OK thanks - I’m trying to think of the cleanest way to integrate ParksnPeaks (website) spotting into PoLo
Alan
and yes I meant the APIkey
Matt,
You can spot ZLOTA on ParksnPeaks website and also on ZLOTA website.
Do either website get spots forwarded from the other? If so how are you preventing bouncing?
Alan
The forwarding methods between PnP and ontheair were covered in an earlier post in this thread (May 21, 5/42), so check that out.
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Re bouncing:
ZLOTA maintains two tables of spots.
- Internal spots (spots received by the web interface, API, SMS or email gateways)
- External spots pulled from other clusters.
ZLOTA only forwards internal spots, so never bounces anything received from other clusters.
==
However, Internal spots forwarded to other clusters by ontheair do reflect back into the External spots table. But on the website all spots are clearly marked showing the cluster from which they originate. The same behaviour is seen for duplicates showing up on multiple external clusters. E.g.:
You can view this as a feature (seeing which clusters have picked up each spot) or a bug. If anyone complains, or if I find myself with free time and unoccupied, I’ll put in some de-dup code in the web page view. That would show each spot only once, but list all clusters that report it. But as each cluster reformats spots in different ways, the de-dup is not the case of a simple A==B comparison.
I’d probably go for the ‘let users put in their credentials’. As the spots will then be assigned to the right owner, and they’ll receive the correct edit / delete permissions. And a smaller security hole than a globally published API key, as any miscreants can be blocked individually.
But realise you’re doing the hard work here, so I’m happy to create you a single PoLo-specific account if that makes it all happen easier.
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@zl4nvw If someone is activating multiple ZLOTA references, how would that be self-spotted? Multiple single spots on the API? Or another way?
You can supply a comma-separated list of references in the reference field - if that works for you. Otherwise then separate API calls.
The former (comma separated list) is preferred as it will result in a single, combined notification to those subscribed for notifications, rather than multiple separate ones.
Great. The comma delimited list sounds good 
PR opened.
One issue I did have @zl4nvw was timeout from the API when posting spots. The spot still worked, just timed out before I got a response. Therefore, I’ve ignored timeout errors when spotting as a work around.
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Yes. I need to move the generation of outgoing spot notifications to a background job, rather than have it happenning during the spot creation. It’s taking too long. Will get onto that in my next RDOs.
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When I enabled ZLOTA in PoLo just now i saw 7,000 lines downloaded. But I seem to remember noticing that ZLOTA has 14,000 more parks than POTA or WWFF. So i was expecting a download in that order… i know there may be multiples but is that correct?
Alan
There are 7828 assets (places) marked as valid in ZLOTA currently.
There are 18,416 assets total (including all 14,000 parks in ZL) assigned references in the scheme, but not all are valid - we exclude parks under 10ha, and classes of park that are unlikely to have public access. The latter are mostly riverbanks - 11m either side of most rivers in NZ is crown land and classified as park, but the vast majority have no viable public access. People can spot, alert, activate those if they want, but they do not attract points under the scheme and are not publicised.
The monthly exported .csv and .json files currently only include the valid assets.
I’ve moved the notification generation to a background job - which has reduced the time to respond to the SPOT API call to sub-2 seconds. However, the API call still generates the map image associated with the spot in real time, hence the second or two taken to respond. So you may be best leaving the ‘timeout ignore’ in there.
Matt
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Sure thing @zl4nvw. It’s it now in the July '25 release so hopefully you and @ZL1UCH can give it a go and raise any issues here
OK thanks for clarifying Matt
Alan
@M1SDH Wonderful! Thank-you very much for all your work on this. I’ve put out a notice to the ZLOTA and ZL-SOTA groups. Hopefully we will see plenty of use.
Thanks heaps for all the hard work getting to this point. I went out in the dark and stormy weather tonight to activate one of my locals. It worked great! Spot publishing worked perfectly. Was unable to try park to park as I couldn’t find anyone else silly enough to be out in the dark.
Only issue I found was the rendering of my own spot showing unknown reference. I checked the spot and it was logged correctly.
Once again thank you so much for all the combined work to make this a reality!
Chris - ZL1UCH