Australia - Survey Marks
rufoushumming-PGO
Posts: 1,450 ✭✭✭✭✭
There are many types of geodetic signs.
So I want to differentiate between these. In NSW there are well over 100K Survey Marks. Generally very small and round in shape. A numbered disk nailed into the ground. I am unsure in reviewing how to accept these. Not only are they common as - they are boring as.
Trig stations I get.... They tend to be substantive and very visual. And if in rural areas. Survey marks are a lot less common. And you get the more interesting ones like reference trees, Star Pickets and Identification plates. So accepting some these may make more sense.
Permanent Marks are much less in number. To find the id number you have to open them up and look under the lid. But common.
OK back to the little round Survey marks. The sheer number of Survey Marks that are little round disks of metal nailed to the ground is mind boggling. Their numbers are increasing every year. Every 5 parcels of land gets one. On a road you may get two every 1000m and in rural settings every 2000m.
The only thing unique is the number
Are they acceptable or not? I certainly ignore any that are on the roads edge, the road gutter or in the road as I consider to be dangerous. But the others .....
Comments
Not eligible; generic, mass-produced, not interesting, does not promote exercise/exploration/social activities.
There is a very good thread about them here, showing how much of an infestation they have become.
Thank you
You're probably sharing the same sentiment as me with incorrect reject reasons.
Based on my experience? Trig stations don't meet criteria and very recently, considered fake, EVEN if they are absolutely clearly on satellite view. Regardless of being substantial, they're also on top of hills, high mountains and often hard to reach places and they are not voted very well. These are the same reviewers who are calling my trig point fake and in an inaccurate location and are instead approving survey marks. A trig point is a darn substantial survey mark!
Unfortunately, the main consensus in Sydney as I've reached out and sleuthed over to a few communities is to accept. Mainly because:
Before, I used to skip survey marks, but there are way too many to just skip through, or even reject. So I just give them at most 2 stars. There are extremely varying efforts of survey marks, like if they were submitted with a good enough description, I'd just maybe, chuck in another star here or there, but many of them are generally bad.
Numerous calls and pleas have been made to Niantic to see whether they can do something about it. Even someone tweeted Brian Rose (even though he isn't really related to Wayfarer) to do something about it. But there is silence. So it just continues to propagate and spread.
But a really big spreader behind this idiology is actually, in fact, the Global Wayfarers Facebook. They are the ones who specifically and strongly advise that survey marks are eligible, and they go off at naysayers telling them to "stop making up your own criteria". Almost every time a post (usually a vent) about survey marks in Sydney is posted, there are a lot of people who rebuke the OP and tell people why they're wrong. And so what they advise is often propagated over and over into the stratosphere and hence, here we are today.
What we post here is only as a minority. But sadly, we're not much in comparison to the hordes and waves approving them. Some people do succumb to just submitting them for convenience purposes and it works for them, after rejecting them at first. But yeah, that's that.
Please stick to your guns and reject those 50c sized survey markers. I have been rejecting every single one I've seen and my rating is still great. I'd say those things are probably very 50/50 for the submitter and it might only take a couple of votes from people with great rating to swing it one way or the other.
The only time I'd consider accepting one of those is if one is on top of a named hill and there isn't a real trig station or a star picket style survey marker marking the summit.
Thanks guys. I feel better now.
I agree. I now reject all. These tiny washer shapped bits of metal, nailed to the ground are nothing more than generic and mass produced. With over 250,000 of these common infectious postules taking over every corner of the NSW land. Across Australia that means over a million. If that does not meet the generic criteria I don't know what does!!!!
Fortunately. Many of them are also on road kerbs, in gutters and in roads so making them location inappropriate as in a dangerous position as well as generic. Boom
I look forward though to my frist trig point, reference tree or star picket ;-) though.....
Ha. I finally got sent a gift of a Survey Mark. I asked my friends to never send me one again. I cannot believe how many I am getting to review. And on some of maps the only nearby are these survey marks. UGH