Broad discussion around using distance climbed vs ascent count in most places when ranking

[brendanheywood]

What happened?

This is opening up a general discussion, the more input on this one the better. Note we have already had several support requests around 'why am I a boulderer' when I'm a trad climber, or worse people have deleted some ascents because they got labeled in a way they didn't like.

There are a variety of places that we rank various things based on ascent count, for instance:

Profile page:

• what type of climber you are (boulder vs trad)
• what crags you have climbed at the most
• who you have climbed with (we don't have this yet but it's on the cards)

Broadly I think using ascent count is imperfect, especially when it comes to bouldering vs sport and worse with bouldering vs trad, and I would guess the worst with big wall or long alpine routes. I can easily send 20 problems in a day, but typically do 5-10 sport routes, and maybe 3-5 trad routes or 1-2 multi pitch, and could climb a mountain or big wall for a week straight and only get 1 tick in theory.

I think there is two much better candidates for a general way of ranking things like this:

a) the number of meters climbed b) or the number of unique days spent climbing in a certain way

On top of this, I don't think the tick type should matter at all. If I go and work a project I'm still 'being' a sport climber or a boulderer and investing time in a particular crag or being with a certain friend.

A concrete example, my profile say my top crags are:

1) Gara (boulder + sport + trad) 2) Mount Wellington (boulder + sport + trad) 3) Waverly park (bouldering) 4) Oatlands (bouldering) 5) Ebor (trad + sport)

Waverly park in particular doesn't sit right with me, but over all it doesn't seem right to me. This seems like a more natural ranking to me:

1) Gara is a no brainer it wins hands down no matter what metrics we'd use 2) Mount Wellington - 26 days 3) Oatlands I have bouldered at on 13 unique days. 4) Ebor 9 unique days 5) Waverley park 8 unique days

These two lists at first glance are only subtly different, but when applied consistently I think some crags like Waverley park would drop off completely and other crags like Beulah and maybe Frog would be added to the list instead.

Doing rough figures in my head using the meters climbed would turn out fairly similar to days. I think overall using meters is probably easier and more useful generally, ie I often boulder and climb routes in the same day. Or I could climb 5 sport routes in a day but with a different partner each time (for the 'who I climbed with most stats)

What you expected:

• [ ] A better definition of 'how much' I have climbed of a certain type or who with

[birgander2]

Profile page, what type of climber you are: In my opinion, don't set that automatically, let the user select explicitly. Btw, the possibility to set some more personal things, like age, weight, etc., would be nice, too.

Concerning top crags: Days would probably the most logical choice. Metres are fine, too. But there are many many routes / boulders (at least in Europe) without lengths, so this probably would not work out as desired in practice.

[brendanheywood]

thanks @birgander2 :)

In my opinion, don't set that automatically, let the user select explicitly.

We've been doing this for years, so I think it's better to keep is as a default and allow people to override it. In practice I think a minority will bother. I also like there being a free text option so you could say 'Punk slack liner' or 'Old school thrutch master', maybe a candidate perk for supporters. I've logged that here https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/3198

Btw, the possibility to set some more personal things, like age, weight, etc., would be nice, too.

The database already has other fields eg height. But these were not used very much as so we've hidden them for the time being. I'll worry about these more when there is some clear benefit we can derive from it.

But there are many many routes / boulders (at least in Europe) without lengths,

This doesn't worry me too much, the main issue is a broadly different weightings for the different styles, so if for example we defaulted a boulder to 3m and a sport route to 15m we'd get a much better result than we have now. We would only use that default height for these relative rankings of crags and partners, ie we wouldn't change the 'distance climbed' metric to include the guessed heights.

Days climbed I do like because it's easy to show and explain. Adding a column saying '10 days climbing at Frog' I think could adds value and is intuitive, whereas saying you bouldered 30m today, or 200m over all time isn't how people think (and the precision is misleading for people who only log redpoints and not working or toprope etc). It could also mesh well conceptually to showing various stats by day, eg this https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/1220#issuecomment-24019194

But that said in most of these contexts I don't think we really need to show the internal metric, we can just say 'Brendan's top 5 crags' and as long as the end result is good it's not too important explaining how we got there.

[brendanheywood]

Hmm almost a duplicate from ages ago:

https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/1207

[brendanheywood]

+1 from support email Tom

[brendanheywood]

+1 from support red2

[brendanheywood]

This is the average height of every route in the system by gear type.

+-----------+-------------+
| AvgHeight | label       |
+-----------+-------------+
|         4 | Boulder     |
|        12 | Top rope    |
|        15 | DWS         |
|        24 | Sport       |
|        31 | Unknown     |
|        46 | Trad        |
|        84 | Ice         |
|       137 | Aid         |
|       311 | Traverse    |
|       394 | Alpine      |
|       437 | Via ferrata |
+-----------+-------------+

The mode for heights is roughly (sliced into 5m categories except for bouldering):

Boulder: 3m DWS: 5m Top rope: 10m Sport: 15m Trad: 20m

[brendanheywood]

I just realized this is also skewing the 'relative popularity' stats ie the power symbols next to routes and areas.

[brendanheywood]

+1 from user testing, specifically around the new grade charts, eg

https://www.thecrag.com/climbing/australia/mt-yarrowyck

Yarrowyck in the title is 'Rock climbing' which is chosen when there is no dominant gear style. But this crag is 75% bouldering by route count (right at the cut off point which is 75%). But it is 98% bouldering by ascent count. Weighted by ascent height it would go down slightly but still be 95%+. This should be a bouldering crag by any measure, and so the grade chart should be in V grades not ewbank

[Mdemaillard]

Merging from #1207 From Scott Godwin:

Is there a way to plot number of metres climbed, rather than number of routes climbed in the bar charts on your dashboard? If not I reckon this would be a cool thing to have. I climbed a lot of long routes this year but every time I look at those charts its makes me sad because it looks like I haven't done very much. I think one 400m route should be worth as much as twenty 20 m routes.

• [ ] I think stuff like this should be both a toggle that others can flip when looking at a profile and also a setting for your own profile.
• [ ] should this also sort the routes by height? Ie if you hardest onsight is 22, show your top 2 longest 22's?
• [ ] have a new column in the notable ascents table with cumulative height
• [ ] we should also make it easy to show and get people to fix missing heights, like the missing gear style drop down. I think this is mostly unfinished facet business, eg we should be able to search for ascents by Scott, that don't have a height. All the route filters should be in the ascent facet too

[lordyavin]

Why not just incrementing by the number of pitches if available?

[brendanheywood]

Changing it to either pitches or distance would be an equal amount of work, using distance would be way more meaningful than pitches