Points | 7454941 |
Map Edits | 2105090 |
All Reports | 334 |
Paved Kilometres | 0.0 |
Driven Kilometres | 155201.9 |
Resolved Update Requests | 6050 |
Closed Map Problems | 14798 |
Forum Posts | 11081 (#7) |
Munched metres | 38629.0 |
INTL all-time# | 10 |
UK all-time# | 1 |
Well, it's been 9 years with Waze. I don't think I've ever had more reasons to give up on Waze, but it doesn't seem likely that I will. I guess that's what addiction does to you.
Obviously, the biggest thing for everyone about the past year has been the COVID pandemic. Personally, it's 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 I've 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 didn't like an answer and wouldn't move on and I left the meeting. I didn't even try the GC Global meetup. I didn't 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 "all the wonderful new features", even they could only actually list one: a better editor for posts/PMs. After 9 years being completely happy with the existing form, I didn't need that. I also didn't need the disgusting number of bugs with which the new forum was released. I didn't need the reduced contrast, or the massively increased amound of scrolling required. I didn't 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, it's just completely unusable due to so much scrolling.
I should also mention the most-thanked-ever post on the forum - my famous "Communication with Waze is broken" rant. I'm 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 can't help wondering why a prominently critical post was the only one to lose all it's thanks.
We have the new Falcon snapper. Depite hearing the explanations many times, I still don't understand why an "improvement" 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, I'd already lost the will to care. But I've watched the disagreements as some editors add LG everywhere and others complain there's too much. I think it's fair to say we have a dedicated group of UK champs who still care - so I'm glad they're 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 it's 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 it's 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 there's some sort of tile status box in my way. Personally, I've done over 2 million edits to the Waze map without ever once needing to know when the next update is. The only thing I'm sure of is, that if you RELY on an update happening at a particular time, then Murphy's Law guarantees it will be delayed. Now they are pissing around with "Waze branding and colours". I find that almost refreshing: at least they're not pretending that the latest damage they cause is for our benefit. These changes are entirely cosmetic - although still damaging.
Overall, I've just lost the will to fight. I've 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 "we're not planning it, but don't stop asking". I don't want to keep asking any more. I don't want to keep explaining why the way combined red-light/speed cameras is handled needs to change. I don't 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. That's the moaning over. It explains why my motivation is mostly gone. But there are reasons why it's still there.
WME FixUI seems to continue to be popular. It doesn't 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 it's not necessarily the same users every day. I'm frequently tempted to try & create some sort of return monitoring to see better usage figures - but it's not worth trying to explain why the script is phoning home and it wouldn't help YOU at all. I'm happy that the forum topic continues to be active, so there is still a desire for it. I'm 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. It's a Layers controller and more. Personally I use it literally ALL the time to change layers. I'm 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 I'll keep working on it.
I have an editing project I'm working on as well, which is keeping me interested in Waze because I know I'm accomplishing something that actually helps Waze users - as opposed to shouting at HQ, which doesn't 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 I'm doing the same thing for the entirety of Scotland. It's 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 I've nearly covered 50% of the area. So I expect I'll be going for easily another 16 months yet.