!

Personally I am torn... unless the waymark is like a game or something special... I would say waymark creation isn't far off from geocache creation and how many geocache owners log their own cache? I don't know I am torn cause I understand it however... it isn't quite as big a deal as geocaches... <shrug> Right now I see a number of people who do log their own, and a few categories that ask waymark owners to log their own... we'll see how this one turns out in the end but it seems right now that the community is leaning towards go ahead and log your own.

and the peasants rejoiced. (sorry for the quote from the not so great sitcom=P)

I think another value to having categories instead of variables is that it is just easier to browse... I mean yes assuming that they add variable search some day and assuming that you can do it in conjunction with the origin filter so that you only get the search results of a variable within your location.. you can find what you are looking for... (if you are ok with a lot of assumptions on what may or may not happen in the future). However, I do think there is a giant usability issue with this. If Groundspeak wants a broad base of users, they need it as easy to find as possible... and to be honest I think directories are much easier to browse through than a list of "10,000 waymarks" that have various variables that you can only see by viewing the waymarks directly. There are 2 ways this can be easier with categories... 1) I just go and look through the categories, find the one I like and "oh look at the pretty butterflies!" or 2) I can just switch to the origin search and have everything listed that is near me and "Oh look there are butterflies, and there are bees in my area! Yay!" Your method would be more like this (depending on how they do the variable search)..... Ok go to the category... now do a variable search.... so yes you could do a search on the supercategory but I think people would rather just click on the subcategory than have to go to the category and then do a search on what they are looking for. (I do think they'd have to have variable search in categoires, or at least have a drop down list of all the categories for the sole reason that every category can and does have a dozen or so variables, and that would be hell to sift through in a central search.) I just do think that the average user would rather have directory... (hell I think google should add common refinement search options once you do a general search to narrow down your searches better! which are similar to a category in many ways) PS - there are no bees or butterfly categories in Waymarking yet as far as I am aware, nor do I generally condone such categories... however perhaps I would condone a birds and the bees category

Maybe I don't quite know what you are talking about on this, but it sounds like it is working to me... I mean if you decline it, it isn't pending or holding.. it has been declined.... I do think that it'd be nice for category owners to be able to archive and un-archive, and change ownership of a waymark however...

No. That is the exact problem that Waymarking has solved. That being people posting unique coordinates for locations that match the 'target'... that was Locationless. I certainly hope you aren't proposing a "Puzzle Waymarking" like we have Puzzle Caches in Geocaching. Oh I can just see it now... someone is going to try to get a "PUZZLE CATEGORY" together. That might work with the proposed WOW Category... but I hope Waymarking continues to be about "See This!" instead of "Figure out how to See This!" Personally I think most categories are about "see this" but Waymarking games category allows for a little more flexibility than that... I guess this would go back to why you are ok with McDonald's though... if you don't like it, ignore it=P I don't think we should be rewarding people who come up with categories like "McDonald's" and penalizing people who actually are creative with Waymarking.

<tries to think of something to do with a variable for ISBN> Hey can you submit a waymark without coords?

I just wanna say this thread is absolutely nuts... it was only posted like a week and a half ago (if that long) and has double the views of any other topic in the first page.... and then we are on like our 4th or 5th topics lol

Historic church categories can always go into history super category even if they are still being used as churches

I think that is a fairly good list... if mormon churches and what not seem to have a high number of churches, then maybe you can give them their own category, but honestly I don't think that is necessary. I also wonder if the protestant category may need to get subcategorized at some point just because of the sheer number of denominations of that category (and that lutheran, evangelical, & baptist are fairly large denominations at least here in the states).... Black Dog... the reason for categories instead of variables isn't because varaibles aren't working... it is because there are just far too many christian churches in a lot of areas for this to be viable given that there are no filter methods by variable... you can get 30 churches in a town the size of 10k fairly easily in the U.S.... 10k is not a large city either so we could be looking at millions of christian churches which may be a bit much for a single category to hold, even if you did a keyword search... (Not to mention a bit much for category owners...

Looking at the list of newest categories I can't say that any of them really don't belong in Waymarking... though my category Building Buildings is likely most peculiar and probably got the most nay votes because people don't understand the idea of construction of large buildings being interesting... (Forgot about fairy hills... may have actually been a good category if we had an example... I still have no idea what one is!)

Totally agree with this!!!

Ahh cool beans, still think added searchability controlled by category owners would be cool (though incredibly difficult to actually implement!) Thanks=)

not sure if he was suggesting it all be under earthcaches or if he was just going along with my Lord of the Rings referance=P However, after reading a bit of the earthcaches category I start to wonder if the Nature category should just be called Earthcaching and have everything in a subcategory. I mean currently the only category in nature that shouldn't be under earthcaching under your description would be Scenic Road-side Lookouts. I don't know how to reconcile this either because there are bound to be more non-earthcaching nature categories, but it will always remain that most of them belong in earthcaching (that would also take control away from the current earthcaching group, err person) My take on it as of now is that earthcaching is only for educational nature waymarks. Meaning that pretty much anything in nature will apply to the category (and perhaps subcategories do need to be added), but the ones in earthcaches need to have educational information describing the features as well as everything else. The reason for this might just be that not everyone will be interested in explaining WHAT is going on with a particular earthly feature, but is still interested in the feature... The only other alternative is that you do like I said above, have just Earthcaching instead of Nature... and then have members of the group willing to go in and explain features of a waymark even if a waymark creator isn't willing to provide the educational stuff instead of just denying it. And then moving in any non-earthcaching nature stuff to maybe a "Places" category that might combine in structures or something to beef it up a bit? I don't know.

Aye that was about my understanding too... the Waymarking would find you the geocache... basically a combination of both sites... I would pre-suppose the best comparison might be a multi-cache where the first few caches would be virutal caches (Which are now known as Waymarks). Whether you would have a category for these types of geocaching in Waymarking.com or you would point to the Waymarking.com website in the geocache description I'm not sure about... but I like the idea of essentially combining the sites for a single type of event... it is interesting to me and could be a nice way to introduce geocachers into Waymarking as Thal stated.

YAY! I was starting to think that maybe I was the only one who'd ever seen these lol

I'm not going to suggest earthcache because I don't know I think of interesting rock formations or something in there (Maybe I don't understand earth caches?=P) But I do think a general Tide category isn't necessary yet. We don't get to pick super categories... I would suggest starting with one of your sub-categories and then doing another and another, (maybe even making suggetions in each one for a tidal supercategory) and then hoping to get a supercategory for it. Trying to start with the supercategory will be a pain in everyones butts if you actually get it at some point... you'd have to rearrange everything! In the meantime you wouldn't be stuck with people just wandering down to the beach and waypointing and having several hundred waypoints in the same area. I think the general concensus would be that more refined interesting categories would be preferable over one large category to rule them all.

Edit- decided to end my part on this discussion=) Good luck on figuring it out guys=)

I mentioned the idea of railroad cars in another thread... though not on permanent display... the idea would be to more track where railroad cars are and where they have been... not a static location waymark... I don't think Jeremy wants me to start this one however, apparantly they are adding tech for the functionality of moving waymarks at some point in the distant future.

I realize you weren't addressing me, but the problem with the argument is when people bring geocaching in comparison to Waymarking. A lot of people seem to just say "they are different don't compare them" and that is their main argument. This doesn't work, because they are similar so you can compare them. Not only that, most waymarkers come from a geocaching background, even moreso Groundspeak is targeting geocachers to get them a strong initial userbase before they really start branching. Because of these, just saying "don't compare them" becomes non-sensical. And that's more what I was saying. Comparing the two is advantagous because it allows us to figure out what exactly made geocaching popular, and what Waymarking might be missing. That doesn't mean we move things directly but we can certainly realize the ideas behind geocaching and come up with similar ideas. (Meaning we may not have goecoins per say in Waymarking, but the idea of a collectible item may certainly take hold in Waymarking.) Furthermore, comparing the two works because since we all understand geocaching on some level, it allows us all to gain a language that we can use when we are trying to portray an idea, especially if that idea is new or missing in Waymarking. Shutting down an idea just because geocaching has it is not beneficial. (After all geocaching did not invent the idea of collectable items, it has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years in human society and is proven to be enjoyed by nearly every human alive in some fashion... we are hoarders by nature!) You may not have been addressing me, or even meaning it the way I took it, and if this is the case I'm sorry. But I've been hearing that as an argument too much lately lol You could group them that way but it isn't comparable, or even that searchable (to some extent it is). I don't use locationless caches as a talking point because only a minority actually did it. I never used it so I can't talk about the rules in it. I do think categories are currently the strength and failure of Waymarking. The strength in the really good categories, and the failure in the really bland categories. Waymarking has a long way to go to be complete and I think one of the main ways it needs to really go is for visitation of a waymark to take a bigger priority than Waymarking. Even though it is easier to create a waymark than it is to place a cache, I still think that there is a much larger audience wanting to visit than create...it's just how the world works... less work. Not only that, eventually creating waymarks will be much more difficult as more people place them... we need to start thinking of what will happen to this site when that eventuality takes place... you can keep creating categories... but what happens when most of the new categories only have waymarks that were already created in other categories just lumped together in a new way? Are these going to be as fun to go get knowing that there really is little finding in it? Or is it going to be done mostly to buff stats? Maybe we will see a bunch of odd ducks dress up as Ronny McDonny and see how many McDonald's they can visit in a single day... that'd be a picture worth taking <QQ at Quasar and jots down a birthday present idea>