Can't Log A Grade That Differs more than 3 grades Than What The Site Lists It As

Hey Chris,

good point, and something we have definitely been considering. This touches on a lot of points.

The original reason for this restriction was to avoid an issue that happened in the past, which is that extensions (or variations to intermediate lower-offs) are logged with the same name at a very different grade. This means there are routes like this: Example route (7c+) with 38 ascents logged as 6c, 4 ascents logged as 6c+, and 11 ascents logged as 8a, and 2 ascents logged as 7c+ (which is what it was logged as first). In the crag list, the 6c version does not appear. A user who searches for a 6c at this crag will not find the route. It would be more meaningful to have two routes, with a suffix to the name indicating the different anchor.

Example Route L2 (8a)

Example Route L1 (6c)

But different crags have different customs, and so it should be the users who determine which suffix to use.

There are three scenarios in which this need for logging a very different grade appears:

1. The first time a route was logged it got a ‘very’ wrong grade, and now the correct grade is no longer possible to log. If this happened, let me know and we fix it in the database directly. 

2. You want to log an extension or shorter version: In this case, creating a new route in the add ascent form's 'create new' tab would be best, with a suffix that specifies the difference to the existing entry.

3. A hold broke and the grade has changed by more than you can indicate currently. In this case, it's not so clear what is best. Adding a new route with a suffix (eg ‘after break’) is something that has been done before. We could alternatively change the grade of the climb in the db (this does not really do anything to anyone's logbook or the ascents, it only changes the grade of the climb in the crag's route list).

In none of these cases logging at a very different grade seems to be the best option for how the climb appears on 8a.

Are you trying to enter a different grade for a different reason?

We will try to separate the most popular two-pitch routes in the next weeks, but for many of them, there is no way to tell if it is differing opinions about a route’s grade of different anchors. Once our toolbox for database changes is working, we will be able to handle these cases more efficiently.

Best,

Ben

I have noticed this issue with boulder grades as well and it has prevented me from giving appropriate personal grades to problems that seem to be misgraded. I will also point out that in the Hueco grading scale, below V8 there can be more than one Font grade for every V grade. So changing a boulder grade from V4 to V6 or vice versa would not be allowed because they are 4 Font grades different.

Maybe a solution to this would not be to block users from logging more than three grades different, but to give a warning to add a separate route entry if they were logging a variation of the route.

Thanks for your input Luke. The last thing we want is climbers not being able to input their personal grade suggestion.