The Changelog : August 2023

Hey all, in case you missed the previous Change Log please check out the original post here.

We've got some changes to let you all know about for this past month.

Updated logos : Perhaps the most obvious change are the updated logos across the Adventure Projects. The X is reflective of onX maps and our mission is to awaken the adventurer inside everyone. We're excited about the new logos and the partnership they communicate. How can I address and embrace the elephant in the room… we have been onX for almost a decade ... RIP twitter.

Spam accounts : We've been seeing an increase in bogus accounts. We've added tooling to help eliminate and identify these accounts before creation. We will be continuing to monitor this, as these accounts are a pain point for our moderators and admins. We have also removed public pages for accounts that have been disabled due to SPAM, abuse, etc. These accounts will no longer be public.

Site performance : We did some work to improve the performance of top contributor’s profile and about pages. The Profile pages were one of our biggest pain points in terms of performance. The more a user contributed, ticked routes, or added to-dos the slower the pages would be. To fix this we limited the amount of ticks and todos that show on the map. In one of the most extreme cases: we have at least one user who has over 20K to-dos! These users were unable to view their profiles at all because the map was trying to render everything and it simply wasn't designed to support that. The tick map now shows the most recent ticks and to-dos, but there is a limit to how many ticks it will show. We plan to continue improving these pages adding more features with performance in mind.

Page Views : Page views for routes have now been re-enabled! Routes should now update daily with their new page views. Page views are processed each day and are an important piece in the Classics algorithm.

Please continue using the forums to let us know about problems you are encountering. This information is extremely helpful and there is a small team of us who are trying to address issues as we can. And a huge shout out to Zander and our CS team, it’s a lot of work keeping up with the forums and they really help us prioritize pressing issues.

Make sure to watch the forums for the next change log. We've got some exciting things planned for September and can't wait to tell you about them.

>>> In one of the most extreme cases: we have at least one user who has over 20K to-dos!

One per day for 54+ years. Nice.

Can you all there in computer expert world suggest the best way to deal with the spam/bot accounts?

I have been using various approaches:

1. flag the post and report it as spam/bot.

2. comment in the thread that so-and-so is a bot.

3. Quote the bot post, and comment that it is a bot.

4. Quote the bot post but delete all the nonsense content, and mention it is a bot.

Are any of these approaches preferable in terms of thwarting the bots goal, which is not comprehensible to me?

Thanks for this! We appreciate the updates. It’s always shocking when you find out how people use your apps.

I only have 300 ticks, but with so many being removed from the map it has essentially ruined the map feature for me completely. The map does nothing to show the number of areas I've visited. If we're going to have a map, it should be accurate, or what is the function? 

Would it be possible to just remove all the todos from the map but keep all the ticks? It seems unnecessary to show on the map a person's personal list of routes they haven't climbed. 

Another solution could be that the embedded map on the users main profile shows a limited number of data points, but the expanded map still has all data. Then the main profile would not be bogged down. 

I would also suggest that ticks and todos be capped with an upper limit. For example 1000 max on the Todo list, 5000 max on the ticks. 

I'm also really disappointed in the map now missing indicators for all ticks/to-dos ... it was super fun to view all the places I've been, like hanging a paper map on my wall and marking it with push-pins

I agree with WW's suggestions to balance performance improvement while maintaining full functionality

* only load map ticks by default, offer an option to view to-dos

* only load a limited count by default, offer an option to "View All"

* show the limited map on the main page, but link to an enhanced-view map page with more

Dwayne Parton wrote:

Site performance : We did some work to improve the performance of top contributor’s profile and about pages. The Profile pages were one of our biggest pain points in terms of performance. The more a user contributed, ticked routes, or added to-dos the slower the pages would be. To fix this we limited the amount of ticks and todos that show on the map. In one of the most extreme cases: we have at least one user who has over 20K to-dos! These users were unable to view their profiles at all because the map was trying to render everything and it simply wasn't designed to support that. The tick map now shows the most recent ticks and to-dos, but there is a limit to how many ticks it will show. We plan to continue improving these pages adding more features with performance in mind.

This is a huge bummer for me. I really love seeing all my ticks of where I've climbed over time, and an incomplete map is basically useless.

Might it be possible to always show all ticks, but hide to-dos by default? Then, when a user with too many to-dos tries to reveal the to-do layer they could receive a warning that they have too many to-dos and it will impact performance. 

Memories are the best tick map.

Where's Walden wrote:

I only have 300 ticks, but with so many being removed from the map it has essentially ruined the map feature for me completely. The map does nothing to show the number of areas I've visited. If we're going to have a map, it should be accurate, or what is the function? 

Would it be possible to just remove all the todos from the map but keep all the ticks? It seems unnecessary to show on the map a person's personal list of routes they haven't climbed. 

Another solution could be that the embedded map on the users main profile shows a limited number of data points, but the expanded map still has all data. Then the main profile would not be bogged down. 

I would also suggest that ticks and todos be capped with an upper limit. For example 1000 max on the Todo list, 5000 max on the ticks. 

We will definitely see what we can do to prioritize finishing up the work on the tick/todo map. Hopefully, we can create apace in the next week or two. Thanks for letting us know; great suggestions. 

I, too, would love to see all of my ticks return to the maps. Don't care much for the To-Dos on the map. 

Hi admins,

When developing with mapping tools and with large numbers of markers, I have used MarkerClusterer in the past. However that's Google Maps specific.

It looks like it's natively supported in MapBox, perhaps that's something to consider? Then you'd be able to show all ticks/to-dos/etc. again.

Please bring back all ticks to the map. I don't care for the to-do's. You can just remove those completely in my opinion. Just keep the ticks and show all of them.

If that's still too slow, how about making a check box for recent and all time? Load the recent by default, and let the user click all time and wait as long as needed to render. Can that work?

This tick map with all user ticks is now available for early access. For more info on that visit this forum.

Sorry correction. NOW available made a typo there.

I'd like to argue that ToDo's are actually equally if not more important to properly display on the map:

When planning a trip, it's important to figure out what areas to focus on, sometimes considering the terrain for sun exposure or altitude/snowfall.

Better solutions to mitigate performance issues due to excessive ToDo size:

• Only show ToDo's when the current map selection satisfies a fixed limit of them
• Only load all ToDo's by explicit user request (Refresh button any time the map is moved)

This way, full functionality is restored while maintaining good load times regardless of ToDo count.

Hope to see it implemented!

Edit: Wondering whether I should manually re-add my 110 ToDo's or write a script for it. Poor database.

Edit 2: 440 clicks and roughly 10.000 HTTP requests later I'm finally done. At this point the absurdity of the current solution should occur to anyone.

Edit 3: One ToDo got lost in the process so I had to go through most of the pages again...

Wondering whether I should manually re-add my 110 ToDo's or write a script for it. Poor database.

I'm curious why you had to re-add your ticks? Were they in the mobile app and not on the web? I'd like to dig into that a bit more, you should not have to add ticks that are already in your account. This sounds like a bug to me, and I'll make sure to look into it as soon as we down what's going on. Thanks

Dwayne Parton wrote:

I'm curious why you had to re-add your ticks? Were they in the mobile app and not on the web? I'd like to dig into that a bit more, you should not have to add ticks that are already in your account. This sounds like a bug to me, and I'll make sure to look into it as soon as we down what's going on. Thanks

I re-added ToDos to make them visible on the map again. As noted above, only recent ToDos are shown. To my disappointment the effect was brief. It sounds like a bug because it‘s bad UX. Hoping you‘ll focus on restoring map usability.

Hello Friends,

The "heat map" version of the Tick Map has been in BETA now for over 6 months, with the caption "We're working to make the tick map amazing, shareable, and something you all can be stoked on."

I am still more sad than stoked about the loss of a feature that I used to really enjoy.

The original Map would show Ticks (yellow) and To-Dos (green), and both were enabled by default for all time.  Due to performance issues with certain users who had long lists, you reduced the map to either a certain count or date range of most recently added Ticks and To-Dos.

You introduced the heat map, but it has several limitations -- not visible to users who aren't logged in, and doesn't show tick markers as distinctly.

There were several performance improvement steps that you could have taken to preserve the original functionality, including:

* only load map ticks by default, offer an option to enable to-dos

* only load a limited count by default, offer an option to "View All"

* show the limited map on the main page (a certain count or date range), but link to an enhanced-view map page with more options for all time

I'd like to renew the feedback that the new heat map feature is not an improvement over the old, and I'm curious whether the improvements that you mentioned working on are still on your roadmap.

Thanks!

Hi Annie, thanks for the well-written flag for the beta Tick map. Your timing is great as work was underway to add in To-Dos and make some tweaks to the functionality and design of the new map. I'll try to touch on the points you brought up and give a status update. 

Currently, you should see all your Ticks and To-Dos on the new map. The heat map design currently highlights Ticks at a broader zoom level and then To-Dos show at a finer zoom level using the same yellow and green dot design from the old map. If you click a Tick or To-Do, you should see a card with more info. If you right click or control + click the map, you can view in 3D. 

Hopefully, this gets the new map to an equal or better place than the old map because you can see all your Tick/To-Do data (equal), related info (better - you can see more related info with the new map), and use a higher-powered map (better). Improvements can definitely be made with the design and functionality, but more-so tweaks than adding fundamental missing pieces. 

With that in mind, we want to better understand what users find valuable with a Tick/To-Do map. (It sounds like you'd like to see Ticks at a broader zoom level and/or with better distinction from one another.)

Does this help? What did I miss? Any/all feedback is appreciated :)

Zander Göpfert wrote:

Hi Annie, thanks for the well-written flag for the beta Tick map. Your timing is great as work was underway to add in To-Dos and make some tweaks to the functionality and design of the new map. I'll try to touch on the points you brought up and give a status update. 

Currently, you should see all your Ticks and To-Dos on the new map. The heat map design currently highlights Ticks at a broader zoom level and then To-Dos show at a finer zoom level using the same yellow and green dot design from the old map. If you click a Tick or To-Do, you should see a card with more info. If you right click or control + click the map, you can view in 3D. 

Hopefully, this gets the new map to an equal or better place than the old map because you can see all your Tick/To-Do data (equal), related info (better - you can see more related info with the new map), and use a higher-powered map (better). Improvements can definitely be made with the design and functionality, but more-so tweaks than adding fundamental missing pieces. 

With that in mind, we want to better understand what users find valuable with a Tick/To-Do map. (It sounds like you'd like to see Ticks at a broader zoom level and/or with better distinction from one another.)

Does this help? What did I miss? Any/all feedback is appreciated :)

Zander,

All we want is to see all of our ticks on the map. That's literally it. When I go to my map, I want to see all of my ticks. All the ticks. That's it. 

Understood. All ticks are on the new tick map. To view the new tick map, use the "Get Started" button below the old tick map. Let me know if you run into any issues with that.