Route stats on area pages, other changes

Ever wonder how many routes of each grade, type, or star rating are within a given area? I added some fun charts to all areas pages.

See the Colorado page for example:
mountainproject.com/v/color…

And here's what it looks like for Eldo:

eldo stats

And as a side note, a huge number of back-end changes just went live with this update. Five javascript libraries with code up to 10 years old got thrown out in favor of a single modern one. This affects every page on the site and thousands of lines of code. So I'm sure some things are broken... tell me what and I'll fix it!

Hey Nick, love the idea!

The one thing I notice is regarding the pie charts. It's a little unclear to me which slice belongs to which type of climbing. Maybe if the climbing type was written within the corresponding slice, or just color-code the text of the climbing type to the slice as well.

Just a thought, but nice work on the updates!

Thanks for the innovations! However, the list of routes at each area is completely gone. The photos are still there, but the quality got really bad compared to before. Looking forward to accessing the route guides again.

This is a fantastic addition to the site.

Great addition.

Several bugs in the last few hours, mostly about routes/areas not showing up on the left side of the page. Should be fixed.

And the site was very slow for a while... but that should be fixing itself overnight. Actually I found several server optimizations that should make it faster than ever.

Hey....neat new feature, Nick. Makes our local areas look weak in the quality stars department, but a very useful tool that provides a quick visual assessment of an area. Thanks!

I like it!!! It would be great if on the difficulty rating grapgh if you could click on the difficulty and it would bring up all of the routes in that grade.

+1 for what travis said. Would make it much faster to see all the routes of a given grade verus doing a search.

This functionality must exist somewhere since you can do it on the tick breakdown page.

Good work! Faster is always a plus!!

The functionality is easy, but it would hard to give a consistent experience: when looking at CA (or even Joshua Tree), there are far too many routes to pop up for a given grade/type. It would work as you get to an area with fewer routes, but I hate inconsistent behavior.

A general comment that doesn't have as much to do with the graphs, but is as a result of the graphs now noticeable. There are some regions (Nick's chosen example of Eldo is a great example) where the Star Ratings are really well distributed. There are quite a lot of classics, a lot of great routes, even more routes that are 'just' good, and then a lot of ok routes, with the addition of some routes which are better left unclimbed. However, I've noticed that far too many areas have way too many classics and great climbs. For example, let's compare Moore's Wall - a nice crag, but by no means a world-class crag - to THE world class climbing mecca, Yosemite Valley. Judging by these two charts, I'd be better off going to Moore's Wall than to Yosemite Valley because the percentage of quality routes is greater. The percentage of classics is roughly equal (though I don't know how you could say Porter's Pooh has the same quality as Astroman), as is the amount of great routes, but the percentage of 2 star routes at Moore's is much less, and there are almost no 1 star routes there and no "bombs".
I think it would be more helpful if we started realizing that "classic" is a term that should be reserved for truly great routes and not shy away from calling a route just "ok". OK routes can be really fun too! Climbing is generally fun, and just because you had a great time climbing a route doesn't necessarily make it a great route. It's general knowledge that some of the 50 classics are, in actually, total garbage routes. Could it be possible for us to avoid exaggerating the quality of routes here on MP?

WRT search, it sounds like what people are after is a quicker way to do common, focused searches.

WRT complaints about the star distribution: why should we assume stars (or ratings) have a Normal distribution? Especially when it comes to an open-sourced route database, how many people are going to take the time to enter all those bombs and near-bombs? Doesn't a skewed distribution make sense?

D.Buffum wrote: If you expect Yosemite, you're an idiot.

Agreed. And I think you're right that you need to keep it in the context of just that one crag. But if I were to come to Wisconsin I'd want to know where I should go for some great climbing. Let's assume Wisconsin has more than one crag, for example 2, and crag X has "Red Recollection" and is otherwise a pretty good crag. Crag y, however has "Dead Red" which is rated 4 stars, but is actually a total chosspile and dangerous as all hell because the rock flakes off and leaves each new attempt with a slightly different route. In fact, all the routes at crag y are like this, but it just feels particularly awesome when you've survived after climbing "Dead Red". And crag x is on a completely opposite side of the state as crag y, so that the locals aren't really communicating. Now when I come from somewhere else in the world and look at where I can go climbing, I see that Wisconsin has some great climbs! What I don't know, however, is that only crag x has great climbs, and crag y is not worth my time.

You're totally correct that hoping for a normalized quality rating system is absolutely bogus, but I think you can see what I mean. And your point about grade standardization is also valid. These charts are nice, but unreliable when you broaden your base outside of the crags. And any hope of this

D.Buffum wrote: It would be interesting (though not particularly useful) to have a bell curve of all areas in North America to compare with local crags, so you can see how the spread of ratings/stars in your area compares to the rest.

having any relevant meaning is also wasted. You can't even compare Seneca to the New River Gorge, and they're in the same state.

I think these charts should only be applied to areas without sub-areas - only areas with routes.

Nick,
Please fix the "Sort your to-do List" function, I can't read any of the route names after the fourth route. Thanks in advance.

[From Nick]: Fixed.