glorfunk

The idea wold be that only categories that where put up and abandoned would expire. If a user set up a unique category that only he used or mabe only a few people used that would be fine. He would only need to log on every month or two to renew it to keep it alive. A simple check box and submit. Then when enough waypoints are logged it would become permanent. Then with some sort of rating system waypoint owners could start to get suggestions on other categories that their waypoint might be better suited for. If enough waypoints migrated out of a category and into better ones then the empty category would automatcly get pruned from the tree, no intervention required. And as for grossly inappropriate sites, I think "site of a corpse" was mentioned earlier you report it to the staff. A good policy on that should probobly be written. It took ebay a while to compile their list of stuff you can't acution, mostly through trial and error. I'm thinking of geocaching.com as a model. The caches are not owned by geocahing. With the exception of legal issues geocaching does not tell owners where to put them or what to put in them. They belong to the owners. The same could be said of waymarks. The owners do significant work to mark and log their waypoints and i don't think it's unreasonable for them to want to place them on the site according to their preferences. I'm also thinking of the Waymarking staff that will have to manage whatever system goes into effect. Websites in general take alot to mannage as it is and any of the workload that they can pass on to automation and user inputs will make their lives that much less stressfull. These are worldwide sites. Just think of how many geocaches are out there and then remove the neccesity for a cache and the potential for descrete wamarks is staggering.

An example of what i was talking about. a user creates a new category lets say "hotdog stands". now that category will expire in say 60 days unless it reaches some threshold of waypoints. We will say ten for arguments sake. So the user has 60 days to get ten waypoints logged into the category. if he doesn't then in 60 days he has to renew the category. if he gets ten then the category stays alive and doesn't have to be renewed. If he was a one timer then his category drops off the tree and the waypoint owners can recategorize their locations. It is somewhat similar to your voting system only you vote by where you put your waypoints. On the flip side the guy who just has to have his category of "air" can have it if he is willing to work on it and keep it alive. Who knows alot of people could feel the same way as he does. It could be taken further in that if a category gets so many subcategories it moves up to a thrid or second teir category. It is more interesting to me as a dynamic heirarchy than a static tree. No matter how you try to organize this thing half the people are going to think that you've done it wrong. At least in a system like this the responsibility is on the users to self manage. It would be a mess for a little while but after a few months you would probobly end up with a really solid heirarchy.

Hi i just scanned over this in regards to the creation of categories. Has anyone thought about rather than having a big complicated beauocracy of category managment to just have unused, unpopular categories expire? then your waypoints get dumped from a category and you are asked to recategorize them when you log on again. Also each visiting user could rank the appropriateness of a categorization (sort of like those music ranking stars) and suggest an alternate category for a waypoint. It becomes the responsibility of the people who want to keep wierd or stupid categories to renew them and keep them alive. I was a little dissapointed in the Waymarking site when i logged on tonight. I was going to make a category and found this whole newsgroups BS happening. If you want to get the WM site moving like geocashing then you have to give the users ownership. If I have to petition you for my category then it's your site - your category, and not mine. No thanks.