MountainWoods

Wellll, I'm not very good with the politics that goes into making a new category, never having successfully started one. It's interesting to see that these single farm stands are actually growing in some areas. Obviously they would have to be "seasonal permanent" -- that is, the same location every year, as opposed to a pick-up truck that sells product hither and yon; but with the understanding that many (probably most) will only be open seasonally, depending on the produce, of course. I'm behind anyone who wants to propose such a thing in the proper forum. My original post was more along the lines of "thinking out loud" about something that seemed a pity to me in terms of a hole in Waymarking. In fact, I don't even know of a farm stand around where I live in the Ozarks that I could Waymark. But I kept the photos for one in Florida on a recent trip. Just in case the hole ever got plugged.

I'm surprised that there is no category for farm/fruit stands. There is a category for farmers' markets, which have to be the produce from > 1 farm, and which have become pretty common. But the old farm/fruit stands that I remember well from my childhood in the 1960s, and which are now exceedingly rare, have no presence in Waymarking. That is a pity. I remember driving a short distance from our home in northern Illinois to the then small town of Crestwood, which was mostly a bunch of farm fields with a few businesses along Cicero Avenue, (look at it now in Google Earth!!), and there were a couple of different farms that had stands staffed for a good part of the day by a member of the respective families of those farms. They were delighted when you stopped to purchase corn, tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, or whatever else they sold. When we drove down to my grandparents near Kankakee, there were a few stands along the way vying for customers to drop by. Some of them with just an honor system drop box for money, and just pick out your own dozen ears, or whatever. Even less than 20 years ago when we lived near Paw Paw, IL we'd drive east on Chicago Road and stop at a stand for some fresh produce. That stand may still be there. But they have become very few and far between. The few hold outs deserve to be remembered in Waymarking -- in my opinion, even more so than Farmers Markets.

You'll note that the OP says that they did exactly that. I think they just wanted to warn the community that a stray 22 year old girl was wandering around, possibly up to no good. Remember that the F of the S is more D than the M.

I agree with Blasterz and BK. But if you do open it up to that trumpet stuff, go ahead and change the description to explicitly state that the category accepts both anamorphosis and the deceiving the eye stuff. That is, don't let anything to chance. You're expanding the category, so update the description. IF you think that it's worth adding the other stuff. I'm not familiar with either thing, being a country boy who spends as little time in the city as possible (though I went to college in Chicago for 5.5 years...). So my only point is to make the wording match the desire.

BTW, does it include old clothes washers used as mailbox stands?

I think the problem with that one, whatever it is, is terminal I edited it, changed the 93 to 093, then changed the 40.38 to 40.381. Neither had any effect. I edited in the long description. Nothing. I did notice that the system always adds a "2" to the end of "40.381", giving it 4 digits of precision. I even extended both long and lat to 6 digits. It always comes back the same, with the same error. I've had to change coordinates on a waymark before (both saved and fully submitted) and it often throws in a random fourth digit. The way to circumvent that is to put in a deliberate fourth digit of zero. So instead of changing 40.38 to 40.381 you need to change it to 40.3810. Mathematically they are the same, of course; but character-string-wise, they are not. I believe the random 4th digit is a common programming issue. The developer is using something like strncpy or memcpy in C/C++, or some equivalent in Java, but they forget that those do not automatically put an end-of-string NUL byte into the destination buffer. So whatever happens to be there in memory from earlier actions ends up attached to the end of the string. The developer should have either used memset (C/C++) or equivalent in Java before using strncpy or memcpy (to set the entire destination buffer to NUL bytes), or they should have made sure that the byte after the copied bytes is deliberately set to '\0' (NUL), or they should have simply used strcpy instead, depending on how the data is stored. Fortunately, now that I'm retired, I don't usually have to diddle with such bugs. Though I do still do some programming on my own interpretive language that is similar to, but much more powerful than awk or its enhancements (nawk, gawk, and so on).

I think you were joking with me MW, but if I'm honest: it could very well be in Antlers! LOL Gawd this hobby -- ha ha ha ha ha Actually, I've been through Antlers a bunch of times; and I know that they do have a little museum there of some kind. (In fact, there's one of those Usually Soggy Paper Game things within the museum that you have to ask the proprietors to get out so that you can sign the non-soggy log in this case, and register it as Found It.) It's a big enough town that it could have multiple small museums. There's a nice old train depot there.

Or Antlers?

I'm just guessing -- trying to look for commonality. It looks like the 4 digits isn't the problem, since the new (pending) waymark looks good, and has automagically been rounded to 3 digits. It's just that the only 2 examples I've bumped into over the years are ones that, when you can get to them, they have 4 digits after the decimal point. But by the looks of it, that is just coincidence. One of the waymarks is in the town near me named Exeter, and it is the Exeter Warning Siren. If you can get the waymark in a search results (I used nearby waymarks on a different Exeter waymark), then you can click on the little Log It! icon in the upper right corner of the listing in the search results. But you can never get into the waymark page itself. Anyway, 4 digits isn't it. There's something else that causes some waymarks to be messed up.

Glad to hear you got it working. When the waymark is approved, would you please include a link to it here? I'd like to check something out. I noticed that you are using 4 digits after the decimal point which, I think, sometimes causes a problem when attempting to view the waymark. At least, I know of two other waymarks that always give errors when attempting to view them (you have to "trick" Waymarking by attempting to do an edit suggestion on them just to bring them up!), and in both cases they have 4 digits after the decimal point instead of three. Thanks.

I've had that happen when the site hiccupped when I did a save or submit, and it actually did save it, and then tried to re-save or submit it. (Perhaps a double click or something?) Check your unfinished waymarks before doing anything to it. You may already have it there in your unfinished.

Thanks. Can you please also fix the aggravating extra newline in multiline fields? (That cannot have been introduced by swapping a server, I'm sure.)

For the current persistent problems to be fixed. As of today the map is always showing up blank. Back to copy/paste coordinates into Google Earth. It'd be wonderful if we could just stop having something else broken each day when we get into it.

Ditto MountainWoods

If you can come up with another means of proof of the identity of the church, fine. But many will not have a website, so the only alternative we have at the moment is a sign. A possibility might be the obvious exterior nature of the building as a church (crosses, religious figures, etc.) and a website, any website (Churchfinder, as an example), indicating the church to be at the address given by the waymarker. As for the "not" between "if" and "ALL". - It's fine as is. K. Many (and I do mean many) of the Country Churches that I find have neither a sign nor a website. They are only identified on topographic maps, with the overall shape of the building and parking lot assisting in the identification that it is, indeed, a church -- perhaps a steeple and/or bell tower or something else that is "typical" of churches. Fortunately, many of these unsigned churches are also located on one of those 1 million "location finder" sites (religious or otherwise), so you have a good suggestion on that. A few of the "topo churches" that I found didn't even appear on a location finder site, for whatever reason. These may be left out in the cold, since nothing identifies them as churches except a topo map.

BTW, the site is down now. And I quote:

I guess the way to "fix" an issue is to kill the messenger who keeps calling it out. Issue fixed. Everyone has to wait more months for approvals. Right? Makes sense to me. Not.

Abandoned Cemeteries are very hard to find. Many of the waymarks submitted to that category are declined, with the main reason being that the poster misunderstood the difference between abandoned (NOT maintained) and inactive (no longer open for burials). It matters not if the last grave was from 300 or 500 years ago, if the cemetery is still mowed and cared for. The cemetery must actually be non-maintained, abandoned, almost (or completely) forgotten to qualify. If the cemetery is being mowed and maintained, it is not abandoned, but simply inactive (for more burials). There was discussion among group officers to modifying the category description to try to make the distinction clearer, but when we looked at it, it already says that the cemetery cannot be being maintained, so the distinction is already in the description. Abandoned cemeteries may still have a nice sign (though usually fading from the sun) and may be on the topographic maps. But otherwise, many or most of the local folks might not even know they are there, unless one stumbles upon one.

I hear you. There is supposed to be a procedure in place for taking over dormant categories. I tried it a long time ago when my name wasn't as well known in Waymarking -- I was probably an officer in one category (two at the most) at the time. I haven't tried it since because I was discouraged that even the final solution wasn't working. I got no response back from Groundspeak. Perhaps it would work the next time I try, if I ever do, but the big question is "Who do you contact from Groundspeak?" The answer seems to keep changing. I wish there were some automated solutions (to some extent) like John mentions: automatically cleaning out groups of officers who have not logged in for X months or a year or something. But that's half of a solution: how does the back-fill process start? According to the How To page, one contacts someone (who?) in Groundspeak to offer to be the leader. Some folks (probably those who've been around for a long time and that Groundspeak "knows") get this to work. How do I know? I saw the group that I mentioned before that I asked GS to be take over the lead (with no response) eventually taken over by one of the Power Hitters. I'm glad they got it, because now the category is no longer dormant. Great. But who do you have to be to get this to work? It doesn't seem consistent to me. Am I "there" yet? If not, when will I be? (That is, my requests will count.) When am I a Power Hitter? By number of Waymarks posted? By number of groups that I'm an officer? Oh well, that's just a discussion of the existing process that has some issues. 'Twould be great to have a bit more automated solution to this issue, so that we don't need to "bother" Groundspeak.

Agreed. I don't really care about this category one way or another, but from our experiences here, if you don't include those other kinds of fishing, then in about a year (or less) someone else is going to come along and say "Darn it. That category is too restrictive. I think I'll try to start a new category for the other types of fishing that they should have allowed." Better to just make it a variable or something, instead of having a slew of very-related categories. (Analogy: We shouldn't need Abandoned Cemeteries and Churchyard Cemeteries if the original Worldwide Cemeteries had had variables for those things.)

Ditto. For now. One problem is that the darn browsers sometimes cache things too much! I had IE open for other tabs for my work, but when I'd try to go to Waymarking.com it would immediately say that it wasn't reachable. Hmmm. "You didn't even take enough time to check it out, ya' darn browser!" So I left all of my tabs, restarted IE and cleared the cache, and then it came right up to Waymarking.com. I'm sure from the immediacy of the "can't reach" messages that it was just using cached can't-get-there information, instead of actually trying.

Yes. In fact, I was just in the site reviewing waymarks when it seemed to go down entirely. I can't get back in at this time.

So is this going to end up like the U.S. Thanksgiving Day in the 1940s where some folks celebrated it on the 3rd Thursday of November and some on the last Thursday of November? Arbitrary milestone or not, let's leave it where it already is, since so many of us (all 11 of us!) already have it on our calendars for September 8. What say?

Ditto. It seemed that the map only disappeared for one or two days, then it came back. Makes everything much easier. Thanks to whodunit.

This thread is a duplicate of one in the Waymarking.com Features & Functions forum, where it more properly fits.