New gear types: carrot, mixed (trad + bolts), mixed (ice + rock) & others

[brendanheywood]

This has come up a couple times, the distinction between carrots vs ring bolts / hangers. I think this is one of those issues that as Australian's we're not really aware of much because we use carrots so much here, but over seas they are much less prevalent either because the climbing is newer and was developed with newer better gear, or because it was much older and has been rebolted with more modern standards.

My general rule of thumb is if guide books have a feature it then it is worth considering for us, and lots of aussie guidebooks like Simon Carters latest ones make a clear distinction between trad / sport / carrots.

Our more specific rule of thumb for gear styles is when you would need different gear to do a climb, and bolt plates are specific gear, so this heuristic also points to a yes.

In terms of data modelling we could make it simple 'sport' with a 'carrot' flag, or we could make it a whole new type. Given the hassles we've gone through with the 'mixed' magic I would vastly prefer to make this a new type as it is so much simple and more intuitive to people. (and we are still not finished with the mixed type, I'm still finding display issues with that I find.). For those reading currently a trad route which has the bolts field filled out gets shown as 'mixed', but it is not it's own real type, and for all other purposes like route search filters, and stats and graphs, it's just a trad route.

Lastly it is possible that a 'trad + bolts' / 'mixed' climb could also have carrots. In this case is seems like the flag would be better, but I don't think making that compromise is worth it. The range of gear needed for a trad climb varies massively, adding a flag to say you need a bolt plate could be seen as equivalent to adding flags to say you need a big boy, or aliens, or whatever other specific trad gear you need. In other words a gear type of 'trad' means 'you need to read the description for more info on gear' which could include mentions on carrots, or no3 BD cam, or pipes, etc. And trad climbers can clip carrots using wires if they don't have plates handy.

[brendanheywood]

I've just fumbled my way through making a poll on facebook for this. This used to be a built in feature in FB but is now a royal pain through 3rd party ad supported apps or premium apps but I think I've wrestled a free one into shape. Go check it out and tell me if you think it works well and we can use this in future for other stuff.

[scd]

I think Matt's email is the guiding use case here. He does not want to waste a trip because he does not have bolt plates.

This is where my trad bias shows, as I would call climbing with bolt plates as sport. Clearly others would not.

If we are going to invent a new style then we should call it something. However I am leaning toward a flag or a tag.

Left field. What about throwing out the concept of styles and just using tags?

[scd]

I just looked at the poll and it looks good technically.

However we have got to take care with using this, because you can get very different answers depending on how you phrase the question.

Also people might not understand the implications on what they are voting on. In fact I don't know the full implications on making a separate style called carrot.

My preference is to run all polls through Campbell as this is what he use to do.

[brendanheywood]

There is some tension between the best data model and the easiest UI. Weighing these together, how does this sound:

• In terms of data modelling I think under the hood the best way is as tags, so a route would be trad+bolts, or trad+carrots, or rock+ice.
• In terms of how that gets edited it should be very similar to what we have now. The existing tags UI really needs to get merged into the bulk edit process, but even then I'd keep them separate.
• for display it should be pretty well the same as now, but pretty well all cases with multiple tags would get shown as 'mixed'. trad+ringbolts = mixed, trad+carrots = mixed, rock+ice = mixed. If you hover or whatever you would see the raw tags to see why. To make this work properly though a mixed ice climb would show as blue, where as a mixed trad climb would show as brown. So I think we'd have a weighting to each tag and the heaviest weight sets the color. Trad and ice would be heavier than carrots.
• for stats the same weighting would apply, so only the heaviest tag gets cascaded up into the profiles. This is what would get shown on the maps bubbles and style bars.
• for facets you can filter on tags by inclusion (by default?), so trad would also find mixed, and sport would also find mixed. But in the results they would show as they would above.

The same heuristic for gear style tags would apply, each tag is a set of gear you would need. The weight of the tags is roughly the order of progression in terms of technique, cost, complexity, risk etc. So a rough order might be:

• dws (shoes)
• bouldering (mat)
• top rope (rope)
• bolts (draws)
• carrots (bolts plates)
• trad (rack)
• via ferrata (crab claw)
• aid gear (more rack)
• ice (axe)
• alpine (oxygen)

So trying to find some fringe cases to break this system:

• dws + ice => coloured as ice (I can imagine a red bull video of this)
• bouldering + aid => coloured as aid
• top rope + alpine => coloured as alpine (pretty well everest these days)

Also I'd want a decision on this idea before implementing #1370, ie potentially removing any and all 'mixed' triggers relating to bolts, and we'd just have a migrate script of any # of bolts to set the 'bolts' flag.

Also people might not understand the implications on what they are voting on. In fact I don't know the full implications on making a separate style called carrot.

Abbott got in voted in. Enough said! Still I'm more interested in knowing what people think on the matter, regardless of the implications either technical or workload or stats processing etc. We may decide this is a good thing but still not have time to do it. We may decide it's not a good thing but the majority of people want it, which means need to be able to back that decision up with a good help article etc. This isn't a democracy, we are the benevolent dictators (hopefully), and a poll is just another bit of info to consider.

[scd]

I think this is the right data model.

Nice bit of analysis. Do we loose 'sport' and 'mixed', or do they become user defined (eg I want to see sport climbs as 'bolts' or 'carrots'.?

Interestingly, peoples comments and votes seem different in response to your post. The poll seems to indicate that we should have a separate carret type, but the comments otherwise.

[brendanheywood]

I'd try to steer away from user defined stuff as it just adds complexity for marginal benefit. The poll gives me two bits of info, 1) that most people want to be able to tell carrots from bolts somehow, 2) but they are divided on how, style vs flag vs just words. More than anything the poll reinforces that there isn't a great need one way or another, or any great sense of urgency. I reckon we sit on this for a while and keep tacking on comments as we handle more support queries to gauge how big it really is.

[lordyavin]

What are carrots?

[brendanheywood]

Carrots are bolts which require a bolt plate in order to be clipped. They are used on some australian routes and also in other parts of the world like the US, and are slowly going out of fashion, but still in widespread use in particular areas. It is important to know where carrots are used because if you just rock up with a set of draws you wont be able to climb anything.

[lordyavin]

Sounds very strange to me. Never saw something equivalent in Europe. Crazy Aussies ;-)

[brendanheywood]

mentioning: @MelwinQ @birgander2 from #2150

[birgander2]

The style "mixed" stands a bit apart, as "mixed" is already well known in the climbing community as a rock / ice combination involving some drytooling (see wikipedia, even has its own grading system). So changing the tag from "trad" to "mixed" when a number of bolts is set is just wrong in my opinion. One can either leave it to "trad" plus showing the number of bolts, or define an entirely new style "trad+bolts".

I am, however, in favor of only few basic styles. At the end, there are so many possibilities that you'll never be able to model all of them. I ran into the problem in Sächsische Schweiz, there "trad" means that you can leave your usual trad gear at home (only knots / slings allowed for protection). Is this the new style "saxon"? I think no.

[brendanheywood]

Moving this into the planned tick type releasem because if we start filtering based on what type of route it is then we need to consider possible new route styles at the same time

[brendanheywood]

+1 for reducing the confusion around mixed having two meanings (context in germany) https://www.thecrag.com/discussion/2557043649

I think there is potentially a very simple fix for the 'mixed' issue without tackling the larger data model change which is simply finding a better word which is both unambiguous to aussies and non-aussies while also feeling natural, and also being succinct.

We don't even have a way to model 'ice+rock' but if we did probably the easiest would be to add that as a new gear style, and I would call it 'Mixed Ice' and rename the other one to 'Mixed Trad'.

Renaming 'mixed' is seconds of work and makes sense in English at least - @rouletout what do you think for most other languages?

[rouletout]

@brendanheywood that will work - better definitions is what we need, so go for it ;-)

[brendanheywood]

@rouletout English done, over to you for the other langs

I also updated this, but it's not translated yet:

https://brendan.thecrag.com/en/article/styles

[rouletout]

@brendanheywood can you please add the new keys here?

[brendanheywood]

For the 'Mixed trad' there is no ney keys, existing one:

"dbconfig.route-gear-style.mixed" : "mixed trad",

The article is a bigger task, lets worry about that as a whole article not here

[rouletout]

OK, closed

[brendanheywood]

This is not closed, that label change was a workaround of a much larger change