Regional Spot Moderators

I really like Zach's idea. It's a nice simple mechanic that would require very little coding, although I'd say it shouldn't be based on who has checked in most, rather who has checked in there regularly. If there are 4 people who eat lunch at the same twice a week i see no reason they shouldn't all be able to tweak it, if needed, after a couple months. Also, i see no reason they should loose this ability if they stop going there, because they're obviously pretty familiar with the place even if they don't go there much anymore.

As for Jason's suggestion:
I think every regional editor getting an e-mail when there was a suggestion would get annoying fast. Maybe a nightly e-mail telling regional moderators there were, for example, 4 renames, and 2 nudges, and 3 dupes needing moderation and to please go to the regional moderator dashboard to help.

I'm thinking that people should get regional moderator invites only if they are regular users and there aren't already too many moderators in the area. If someone stops using gowalla or moderating they could loose their moderator status after a warning.

It would probably be able to automate some of this nudging as well - by logging the position of each one checking in to a location both the size and center of it should be guessable by Gowalla itself.

What the simplest kind of "position-moderatosr" would need to then is just to approve or disapprove of the Gowalla site's own suggested nudge.

This assumes that most people walk right up to a place when checking in. However, I suspect there are quite a few people like me who will check into a place that shows up as they're walking down the road, frequently on the other side of the road. And then you've got larger places like malls and large parks where people could check in anywhere in a large radious

Simply put, you've got far too many data points that don't approximate the center of the location to have an automated nudging. It's a good idea though.

It's true that for some (perhaps even many) spots the geo positions of the check ins won't be evenly distributed around the center of the spot - so all such automated suggestion would need heavy moderation/validation to ensure that they're improving the position and/or size of the spot.

Such validation could be crowdsourced though - letting all users who have checked in to that location at least once vote on whether the suggested nudge is an improvement or not.

As a relatively new user, I'd just like to make a couple comments on the issue. As I look at the map around me, I see LOTS of spots that are off by varying amounts...100 feet...500 yards. There is a lot of cleanup to do to make the spots really accurate. I couldn't check in to my favorite local sandwich place because the spot creator put the spot in the major road outside the strip mall area, missing the building with its radius entirely.

It would be so easy for me to look at the map of my area, and move the incorrect spots right where they need to be. I could adjust 10 of them in just a minute or two.

But the way you have to do it now guarantees that I won't be making the effort. I would have to create a post and list the spot and describe the correction and wait for someone else to hopefully get the correction right. It would take more time to document one change than go in and fix 10 of them.

So my question is, why can't anyone move a spot? At least within a certain small radius. Like Google Maps...you can move any marker. If it is moved too far, it automatically gets submitted for review before it is accepted.

I guess the reason is that it's feared that people will screw up the locations, but I don't think that would happen. What is the motive? Users can create spots now, and that can be done wrong as it is.

Or at least maybe users could earn their way into editing status by the number of check-ins or spots created, or something.

Anyway, being able to adjust the local spots would give me the ability and incentive to make the experience better for me and everyone else who uses Gowalla in my area. I really think it would be an improvement. I simply can't use the current process to get all the spots fixed.