Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/why-do-people-leave-comments-on-openbenches/

by sedboyz • 7 months ago

235 27 7 months ago

Great project, feels like the old web. I'm inspired to take a walk to my local park and add the memorial benches

sjsmith89• 7 months ago

I see my area is lacking dispite having many memorial benches. Unfortunately some are in poor condition. I will try my best to capture and record them. Great project. Will encourage others.

arjie• 7 months ago

Marvelous stuff. Appreciate the tips on the technologies used to stay abreast of the new regulations. I always thought it was a pity we were going to start losing comments and am glad to see that it's still feasible to keep them.

BeetleB• 7 months ago

For 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. :-)

1659447091• 7 months ago

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

edent5• 7 months ago

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

aaronax• 7 months ago

Exists: https://www.hmdb.org/

pigsonthewing2• 7 months ago

That sounds, at least in part, like OpenPlaques: https://openplaques.org/

POBIX• 7 months ago

This is really beautiful. One of the most moving things I've seen in weeks. The website and the comments and just the idea of memorial benches.

I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?

edent5• 7 months ago

Built it and they will come.

OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.

I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.

My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.

It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.

There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.

But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.

jmkb• 7 months ago

Thanks for building and maintaining this lovely project.

I'm an OSM mapper & enjoy linking mapped benches to their profiles on OpenBenches. It gets hairy, though, when a single bench features multiple memorial plaques. Wonder if you'd consider revising your data model to permit multiple inscriptions per bench?

tracker1• 7 months ago

Agreed, it's heartwarming to see this. The past couple years, my vision has gotten significantly worse and I've been contemplating my life and even retirement. I honestly never even considered retirement or the thought of not being able to work, it's terrifying to me, and now seems all but inevitable.

I can only hope to be remembered by anyone as fondly as some of these people.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Thought this was going to lead to something about a major annoyance or weird commenters but pleasantly surprised at the list of impacts, heartfelt, emotive, human experiences connecting community from the physical to the virtual (to the otherworldly no doubt).

There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?

madaxe_again2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I likewise thought this was going to be about people being brutally unpleasant - commenting to laugh at the dead, to pour scorn on their families, that sort of thing.

I am jaded. Then again I come from a family where people go to funerals to gloat and start fights.

whatevermom4• 7 months ago

Is there a way to reprogram yourself when having a family like this?

edent5• 7 months ago

Please build it! There are lots of lovely tree memorials which should also be preserved.

0xDEAFBEAD• 7 months ago

I was reading over a comment thread on songfacts.com a few days ago and thought to myself "this is what the internet was supposed to be". People from all over the world connecting to discuss their favorite music, across time and space, without any upvoting, downvoting, likes, followers, or other systems to game for popularity.

Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.

tomjakubowski• 7 months ago

Up in the San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, just off of a faint use trail above Sierra Madre, someone installed a memorial bench for their child who died shortly after birth. Stumbling on it on a hike, I was overcome with emotion thinking of the grief those parents must have felt, and how it spurred them into the monumental effort of hiking the bench all the way up there and planting it in the ground. I'm normally a staunch advocate of the wilderness principle of Leave No Trace, but I didn't even think about it once whilst seated on that bench.

swiftcoder• 7 months ago

I really assumed this was going to be about an automated benchmark suite...

sph• 7 months ago

Beautiful post. Nothing confirms the Dead Internet Theory better than the surprise at seeing genuine human interaction on the net.

We share the desperate need to connect with each other, no matter how arduous it has become to.

I will expect with sadness the day that the author complains about bot spam on his benches website.

symbogra• 7 months ago

I will try to record any that I spot in my travels

edent5• 7 months ago

Thank you!

Waterluvian• 7 months ago

One early vacation morning my wife and I took our kids to a playground to adjust their pre-museum energy levels. It was quiet and sunny with dew still on the grass. The kids ran carefree through the playground, making their own adventures while I settled on a nearby bench. I noticed the bench had one of those memorial plaques for a man named Everett:

https://ibb.co/GQsk7Dqk

The power of the memorial that morning had me daydreaming what it would be like to be a grandpa watching my grandkids running around the playground. That's where I want to be immortalized: not in a lonely cemetery but on a warm park bench, relaxing and enjoying the best things about life.

My youngest migrated his play to the swing set and called me over for help. I loaded him in and began pushing while thinking of old Everett, maybe pushing his own grandson, maybe in this very swing.

And then I noticed what was written just above him:

https://ibb.co/SwLJQgD4

In a breath my mind corrected the error in my daydreams and a freight train punched through my gut, leaving me unable to breathe. My heart sunk and fell out the bottom of me as I struggled to keep pushing my son. I'd later learn that my son, in that moment, was older than Evvy would ever get to be. It's been years and I still wrestle with this memory every time my kids play on a swing set.

KomoD• 7 months ago

Interesting site, will definitely add a few that are in my city!

Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

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