Something I work hard on in most of my projects is to reduce user friction. For example, when PN&R opened, I expected contributors to have an account on pota.news, log in, and write their story in the Wordpress editors on PN&R. Now, I take articles mainly by email and then o a light format and post it under the author’s byline. It just simplifies the process and doesn’t require someone to be familiar with the editors.
I’ve been searching for a really, really simple way for activators to submit field reports. It’s the same problem as the longer reviews, there’s just a lot of ‘stuff’ in the way of just submitting a quick trip report.
So, still experimental but looking promising, anyone can now email a park / trip report to parks@pota.news. It should include the park number somewhere. That’s it! When the email is received, a topic is created in the Field Notes category and flagged for moderation. For now I’ll go through them manually and apply some formatting.
The next step is to tie these reports back to the POTAmap so that users can bring up a data card on POTAmap and see a link back to the discussion of the park here.
This is a soft release while I test a few things, nbut feel free to submit a few reports!
The wordpress editor… well. I am trying to be polite, here. Let’s just say it’s awful. Really awful. Really, really #^$#$%^%#@ awful.
I write stuff for my blog in markdown, because I care about content but am trying to NOT care about presentation. What would be ideal for me would be for me to write a blog post about my activation at some park, and then just… point pota.review at the URL for my blog post and let pota.review hover it all up, photos, text, and all, and then post it.
I would really, really like to see pota.review forums become the place for POTA discussions, because Discord… Discord is horrid.
I tend to write in Markdown, too. I use Obsidian as my note-organizer and it stores everything in MD. Sometimes I’ll do the writing in Markdown end render it, usually in HTML. Then I can copy that and paste it into the WP editor (I’m in Gutenberg). It remarkably retains all the structure, even tables. That’s how I import Ada’s newsletter each week.
I have to say that I’m getting used to the WP editors. I’ve long preached (literally in my lectures) on the advantages of separating content and structure, and that’s how WP works. I set up the shape of the pages in Elementor, and then the content that’s written in Gutenberg just pours into the Elementor templates. I still have some tweaking to do around things like sidebars and inline images but overall it’s becoming a pretty natural process.
Apart from that, I think that the site can ingest the content at a URL. I’ll play around with it and see.
I think it is working correctly, receiving reports from anyone at parks@pota.news. They go into a moderation queue to limit surprises.
Next week is Infrastructure Week with two planned sprints:
Tie existing Field Reports back to the park’s review on PN&R
Connect POTAmap to the Field Reports with a ‘Discuss’ button on park’s data card
I think that the anonymous input is really key, there is so little friction in sending a quick email with a short report, or even a longer email with a full report and pictures.
Some of the infrastructure work this week will be against the Discourse API, which is going to require an intermediate server, likely a Deno instance since I like Typescript. That layer will give me control over who can use the PN&R Forum API. I have it in the back of my head to open up endpoints for folks like @KI2D who might want to integrate some of the knowledge base we’re building here into their own products.
The end goal is to build up a living reference library of information about the parks in the POTA program that operators can use for research, advice, observations, and the like. Requiring an account on a site to submit field reports immediately eliminates what I think is a large segment of possible reporters, because they just won’t bother.
By making it anonymous – no account required – and creating a reporting mechanism that is simple and something people do multiple times daily – send an email – I think it creates a system that maximizes input.
I could have set this up without the connection to Discourse, so that ops would just email reports to me, and I’d enter them manually, but this system does that work for me and places each inbound report into a queue with as a Discourse topic ready to do a quick edit on (mainly to make sure the park number is in the title). It does add a moderation task but I’d have had to do that on manual reports anyway.
Now that this is in place (it’d be awesome if you’d send a test email) we’re set up for the next phase, which is connecting POTAmap to Discourse. At that point the map becomes a primary entry point to the knowledge base – if I’m on the map researching parks, I can flip the data card around on one and immediately click a link back to Discourse for further research or discussion.
The last piece is plumbing PN&R’s Wordpress search engine into Discourse, so that if someone looks up a site or is reading a review on PN&R, they’ll have immediate access to the discussion behind that park.
Understood. The issue I see is that knowing who posted the advice provides a lot of useful information about the presumed reliability of the content.
Example: If I look at the linked field report for US-12339 Crescent Lake and see a report saying the southern parking lot is under water - if that’s posted by Brian AC7PB, I’ll treat that report as pretty much gospel, as I know Brian, he’s at US-12339 a lot, and in fact he’s sent me an email saying that the lot was finally clear after recent flooding. If it’s anonymous, I have no idea of the info is reliable, or just someone who got confused by the map and thought the boat launch on the river was actually the lot for the wildlife area, some 300 yards east and 25ft higher.
Yup, it’s a value-vs-risk scenario, and the risk goes down I think as activity increases. If there’s only one field report and not a lot of views, you are stuck evaluating whether it has value. As activity increases and more people see the report, the more likely that corrections will be made by the community, converging on a set of facts that the community believes to be true.
We hit 100+ unique visitors on the PN&R main site yesterday for the first time since launch and there are well over 100 newsletter subscribers now. Growth has been steady and for the most part organic as people hear about PN&R from other hams.
The infrastructure push is just about done and most of the major tech pieces are now in place. I’ll finish wiring the map and PN&R into Discourse this coming week.
The next big push is community growth and awareness, that’s the work for at least Q1 and Q2 2026.