Discussion: Release 108: Ticking & Grade Updates

Release 108: Ticking & Grade Updates

On popular request we bring you the long awaited ascent gear style icons for easier tick type identification on the dashboard.

We have also fixed some issues with the Swedish grading system and improved conversion of slash grades.

Our partner Stay22 has fixed its issues with the accommodation widget that you can find again on all area pages and we introduced final modifications to comply with Google Analytics 4 requirements.

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I like the gear style icons a lot but a hover state is missing like for tick types. That would really be nice to easily see a gear style you don't recognize.

I checked the HTML and it's just a title attribute that needs to be set on the element, like for tick types.

IMHO the ascent gear style is not required and makes the dashboard too cluttered 😔

I agree with Philip.

However, I may be misunderstanding something. The feed already has textual indications of the gear style which seem more descriptive. Do these new icons add something different? Perhaps they are ticked gear style rather than route gear style?

Nice to see more incremental alignment of the grades!

The icons are unnecessary. Everything looks so messy now. Besides, the toprope one looks like the guy just clipped a draw in lead 🙈😂

The ascent gear style icons help to distinguish ascents of different styles that show with the same icon, e.g.

• top rope flash
• lead flash

- image-1686604297215.png

however, with the spelled out gear style in the same line, there is redundant information.

While I think it's good to put ascent type and gear style next to each other, I would like to challenge the choice of icons, especially lead, seconding, top-rope.

The three icons are not easily distinguishable. Only the small thin rope sets them apart. On a small icon this is an even smaller detail.

For comparison, the icons for onsight, flash, hangdog are great for recognizing quickly as they are different in color and shape.

Here's a good illustration

- image-1686605154683.png

I also don´t see a improvement with the new icons. The information about the ascent type (Toprope, lead, 2nd) plus the info about Onsight, Flash, etc. are totally enough for a the dashboard.

If you want information about the route itself (gear etc.) you can still click on the route and check the relevant style.

The icons do not tell me anything more besides what is already clearly written on the right side of the ascent. Besides, soon we need a glossary (like in guidebooks) explaining all the different icons...

From my point of view: Get rid of the symbols and keep the "FA tick option instead!"

"On popular request" ? Really ? A lot of users asked to switch quality icons to stars. With this release we have even more icons, some of them not obvious at all for instance the bouldering one.

The only reason these icons were necessary in the first place was Issue 4127. I didn't really get the explanation why the old tick types are problematic. We have 3 pieces of information now: tick type, gear style and route gear style. With the icons in place, I would assume that the tag at the end of the line would be route gear style, but it isn't, is it?

I'm also with esperanza here: I'd love to see the quality icons go back to stars (and I've seen many more people ask for this than for gear style icons). My guess is that these emojis are partly to blame for the "mega classic inflation" on the site, because people are so used to the exaggerated use of emojis.

On a different note: the response times of the site are still extremely bad sometimes. It's hard to measure because it's sporadic, but I'm annoyed by response times of over 10 seconds (before the site even starts to load) at least a few times a day.

I agree with Christoph that this only makes sense if the tag on the right reverts to 'route gear style' otherwise this new icon is superfluous.

I think that seeing if a route is bolted, mixed, or on gear from the dashboard without having to click through to the route is important info.

Furthermore the new icons do a very poor job of visually cuing what they represent and could do for a redesign (as the only difference is the small section of rope).

+1 regarding the response times Christoph mentioned...

I agree with the general sentiment in this thread. The ascend gear styles make the dashboard more cluttered without adding information.

And I must say I totally hate the emojis for the quality rating. I always have to click on them to see what they actually mean.

I have also had a lot of pages failing to load recently. Currently the front page stream just doesn't load.

All stream events here (link below) are dated to "6 hours ago". Further down, one stream event looks like this.

- image-1688817983693.JPG

https://www.thecrag.com/en/climbing/germany/ruhrtal/area/1606407873

+1 two icons for gear type is too much. Same problem as with the emojis for me: Figuring out what the icon wants to tell me takes more time than reading "mega classic" or "sport". Shouldn't it be the opposite with a visual element?

Tobias Auth - I've added your broken formatting to this issue: https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/4204

When I filter all my ascents (around 950, mostly sport) by gear style sport, only 100 appear in the list. Looks like a big bug. Or is it some kind of constraint to lower traffic?

I suppose it only shows the ascents since the introduction of the new ticking flow. As far as I can tell, since around that time, the route gear style is copied into the ascent gear style automatically (even when logging with the old interface), but older ascents have not been touched. If you filter by route gear style instead, it should show every ascent.

oooh indeed! Thanks. Up until today I never knew there were two different filters for ascent and route gear style.

Then the bug seems to be that the ascent gear style filter does not deliver all the ascents it should. (Like you said.)

I created a Tampermonkey userscript that modifies the look of the ascent comments in the stream

- image-1692254551230.png

• it replaces the ascent style icon with a colored box of the corresponding style (LD=Lead, BD=Bouldering, etc.)
• the redundant gear style at the end of the line is removed
• the number of bolts of the route is removed (because I don't find that useful information here)

Here's the script if anyone is interested: Github

Note: I use theCrag in Spanish, so if yours is English, you will have to adjust the strings in the section "// Remove specific elements by content"

Dominik just a remark, the gear style at the end is not redundant - it is the route gear style whereas the first one is the ascent gear style...

Ulfi Technically, you're probably right. To me it's still redundant.

I'm guessing that in 99% of cases the ascent gear style already implies the route gear style. In addition in most areas the route gear style is the same for all routes, e.g. sport climbing. For me there's no added value in displaying it.