Fist of all regarding the map updates.
No major changes this week. Changes include better naming of mountain passes (include altitude), and lil changes on altitude inclusion for summits/mountains. Foot/Walking routes with distance>12 are now rendered as hiking routes.
For next weeks update there will be a size reduction of 3-4% (well that also means a bit better performance) and maybe a solution to the streetname labels disappearing on Oregons / 62 series (without beta firmware) and edge 800 (there is no firmware that works yet).
The bigger changes are related to the server of the openmtbmaps. I switched from Apache to Nginx to improve the performance, and hopefully for the next year have no more downtimes. I also changed the caching mechanism. In a few days I will block comments on all pages and either open up a support forum, or some special pages to drop comments. However there will be a change. I'll only allow people to comment who have donated 20€ or more to openmtbmap.org.
There are several reasons for this. First is that I don't really want to spend lots of time to answer questions that have been answered on the pages already. Second: Typically the people who post them, never donate any money, nor are willing/able to read and comprehend. Second I don't want to leave comments/questions unanswered or cluttering up the page and thereby cause bad publicity. Third, I don't want to spend time on answering trivial questions, that are mostly related not to the maps, but principal usage/understanding of Garmin GPS/Mapsource. It simply takes a lot of time, that I would prefer to spend for other things.
I don't mind people asking questions, but online forums are the better option. They relieve me from answering, and they put out the word of the openmtbmaps existing.
Actually I find it sad that I have to take this measure, also because it will take me 2-3 working days to implement (setup Buddypress, S2Member, changing the comment form, entering addresses of people who did donate money into the system) and not sure how I will really implement it. But my decision regarding to this is taken, and I won't change my mind (only technical hurdens could delay it).
I think I may even try to get bonus content for people who donated something, but then that is something I actually don't want to do. The bonus stuff could be a 1monthly updated map of Europe, where only people having access to the member section, get the possibility to download the files needed for searching addresses and loading map to mapsource. (everyone else will have to do it manually, and creating the address index for a Europe map does need 6GB of RAM or more, so not available to everyone easily).
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