[table][tr][td]Points[/td][td]7454941[/td][/tr][tr][td]Map Edits[/td][td]2105090[/td][/tr][tr][td]All Reports[/td][td]334[/td][/tr][tr][td]Paved Kilometres[/td][td]0.0[/td][/tr][tr][td]Driven Kilometres[/td][td]155201.9[/td][/tr][tr][td]Resolved Update Requests[/td][td]6050[/td][/tr][tr][td]Closed Map Problems[/td][td]14798[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Forum Posts[/td][td]11081 (#7)[/td][/tr][tr][td]Munched metres[/td][td]38629.0[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]INTL all-time#[/td][td]10[/td][/tr][tr][td]UK all-time#[/td][td]1[/td][/tr][/table]
Well, itās been 9 years with Waze. I donāt think Iāve ever had more reasons to give up on Waze, but it doesnāt seem likely that I will. I guess thatās what addiction does to you.
Obviously, the biggest thing for everyone about the past year has been the COVID pandemic. Personally, itās actually had little effect on me. I had no social life to start with so, the lockdowns had zero effect on that. My job is ideally suited to working from home, so Iāve exchanged a 30-minute commute to work across London for a 30-second commute from my bedroom to my lounge. Where it has affected me is in the loss of meetups.
Waze online meetups turned out to be absolutely unbearable. Anyone can attend, so everyone does. The interested people who have something worthwhile to say are overwhelmed by the idiots who all want to ask the same silly questions and will ask them no matter if someone before them has already asked & been answered. Waze moderation of talk & question spreadsheets was pretty much non-existent. After being told off twice by our Community Manager for speaking impatiently to idiots in chat, I gave up on Waze online meetups entirely, just before last Christmas. I was persuaded to try another GC meeting partway through this year: after 10 minutes it was completely taken over by someone who didnāt like an answer and wouldnāt move on and I left the meeting. I didnāt even try the GC Global meetup. I didnāt attend the UK meetup: and when I heard what was being aid by Waze staff from our UK Champs in our Slack Chat, even THAT made me so angry I had to leave the chat for a couple of days.
We have a new forum upgrade and there is no other way I can put it: it is a disgraceful pile of s***. Despite a recent post from staff saying āall the wonderful new featuresā, even they could only actually list one: a better editor for posts/PMs. After 9 years being completely happy with the existing form, I didnāt need that. I also didnāt need the disgusting number of bugs with which the new forum was released. I didnāt need the reduced contrast, or the massively increased amound of scrolling required. I didnāt need the features that are now in a different place, or missing, or present but invisible due to poor formatting. I now stay away from the forum as much as I can. On mobile, itās just completely unusable due to so much scrolling.
I should also mention the most-thanked-ever post on the forum - my famous āCommunication with Waze is brokenā rant. Iām proud of how it turned out: it evoked a major improvement in community-HQ relations. But it was also pretty critical of HQ. And in the forum upgrade, every single Thanks was removed. I had to contact Shira to get the thanks restored. It could have been an accident (as I was told). But I canāt help wondering why a prominently critical post was the only one to lose all itās thanks.
We have the new Falcon snapper. Depite hearing the explanations many times, I still donāt understand why an āimprovementā to the app means we have to abandon KISS principles that have made the Waze map simple to understand, maintain and use for many years. Our Falcon mapraid improved the alignment of some new roads and roundabouts - but also lead to the breaking of several roundabout junctions as the added complexity required by Falcon caused inadvertent mistakes to be made.
We have lane guidance. To be honest, by the time it hit production, Iād already lost the will to care. But Iāve watched the disagreements as some editors add LG everywhere and others complain thereās too much. I think itās fair to say we have a dedicated group of UK champs who still care - so Iām glad theyāre doing a good job with it.
We have road shields. AGAIN. Because we had them before - an implementation that worked, but the developer who did it left Waze and nobody remaining knew how it worked or how to fix it when it broke. Now we have the wonderful implementation based on Street IDs: something beyond the proper control of editors and something that simply fails completely in many situations. Last week, I found the A99 route in Scotland: Major Highway and part of the UK Primary Route Network for most of itās length, so it gets a green shield. Until it hits a town; from that point on it is Minor Highway and not part of the PRN. But it still has green shields because itās still A99, No City. Except where it goes through another town and can therefore have the correct white shield.
We have more dollops of excrement dropped onto the WME screen. First it was moving buttons out of the toolbar onto the map area. Now thereās some sort of tile status box in my way. Personally, Iāve done over 2 million edits to the Waze map without ever once needing to know when the next update is. The only thing Iām sure of is, that if you RELY on an update happening at a particular time, then Murphyās Law guarantees it will be delayed. Now they are pissing around with āWaze branding and coloursā. I find that almost refreshing: at least theyāre not pretending that the latest damage they cause is for our benefit. These changes are entirely cosmetic - although still damaging.
Overall, Iāve just lost the will to fight. Iāve spent so many years trying to explain to Waze things that we need to be fixed or added and being ignored. Every year, at every meetup, I ask for vehicle size restrictions. Every time, Shira says āweāre not planning it, but donāt stop askingā. I donāt want to keep asking any more. I donāt want to keep explaining why the way combined red-light/speed cameras is handled needs to change. I donāt want to complain about yet another mass of ad-team-created places have damaged the map, created non-existent cities, broken UK mapping standards, are are directing drivers AWAY from the correct location.
OK. Thatās the moaning over. It explains why my motivation is mostly gone. But there are reasons why itās still there.
WME FixUI seems to continue to be popular. It doesnāt measure up to some of the big scripts that add functionality to WME, but it still has over 4000 installs. Most days, GreasyFork sees over 400 update checks, so at least that many users are using it each day; and itās not necessarily the same users every day. Iām frequently tempted to try & create some sort of return monitoring to see better usage figures - but itās not worth trying to explain why the script is phoning home and it wouldnāt help YOU at all. Iām happy that the forum topic continues to be active, so there is still a desire for it. Iām probably more oriented to fixing things that directly bug ME at the moment, but I still get satisfaction from helping you guys.
I also released another script recently - WME Presets. Itās a Layers controller and more. Personally I use it literally ALL the time to change layers. Iām a little disappointed that only 38 people have installed it - but maybe it will get more popular. Certainly the use I get out of it myself means Iāll keep working on it.
I have an editing project Iām working on as well, which is keeping me interested in Waze because I know Iām accomplishing something that actually helps Waze users - as opposed to shouting at HQ, which doesnāt seem to accomplish anything anymore. When I first became an Area Manager, I went through my area screen-by-screen at zoom=4 to work on the map. Now Iām doing the same thing for the entirety of Scotland. Itās an area with little population (the entire population of Scotland is less than the population of London) and few editors, so I know I can add value to the map. I started in early 2020 - and 16 months later Iāve nearly covered 50% of the area. So I expect Iāll be going for easily another 16 months yet.
