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Mark Worthington Monday 21 Nov 2022 11:08:01
Great! Thanks for giving it a shot!
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patrick carrington Monday 21 Nov 2022 10:39:47
Thank you admin - that is really helpful.
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plotaroute admin Monday 21 Nov 2022 09:29:37
We've increased the size of a "Small Collection" from 10 to 30 following the feedback below, to allow all the routes in a small collection to be loaded with single mouse click. This is a provisional change at the moment while we monitor for any technical issues, but we should hopefully be able to make this change permanant in due course.
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patrick carrington Thursday 17 Nov 2022 23:16:54
You must take tremendous satisfaction from seeing Plotaroute used to develop so many walking and cycling routes.
Ours is a ten year project but at least we are starting with landowner buy-in - just need the money for construction and maintenance.
Another good local example of the use of Plotaroute is here:
https://www.plotaroute.com/routecollection/8348
but no doubt you are aware of lots around the country.
Keep up the great work.
Thanks also to Mark for your comments.
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plotaroute admin Thursday 17 Nov 2022 08:56:47
Thanks for your kind words about Plotaroute Patrick. Yes, much more love than money!
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Mark Worthington Thursday 17 Nov 2022 06:02:21
Patrick, that's a wonderful project you are devloping!
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patrick carrington Wednesday 16 Nov 2022 22:00:12
Thank you for your prompt, and very helpful, reply.
I can see now that this arose in response to demand for more routes in collections and you then had to limit how much computing power was consumed when a collection is opened.
It does seem like a sensible compromise to redefine small as up to 30 so that they can all be opened with a single toggle switch which should not be too much additional burden on non-plotaroute savvy recipients (I'll just have to add this to the instructions I send out with any links - even I took a while working out where the 'toggle all' switch was).
I realise you can't please all the people all the time but you have certainly made me (and Mark) quite a bit happier!
Will you post in this thread when it has been done?
Finally I'd just like to say again how good Plotaroute is. When I joined the project to create the cycle route mentioned below I compared all the online mapping tools and yours was definitely the best for the job. I suspect you do it for love and not just for money. You can tell it's British as well.
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Mark Worthington Wednesday 16 Nov 2022 19:22:48
I would second that,re-defining "Small" to 30 seems a sensible and practical limit.
I'm sure the patient will survive until the next available opening! -
plotaroute admin Wednesday 16 Nov 2022 09:44:31
Thanks for that feedback Patrick and the examples you've shared. I understand the point you're making. The main issue from our perspective is that we wanted to respond to the requests we were getting to support more than 30 routes per collection and it simply isn't practical to load all the routes in a collection at the same time when you have large numbers of routes. Each route can have up to 50,000 data points, so if we had 100 people opening a collection with 200 routes, in theory that could mean loading up to 1 billion data points! Even 30 routes is a stretch and we were probably wrong to set the original limit that high. Also, it's quite wasteful, as not everyone will want all the routes loaded when they open the page.
I think what we can do though is raise the limit on what we define as a Small Collection from 10 to 30, so that the Toggle All switch is available for any collection with up to 30 routes. Beyond this the map would probably be impossible to read anyway, as it would be very cluttered even with 30 routes.
Unfortunately it's not a 5 minute job though, as this isn't a parameter that we can easily change, we'd have to open up this area of the site again, hence the medical analogy. To take the analogy further, there's quite a long waiting list, but we'll see if we can fit it in somewhere soon.
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patrick carrington Tuesday 15 Nov 2022 21:51:03
Firstly I’d like to say I think Plotaroute is wonderful but the recent upgrade to the way route collections are displayed is a huge retrograde step to the usefulness of Plotaroute as a means of communicating new routes.
As an example, I have been working with the Tatton Estate to develop a new cycle route through estate land and elsewhere to link some existing traffic free routes. The main route or ‘spine’ is shown here.
We then propose other adjacent routes (‘ribs’) to link with local populations and local attractions so as to create a network of routes in the South Manchester/North Cheshire area.
The main spine and ribs were then amalgamated as a collection and the link to this collection has been enormously useful to convey the proposal to the relevant stakeholders eg the National Trust, Sustrans, local councils, Manchester Airport group and many others.
Most of the recipients of the link are not experienced users of Plotaroute but the fact that the main route and other links opened automatically made it very easy for the recipients to be able to see all the proposals in their entirety.
This is no longer possible unless the recipient clicks the toggle button for every route which is really tedious and has been criticised already. Surely there must be another way? Can you not allow collections up to a certain limit (?20-40) open automatically and above that limit be restricted? Or can you include the ‘toggle all’ button for a higher number than 10 (again 20, 30 or 40 say) which would help.
If Plotaroute is to maintain its position as an easy way to communicate routes it has to be easy to view these routes and the recent prevention of automatic opening of route collections makes viewing collections more difficult and in my opinion is not an 'upgrade' but a backwards step.
Please, please do something about this.
BTW as a doctor I don’t accept the analogy that now that you have stitched up the wound you cannot reopen it – if I had done an operation and there were then complications such as internal bleeding, I would have to go back in. To say you could not disturb the stitches would not sound very good in the coroner’s court!
