Stats restricted to systems/regions/etc of interest

[bejacob]

There's more to this site that is popular than North America.

I think that missed the point of the prior post. I see this as a response specifically to "scenic and specialty routes" such as the Great River Road mentioned elsewhere. I may have misinterpreted it, but it did not look to me to be disparaging of route systems outside of North America. Instead I saw this as a plea to stop trying to add additional 'specialty' systems in North America when there are 7 states currently in preview and Mississippi is not yet in development. There are similar situations outside the US. Is it wrong to suggest the focus on drafting new routes (especially 'specialty' ones) be delayed until more of the systems currently in preview are activated?

I know there are peer reviews ongoing for California, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. This comment seemed to be suggesting those be completed (along with Arkansas and Louisiana) so those systems can be activated before adding other 'specialty' systems such as "scenic routes" in North America. I suspect the same is true for systems elsewhere in the world.

Believe me, those of us who use this site and are not developers greatly appreciate all the work the contributors do. Without you guys, we wouldn't have this site at all. Sometimes we get impatient to see things completed. As for activating 3 systems a week, that certainly seems true for September, though over the last 6 months, the rate has been closer to 1 a week. Honestly, that's pretty good considering the complexity of some of these systems.

Please keep on with the international systems as you see fit. I agree with the prior post that adding new systems in North America like the aforementioned scenic routes before completing the remaining state routes is not in the best interest of many of the users of this site.

[si404]

Is it wrong to suggest the focus on drafting new routes (especially 'specialty' ones) be delayed until more of the systems currently in preview are activated?

Not at all, but that's not the same as the proposal being made - which wasn't about focus, but about not doing something entirely. And wasn't about 'systems currently in preview' but 'all the state and provincial highways in North America', which includes one that hasn't been started yet (putting a load of pressure on one person).

Now moving the focus onto getting the systems currently in preview activated. No one has a problem with that - hence why we are doing it.

Believe me, those of us who use this site and are not developers greatly appreciate all the work the contributors do. Without you guys, we wouldn't have this site at all. Sometimes we get impatient to see things completed.

Thank you.

We get impatient too. Which is why a hard-and-fast rule forcing people to wait on other people to finish what they are doing before being allowed to do something is not a good idea.

As for activating 3 systems a week, that certainly seems true for September, though over the last 6 months, the rate has been closer to 1 a week.

We only really picked up the pace recently (it's 22 systems activated in the last ~7 weeks, out of 33 for the whole year) - the change in activations says that we already ARE addressing your concerns about completion being preferable to creation.

I agree with the prior post that adding new systems in North America like the aforementioned scenic routes before completing the remaining state routes is not in the best interest of many of the users of this site.

Please notice how the wording of this is different to asking that "the focus on drafting new routes be delayed until more of the systems currently in preview are activated?" that you said earlier. It's a very different proposition.

Compare "the focus on drafting new routes" and "adding new systems" - one is prioritising creation, the other is merely creating. Likewise compare "completing the remaining state routes" and "more of the systems currently in preview are activated" - one is activating 12 systems (not including PR and AS territorial systems) - one of which hasn't been started yet, whereas the other is simply 'more' so after 5 or 6 or something.

It's not in the best interest of any of the users of this site to have a collaborators twiddling their thumbs waiting on one of their colleagues before they can create systems they want to create. Mississippi will happen when it happens, other North American systems might appear before that - and that isn't a problem unless it actually is holding up completing a provincial/state highway system.

I don't see, from my side of things, why someone can't draft systems like Nova Scotia Scenic Travelways if they have time to do so, as long as the focus is activating preview-level systems, like, I don't know, Newfoundland and Labrador. It might be that you need a big block of time to do what's needed to finish that review, but only have small amounts of time, so can do stuff like draft routes for other systems, or write short bits of code to improve all the data, etc, etc, but can't do what you wanted with the system you are reviewing.
(I know I'm picking out one person here, and let it be known that I understand, even if I'm a little impatient to see the cannl system I drafted finally get activated! I guess it's been a couple of months since my last bump on it, so consider this that, though also keep up the good work elsewhere!)

[michih]

Relax...

(I know I'm picking out one person here, and let it be known that I understand, even if I'm a little impatient to see the cannl system I drafted finally get activated! I guess it's been a couple of months since my last bump on it, so consider this that, though also keep up the good work elsewhere!)

Sure but have you answered questions like "What's the source for this name?"

[si404]

Relax...

I'm relaxed. The problem is that the people demanding we do stuff don't seem to be - hence why they keep reiterating the same demands.

I know I can just ignore them, but I want to both reassure them that we are doing what they say that they would like us to do, and also why we won't do what they are actually saying they want us to do.

Sure but have you answered questions like "What's the source for this name?"

I missed the answer to my bumps has arrived. Will address.

[kjslaughter]

I suck at quoting prior lines in forums, so...

To be clear, I was just saying within North America to finish one thing before starting another.  I don't travel to Europe much myself, but I understand this is an international site.

As another user said, thanks to all of you guys!  I wish there was more I could do to help and try not to complain about work on a volunteer unpaid project.  :-)  The road geek in me is just happy to have a place to log my travels and it adds a new element to my travels to try to clinch roads.

I have lived in Georgia most of my life, so if there is anything I can do to help validate routes in Georgia and adjacent states, I'm happy to do so.  I'm just unsure of the need and what I can do.  If you guys need any sort of donations to help keep servers running too, let me know.

[michih]

Sure but have you answered questions like "What's the source for this name?"

I missed the answer to my bumps has arrived. Will address.

I also missed it I just wanted to know today when you've bumped it last time. And realized that something has happened meanwhile

[Jim]

Resurrecting this thread as a place to talk about how we might support subsets of TM for users who are not interested in certain systems/regions/etc.  It's come up again in the context of unsigned interstates and others.

Here are a few thoughts from my point of view, thinking of both the data and the web front end.

I don't see how this can be user-based in the sense that user joecool can say that anyone who visits TM and sees my name and stats and maps should only see those based on this subset of TM that I'm interested in.  When joecool wants to see his stats and maps restricted to those in his subset of regions/systems of interest, he would have to set those preferences in his browser.  Anyone would be able to see everyone's overall stats and maps or restricted any way he or she likes.  I think this would satisfy most.

I see this as being totally flexible, restricting things to any combination of systems and regions that you wish.  It might not be simple to select a completely arbitrary subset, but I would want it to be possible.  That said, I expect there would be a fairly small subset of common restrictions (e.g., North America only, everything except usaif, national-level systems only, etc).

There's a lot to think about and implement here.

[Jim]

Relevant: https://github.com/TravelMapping/Web/issues/351

[Jim]

One thing that's come up in other threads related to this idea is a signed/unsigned flag in the route list for a given system.  I think I'd prefer signed and unsigned to end up in different systems, but I could be convinced otherwise.  One complication of splitting into separate systems is that we could not define a partially-signed route to have a single connected route.  However, if a goal is to allow someone to turn on and off all unsigned routes, having them together in a single connected route would be problematic anyway.

[yakra]

Maybe just ignore that distinction when looking at connected routes?
Not even saying this idea is necessarily a good one; it's just the first thing that comes to mind

[Jim]

- There should be enough information in the DB as currently designed and populated to do much if not all of what we want, at least from the point of view of someone looking at the web front end.  Log files generated by the site update process would continue to show stats for all systems for all users.

- The implementation challenges seem to break down into a few categories:

1. How to specify which systems/regions/countries/continents/tiers/etc. should be included and excluded for a given page load.  This would likely be part of the long-planned control panel page (https://github.com/TravelMapping/Web/issues/351). As stated before, I would want to implement this to be completely flexible.  If someone wants all of Europe, only Future interstates and the Nebraska Links and Spurs, and nothing else, they should be able to do that.
2. How to remember that information.
  a. My thought is that it would most likely would be done in a browser cookie or cookies.
  b. I'd like to allow people to save those to these settings to their computer in a config file that could be reloaded if cookies are cleared, loaded into other browsers, shared with other users, etc.
  c. Maybe those config files could be stored in GitHub as a way to select among subsets people have put together based on their own interests.
3. Updating all of the affected SQL queries to limit them to the desired subset of highway data.  A quick count shows 77 tmdb_query calls in TM's php code, and a significant fraction of them will be affected.  It will take some planning to come up with a way to update them all in a consistent and coherent way, and to make sure whatever changes are made to the queries are not only correct, but that the queries do not become significantly slower.

- I think this functionality needs to be in place before any new unsigned systems being discussed in other threads would progress past devel status.  With a compressed semester starting up soon, I am unlikely to work on it before June.  That said, I am very interested in getting this functionality in place and will work on it sooner if time permits.

[yakra]

...and allowing users to "opt out" and not track systems they don't care about.

There's infrastructure for this in place, but our current userpages don't get us all the way there. On region.php & system.php, the maps look OK whether we filter for any combination of 1 or more systems in 1 or more regions. A happy side effect of the way the site works under the hood. The tables are more limited and less customizable though -- region.php always shows all the systems in one region; system.php will filter for any number of regions, but only one system.

Even without a control panel page, I think this would get us most of what we want. If we keep the regions & systems we filter in/out persistent in the URL, we can share URLs on another forum, and someone else can click & open up the same page we're looking at ourselves.

Of course, having a good UI to get there will make the page more usable, but first, there's gotta be something for that UI to direct to, eh?

[Duke87]

This post from the unsigned interstates thread makes me think of something:

I'm not sure that a toggle that would only affect my view would be satisfying... kinda like cleaning up by sweeping the dust under the rug.  Especially as I do link to my page from my website, and because I don't feel like "signing in" to view my page.

The basic stated issue here is that if a user does not care for unsigned highways and has not logged any, simply switching them off on their end will not help when they are sending others a link to their page.

How's this for a suggestion: can we support certain exclusion criteria in the URL? For example maybe if someone appends "&includeunsigned=n" this would resolve the issue of allowing users to share links that will display things as they prefer.

[yakra]

simply switching them off on their end will not help when they are sending others a link to their page.
... How's this for a suggestion: can we support certain exclusion criteria in the URL?

keep the regions & systems we filter in/out persistent in the URL, we can share URLs on another forum

[Jim]

I think a QS parameter to set the subset would make sense and that QS parameter could be included when sharing links, etc.  However, the implementation paths going forward that I have in mind would not restrict someone coming to TM and viewing user X's stats and maps from setting whatever subset they want.