alt Hacker NewsFor almost 20 years, I've wanted to build a site where users can upload photos of informational boards/plaques along the road (e.g. on highways), along with photos of the actual item the board was talking about. The idea was that you could browse a map, and see all the ones along the route you were thinking of traveling, and decide which spots were worth stopping at.
In those days there were no cell phones, and I didn't know much web development. Now, with GPS embedded into photos, this is perhaps a really easy site to build.
But I don't want to deal with user moderation. And I don't want the burden of continual maintenance.
I was also concerned that a side effect would be really nice, not frequently visited spots will suddenly overflow with tourists. A much tougher problem to crack.
I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Someone convince me otherwise. Or better yet, build it for me. :-)
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> The idea was that you could browse a map, and see all the ones along the route you were thinking of traveling, and decide which spots were worth stopping at.
Strava has something like this, not specifically for informational boards/plaques. People with public profiles can have their uploaded photos of (usually) trail markers, plaques, rickety bridges/stairs/rocks, big trees etc added to a community map so others can see whats on a trail or route they want to walk/run.
I take the exact photos you are talking about and have them uploaded to my trail activities -- though I keep my profile private, more of a historical record for myself. I've wondered if others were into taking/saving photos of all the ones they come across. I see others reading and moving on or taking a selfie, but am usually the only one trying to get photos of the board/plaque and the objects it was pointing out
You are welcome to fork our code for OpenBenches
https://github.com/openbenches/openbenches.org/
It is fairly standard PHP + MySQL.
We use Auth0 for authentication - people editing have to use a social network to log in. That significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the need for moderation.
As for maintenance - once in a while dependabot will say a PHP library is out of date and I'll run the update.
Please do launch your project; it sounds like fun