Re: Beating a dead horse on voting again ?
Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 1:47 am
Josh Lewis wrote:Eye candy is very important in my book.
If a good mountain does not have any eye candy, even if the text is good, I usually refuse to vote on it.
Depends on the type of page. If it is a route page, and there are lots of route pages as children of a single parent mountain page, the route pages should give correct descriptions, and the mountain page can have the eye candy. Albums are usually just eye candy.
I guess you have to ask what the real purpose of summitpost should be. Years ago, SP was a primarily place to find information that would help one climb summits. The size of photos and maps was severely limited, and people had to get creative -- perhaps uploading maps in sections, or simply giving the quad name and providing details relative to that map.
Years ago, there was a person who provided a nice web page, with nice photos, and nice maps with drawn, color-coded tracks. The problem was that the person had not actually climbed the mountain, and had drawn in hypothetical tracks. One of the tracks, described as class 2, went over 300' of technical cliffs. In this case, the prettiness of the page, and all the detail, was a smokescreen. But it was an obscure peak, and few people could call the author on the errors. Yet the page was pretty, and got the requisite 10/10 votes. Now, the person did not intend to be malicious-- the author was just new to the game, and naive; the author thought that if you could draw a trail on a map, by golly, you should be able to follow it. But since a loop was shown, a person could have chosen to descend the "class 2" route at the end of the day, and been quite surprised.
IMHO, accurate directions are far more important than pretty pictures, unless the pretty pictures are used to illustrate a route.