The Buddha’s head is cut off in this thumbnail:
Also, is having the city names in local alphabets something you’ll do moving forward? I think there was another case with the name in Thai. I think that might lead to confusion as the site is geared towards English-speaking audiences and, let’s say we all know the name Bangkok, only a tiny fraction will also know it as กรุงเทพมหานคร.
I agree that local names would help. Even in Latin alfabet countries the name is off sometimes. Like the Hague which is called Den Haag in NL. This makes searching hard sometimes.
I like that they started allowing the proper names for a place like ‘real name (English name)’ maybe the same can be done with other alfabets? ‘english phonetic name (English name) - original characters’?
The automated publish email should be working properly now! Please let me know if you’re seeing otherwise. Thanks for your patience on this, and for all your contributions. 
thanks! I got one spot waiting to be published atm so will be able to report back soon.
What was the problem in the end?
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In February, we updated our web app framework (Ruby on Rails) to a later version and that caused some of our automated emails to break.
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I’ve recently started a conversation on the Seychelles category but it’s not showing on the “latest posts” section. Wondering if this might be a glitch:
Also, some older place entries had an option near the bottom to “start a conversation” that would create a thread for that specific place, but newer ones no longer have this. If this intended to be phased out going ahead?
Is there a chance that you could bring back the status of submissions? The grey bar that gave information is gone and now there is no way for me to see what works and what doesn’t. I even got a place that was rejected and you can’t tell by looking at the entry.
It would also be great if you could add more status updates. Something like ‘submitted’ for when sent in, ‘pending’ if accepted and waiting for an editor, ‘pending publication’ when it is done and waiting to get published. And of course ‘declined’ for when its not fitting and ‘work needed’ for when you need more input from the user.
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Ah, yep! That’s on our radar. Looks like those got lost in our latest place page design update. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
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Hey is there any news on this? I really think that you guys should change the way that the top places are chosen, as I am noticing a very skewed growth in places. It seems like most people just look at the first few places in the list of a city and that’s it.
For example there’s a few spots in Stockholm that I added and they are literally in within 10 ft of each other or less. Both outside and free, etc. One gets semi popular and goes up to page 1, the other does not and stays below.
So people either don’t use the maps, don’t care to click the places that they have been or don’t see the places. Personally I think that it is nr3, as spots that i add in sparsely populated areas (AO place wise) get loads of clicks and spots that I add in densely populated areas get nothing. e.g. try adding something to London, it is insane.
Have you considered adding categories like:
- Must see: Sorted by # visited. These are the easiest and most accessible spots.
- Hard to get: Sorted by # want to go, but lowest # visited first. This should give travellers a really unique list of places that seem popular but are never visited. (So this should give priority to 0,100 over 1000,2000)
- hidden wonders: perhaps something that sorts the least visited/want to visit posts based on date. So stuff that never caught on and got buried for 6 months would win from something that just got published.
And recalculating the popular ranking would also be great I think. The top places in a city are always never as interesting as say page 2. Do you store a time stamp with the clicks? You could compare the number each month and pick the places that got the most want to go’s in that time. That way the popular places are up to date and the big ones can finally be beaten by better stuff. You could call it something like ‘popular now’ maybe.
I think that stuff like that would really make the atlas much more accessible to people who travel.
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I have been really angry these days, because it has happened again that one of the places that I sent 3 years ago (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/night-and-day) has been
given to another person. (And even the same person !!) I was thinking of stopping adding more places, but I’m afraid that my addiction to Atlas Obscura is bigger than I thought. I just do it for my own enjoyment, otherwise I would be self-punishing. Looking for curious, incredible and surprising places motivates me to visit them and it is something that keeps my brain alive and my desire to learn more. It would be some how mental gymnastics. In spite of this, I will continue adding places but surely I will spend less time to write about them. Kind regards.
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Odd, your piece is even better I would say. This is the other one right? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dia-y-noche-day-and-night
What helped me recently was to send all my unpublished places to AO and ask them to evaluate them. That got some bumped up and published. From what I noticed, stuff that does not get picked up within a few weeks just disappears for ever.
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Hi Luis,
Thanks for letting us know about these! I’m so sorry that this has happened multiple times, and totally understand your frustration. We have some internal systems to flag duplicate entries for us, but clearly they do not catch everything. We’ll be taking a look at how we can improve these systems to reduce the chances that this happens in the future.
I’ve made a note about this and the other entry that you flagged so that we can consolidate them and make sure that you’re credited for the submissions. We’re currently working on fixing a bug in the tool that we use to merge entries, but as soon as that’s back up and running I’ll get those places updated.
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Thank you CoolCrab. Yes, That’s the published recently. I don’t know mine is better or not. (I actually have not read the new entry, just I was very angry because I come by there everyday) I think I’ll follow your advice.
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Exactly 9,84 ft. Quoting my own and unpublished article: “Both sculptures were worked in unity and made in bronze from 2002 to 2008. At first, a large piece was thought, although the measures of origin were smaller than the current ones. It was designed to make them in 2 meters (6,56 ft), but finally after a slow process of choosing the size, Lopez decides a totally monumental proportion of 3 meters (9,84 ft) and more than two thousand kilos of weight each (4.409 lb)”
Smaller problem, but I noticed that when you press ‘add photos’ in mobile, then you can add only one each time.
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This also might be worth fixing. All main site places seem to have it.
Thanks for the heads up! We’re looking into it.
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