StephenA

It's the sensationalist headings, the click bait titles like the one in this video or "Disaster Strikes" with a big white arrow pointing out the sunken boat. They're not delivering it as news - they're delivering it as a way of earning money.

Is it only me who feels a bit uncomfortable about people basically cashing in (via adverts) on other peoples misfortune?

This is one of our cats opinion on my programming

Good old Alibaba Cloud.

We had that last year - was just trying to tie up resources and take the site off line. doing things slowly so things like fail2ban or concurrency monitors didn't pick up on it. Went on for a few days . Before that it was attacks against the email server, again doing things slowly and it was only when you started looking at things you could see a pattern. Has just become part of the background admin of running a server. Have reported over 1 million IP addresses to AbuseIPDB and have actually given up and firewalled quite a few entire CIDR ranges permanently because the minute you took them out of the firewall they just started over again.

We've had a UK based botnet hammering canalplan for weeks - trying SQL injection attacks. We use fail2ban to firewall them and report them to AbuseIPDB It's just how the internet is. Possibly - can always request it using the bugtracker. We're quite amenable to things like that

Top of the main gazetteer page https://canalplan.uk/gazetteer/

Last time I used pins in a map was back in the 1980s when I was doing some DXing and had a map of the world on the bedroom wall

We have a set of those maps in a frame on the wall of the main cabin and swap them round when we're on the move. Company is still in business too.. https://www.lockmastermaps.co.uk/wp/ Think I pointed this out a while back, that LockMaster is a well known brand in the UK Canal world so calling something LockMasterAI could be seen as trying to cash in on someone elses brand.

We did that going upstream last year. It's a longish day. The only issue going downstream is getting to the Avon lock before closing time.

How would it have helped someone who was 2 hours behind me and hadn't committed to the flight? There is no practical alternative route, all they could do is moor up and have a cup of tea and just sit there as boats go past them rather than get to the stoppage and get into the queue.

You seem obsessed with the "right on the day". We used Nicholsons and a PDF from Canalplan this summer and had no problems at all. We heard about the tree down over a boat via the towpath telegraph before we even got the emails. The other short term closure on Atherstone wasn't something we could do about as we were in it - the notoriously low levels round lock 9 were lower than normal. Not sure what you think people below the flight or above it would do if your app told them there was a problem - can't turn round. can't really plan around it, and the same goes for the tree down across a boat. BTW why does every single bridge on the Shroppie have a warning "Known Shallow Area - Keep Centre Channel"? And "risk : bridge hole" is rather superfluous. You also seem to say "Known Shallow Area - Keep Centre Channel" for most winding holes - which is pretty nonsensical.

As has been said there are apps which offer waze like features and there are sites like Canalplan which offer complex route planning including stoppages, and if you set your boat dimensions it will plan accordingly. Canalplan also has a My Map feature which you select a location and it shows where you can navigate from there given your boat dimensions With those dimensions you'll pretty much be stuck in which ever set of wide waterways ( north , but not the C&H, or south ) you have your boat in.

Needles, camels, that sort of thing