Another thing I thought about concerning this GPX feature is that many routes are already present on SP, not to say all popular routes for some areas.
Considering that only new routes, from the moment the GPX feature was available, will possibly contain a GPX route, the risk is that only a very marginal amount of routes on SP will ever contain GPS data.
Of course it is always possible to contact the owner and propose the route, but for many old pages many owners do not connect regularly, and many newcomers having routes will not mind immediately about doing this procedure in order to append their GPXes.
Perhaps the idea of providing GPX data for existing routes should be considered in order to fill progressively the blanks.
I see several ways to do that but each has advantages and inconvenients :
- Anyone could append a GPX to an existing route as long as there is none. But how to control if the GPX is a good one, and how to remove it in case of mistake
- Anyone could append a GPX to an existing route, and the owner gets a notification in order to check if the route really matches with the page content. Perhaps such notifications could be grouped in the profile page into a folding frame, like the comments and replies, under the title "GPX routes to approve"
- Perhaps GPX routes should simply be a new type of object, that, just like images, we attach to other kind of objects (the advantage would be to use it both for a route, a TR like Gangolf mentionned, or even a peak ?) A question in this case, would several GPXes be attached to one object ? (maybe the page reader would enjoy having the choice between several traces of various quality ?)
That's in my opinion a good topic to be meditated before extending the feature !
Eric