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Help: Adding/Editing Letterboxes

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  1. How do I delete or edit a listed letterbox?
  2. How do I change the type of a letterbox?
  3. How do I adopt a letterbox?
  4. What's the difference between the carver, author, planter, and owner of a letterbox?
  5. How is the elevation gain measured?
  6. How is the distance for a letterbox calculated?
  7. What happens to abandoned letterboxes?
  8. Atlas Quest won't accept the address I list for the box—what do I do?
  9. What if AQ does not support a city I need?
  10. How do I add more than one photo to an AQ hosted clue?
  11. How do I add a box to a series?
  12. How do I remove a box from a larger series?
  13. How do I host a clue on Atlas Quest?
  14. How are clue hits counted?
  15. How do I make sure that the starting location for my clues is correct?
  16. How do I let AQ know where my clue starts and ends for remotedly-hosted clues?
  17. How do I add one photo?
  18. How do I change the box type if I made an error?
  19. How do I edit the name of my letterbox?
  20. What the P-club and F-club restrictions?
  21. What are member group restrictions?
  22. What are whitelist and blacklist restrictions?
  23. How do you go about planting and listing a letterbox?
  24. What is the Stamp Image for in virtual solutions?

How do I delete or edit a listed letterbox?

You should rarely ever need to delete a letterbox. If a letterbox goes missing or is retired, you should change the status of the letterbox instead. This way, those who have found the letterbox can still record it as a find. However, if you ever do need to delete a letterbox—for instance, you accidentally added a box twice—drill down to the letterbox's details. (If you perform a search for a letterbox, clicking on the name of the box will get you to this screen.) Assuming you are logged in and have the authority to delete the letterbox, you will find a 'Delete Box' link near the upper-righthand corner of the window in the shape of a prominent red X.

To edit a letterbox, look in the same location except click the picture of the pencil in the upper-righthand corner. This will allow you to edit almost any information about the letterbox in question.

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How do I change the type of a letterbox?

This question almost invariably has its roots in a letterboxing gathering where you carved a special box just for the gathering, then afterwards convert it into a hitchhiker (or some other type of letterbox) to be released unleashed upon the rest of the world at large.

You cannot change the type of a letterbox, and there's a good reason for that. If you plant a temporary letterbox at a gathering, people will want to record it as a find on Atlas Quest. Later, after you turn it into a hitchhiker, people who find it will want to record it as a hitchhiker. If you simply change the letterbox type, however, people who found it as a real letterbox will end up getting credit for finding a hitchhiker that they really did not find and not getting the proper credit for finding a traditional letterbox. Even worse, if someone who was at the gathering that found it as a traditional letterbox ends up finding the hitchhiker, they won't be able to record finding both versions of the letterbox.

The solution, in this case, is to list the letterbox twice: once as a traditional letterbox and once as a hitchhiker. The traditional version should be listed as retired once it's played its role while the hitchhiker can be listed as active. That way, people can record the find for the correct type of box that they found, and if they find both types, they have a way of recording it.

It doesn't really matter what type of letterboxing you are starting with and into what you have converted it, the theory is still the same. An event stamp that becomes a traditional letterbox, or a personal traveler that becomes a hitchhiker, or any other combination of letterbox types, the process is still the same. Mark the old version as retired and list the new version as if it were a completely new letterbox.

So Atlas Quest does not allow you to change the type of a letterbox once it's been listed. Instead, the recommended method is to retire the old type, and list a new type.

If you inadvertently list a box incorrectly, just delete the incorrect listing and relist the box correctly.

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How do I adopt a letterbox?

The owner of a letterbox can transfer ownership to you if he or she agrees to allow you to adopt their box. They can change the ownership by editing their box's listing.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

What's the difference between the carver, author, planter, and owner of a letterbox?

Find reports will go to everyone associated with the letterbox, including the person who listed the letterbox if they are not already listed as the carver, author, planter, owner or contact.

Only the author and planter receive credit for a plant. Some people like to count any letterbox they've carved the stamp for as a plant, but Atlas Quest does not for two reasons: (1) A hand-carved stamp is optional and it seems odd to get credit for planting a letterbox for a feature that's optional, and (2) if you later find the letterbox with your stamp, you can still record it as an official find. If you were getting credit for the box as a plant, you would not also be able to claim credit for it as a find.

Likewise, as much as we appreciate those who've adopted and maintain a letterbox, those are adopted letterboxes and do not count towards your P-count. However, they may count towards your F-count if you went out and found the box yourself.

The carver, author, and planter of a letterbox should not change over the letterbox's lifetime and therefore cannot be changed except by the person who is getting credit as the carver, author, or planter respectively. The owner of a letterbox may change, sometimes quite often, and ownership can be revoked or transfered by the listed author, planter, or owner. The carver of a letterbox cannot transfer ownership to someone else.

Finally, there is a 'secret' piece of information included with every letterbox listing—the person who originally listed the box in the first place. Their name won't show up anywhere on the listing, but was originally designed to find people who list letterboxes without permission. However, if they have received permission to list the boxes, it also assumes you have permission to edit the boxes as necessary, and therefore the original lister of the box can also edit the boxes. Anyone designated as the Owner, Author or Planter can edit clues as well but not someone listed as a Carver or Contact.

If the carver, author, planter, or owner do not have accounts on Atlas Quest, leave the appropriate option blank and give credit where credit is due directly in the clues.

Table summary (powers and privileges):
Status Notified of a Find Credit for the Plant Edit the clue Transfer Ownership Expected Use
Owner Yes No Yes Yes The person who maintains the box
Author Yes Yes Yes Yes The person who wrote the clue
Planter Yes Yes Yes Yes The person who physically planted the letterbox
Lister Yes No Yes No The person who listed the box on Atlas Quest
Carver Yes No No No The person who carved the stamp
Contact Yes No No No People who should be notified whenever a find or attempt is recorded


Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How is the elevation gain measured?

This is the total elevation gain, in feet or meters depending on your preferences, required get the letterbox. This is not the net elevation gain, but the total elevation gain of the uphill parts—both to get the letterbox and to return to the trailhead. You want to give people an idea of how strenuous a hike will be, so you do not want to mislead them by listing the net elevation gain.

For instance, if a hike starts at sea level, climbs over a 100' mountain then descends back to sea level where the letterbox is located on the other side, the total elevation gain is 200'. That's 100 feet to get over the mountain and reach the box, then another 100 feet to climb back over the mountain and get back to the trailhead. The net elevation gain is zero, but if you list that, that would imply that the trail is flat. So you want to list the elevation gain as 200' so people realize that there is an uphill climb involved.

You can measure elevation gain using several possible methods:



Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How is the distance for a letterbox calculated?

The listed distance of a letterbox is the total length, in miles or kilometers depending on your preferences, required to walk for a letterboxer to nab all boxes within the series, as specified by the directions in the clue. It should include both the distance to get all letterboxes and to get back to the trailhead. You can estimate the distance, as long as the distance is somewhat accurate.

To measure the distance for your box, you have several options:


And remember, the distance does not necessarily have to be accurate to within 1/10th of a mile. Telling people that a hike is 5 miles long instead of 4.8 miles is not a problem. You want to give them an idea of how long and strenuous a hike is, and a rough estimate is better than no information at all.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

What happens to abandoned letterboxes?

For a box to qualify as abandoned, all people associated with the letterbox (including the carver, author, planter, owner, and the person who originally listed the box) has not logged into Atlas Quest for one full year. At this point, the status of the their boxes will be control automatically based on the finds and attempts associated with the box. The precise requirements to have the status automatically change is not public, but as a whole, boxes that are found recently will have a status of "active," those with lots of attempts will be listed as "retired," and those boxes with just a small number of attempts will be listed as "unknown." The precise number of finds and attempts, and even what counts as a find or attempt, is subject to change as necessary.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

Atlas Quest won't accept the address I list for the box—what do I do?

Be sure to list an actual street address or street intersection for where the clues start. The street address takes the form of the street number plus the street name. If the park or location does not have a street number, use a nearby street intersection instead, or perhaps try putting the number 1 before the street's name (e.g. type "1 Main St" instead of "Main St").

If the location is at or near an intersection, you could type an address of "Main St at Washington St" or "Main and Washington." For addresses in the United States, Atlas Quest can determine the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of an address or street intersection for a more accurate listing.

Using the exact street address is usually the easiest way to go if there's one available. Using a nearby street intersection is usually the second easiest location to list. Making up a number for a street that the site will accept is usually the most challenging method of listing an address.

If all else fails, just leave the address blank. The address is optional, and it's certainly nice when it is available, but letterboxers would prefer not having an address to not having any clue at all!

For non-US cities, Atlas Quest is unable to calculate the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of a specific address so instead it will store the city center's coordinates. The calculations will not be quite so precise, but it will still be accurate enough for most purposes.

The address must be an actual street address or intersection between two streets. Names of parks, businesses, or nicknames will not work.


Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

What if AQ does not support a city I need?

That's actually very rare, particularly in the United States. First, make sure you are not including an address as part of your location. Atlas Quest will generate an error if it cannot find a specific address, but if you leave that blank you'll often find that the city itself is supported. You can always come back again later and try adding an address if the address is being problematic.

If you still cannot get Atlas Quest to accept a specific city, be sure you use it's full and proper name. Nicknames and abbreviations are not supported.

Outside of the United States, support for cities varies considerably. Usually Atlas Quest will support the English version name of the city rather than what the locals call it, so try that first. If that fails, try the name the locals use.

If all else fails, contact an administrator to have the missing city added. If you can provide the latitude and longitude coordinates of the town, usually from an online source, it will help speed up your request.


Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How do I add more than one photo to an AQ hosted clue?

You have several options. Atlas Quest will accept just one picture for the clue, but you can do anything you want with that picture. Using your favorite photo editing program, you can merge several photos into a single photo that can be uploaded.

Another option is to host the pictures somewhere else, then link to the photos from your clue.

Or, of course, you can also create your own website and use all the photos you need.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How do I add a box to a series?

Use the Edit Box button found in the panel of buttons along the right side of the box details page. On the right side of the edit page, there will be a button for Series Info. Use that page to add additional boxes to your series and reorder them as necessary.

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How do I remove a box from a larger series?

Use the Delete Box button from the box details page. It will give you an option to choose which boxes in your series should be deleted rather than delete the entire series—unless, of course, you tell it to delete all the boxes in the series.

The Edit Box button will not allow you to delete individual boxes in a series. You can use that button to add new boxes to the series, but you must use the Delete Box button to actually delete an individual letterbox or an entire series.

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How do I host a clue on Atlas Quest?

When adding or editing a letterbox, click the button for the Clue section. By default, the drop down list at the top of that page will be to have no clue at all, but you can change it to be an AQ-hosted clue.

Everything for AQ-hosted clues is optional, except the clue itself. Atlas Quest will require that something be included as part of the clue's text before you can save the page, but if you change your mind, you can use the drop down list to go back to the option for no clue at all.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How are clue hits counted?

Note that clue hits are only tracked for AQ-hosted clues since Atlas Quest has no way to determine how often a clue is viewed on a remotely-hosted website.

Assuming you have an AQ-hosted clue, hits are only counted when someone other than yourself views the clue, and only counted a maximum of one time per session. For instance, if someone views your clue then continually clicks the refresh button, the hit will only be counted once. If they view the clue then come back the next day and view it again, it will count as two hits.

Additionally, there is no screening of hits except to not count it when you view your own clue. Hits may be generated from search engines crawling the web and therefore may not be 'human hits.'

Additionally, hits are not counted when people view the cached version of a clue, which happens more often than you might think. For instance, if someone uses the print-friendly page to print multiple clues on a single page, that is actually displaying the cached version of the clue and therefore will not be counted. Same thing if someone downloads clues from the PDA Downloads page (a premium member perk). Those use cached versions of the clues, so they don't get counted when the clues are downloaded.

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How do I make sure that the starting location for my clues is correct?

  1. Go to maps.yahoo.com.
  2. Start with a rough approximation of where the box clues start (often a parking lot) either by typing your city name or a nearby location in the box on the left side of the screen labeled with an "A" marker or double-click on the general location of the parking lot on the map again and again (it will zoom in a little each time).
  3. When you are zoomed in fairly close to the area of the parking lot, click on the Hybrid button at the top of the map itself. This will show you the satellite view with the street names overlaid on it.
  4. Now that you can see the satellite view, continue double-clicking on the area where the parking lot is. Do this until you cannot zoom in any further.
  5. Right click (Windows) or Control click (Mac) on the location where you want the clues to start (probably a nearby parking lot) and choose the Drive to here... option in the menu that pops up. A marker labeled "B" should now be on the map pointing to your start location.
  6. Notice that a set of coordinates was just placed in the text box on the left side of the screen that is labeled with a "B" marker. Now we have the coordinates, we just need to clean them up a bit. They should look something like: 29.765259,-95.445001
  7. The next step is simple but very important. Replace the comma with a space. In the above example, you should end up with: 29.765259 -95.445001
  8. On the Location page of the Add Planted Letterbox section of the website, there are boxes for typing in Location, City, State, and Country. In the Location box, type a description of the location, like Memorial Park, then a comma and then the exact coordinates from above (which are separated by a space and not a comma). Use Copy/Paste to make sure the coordinates don't get transposed. An example would be: Memorial Park, 29.765259 -95.445001
  9. Click on the Save button on the Atlas Quest web page just to the right of the "Change to Mystery" button.

It only takes doing this once, at which point Atlas Quest has "learned" the new location. From then on, you will no longer have to include the coordinates to use that location. Please try it, it will make the results much more accurate in Atlas Quest.

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How do I let AQ know where my clue starts and ends for remotedly-hosted clues?

Atlas Quest pulls information into its database for clues hosted on other websites. In order for the information brought in to be concise (no page headers and HTML from navigation links or other unneeded frames), place the following tags (without the spaces between the less than and exclamation mark) at the top and bottom of your clue.

< !-- aq -->
Your clue goes here.
< !-- aq end -->

Keep in mind that these tags should be comments in HTML and therefore will not be visible to people viewing your clue. If the tags are visible, you've done something wrong. Atlas Quest will still recognize the mistake and use the correct starting and ending points, but it still looks ugly for people who view your clue directly.

Note to Editors
Do NOT 'fix' the HTML comments to remove the extra spaces. The extra spaces ensure that the comments don't disappear from the help pages!

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

How do I add one photo?

To add a photo to your clue, the clue must be hosted on Atlas Quest. If your clue is hosted on LbNA or your own personal website, you will not be able to include a photo with your box listing.

On the clue page for AQ hosted clues there will be a location available to specify an image for uploading.

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How do I change the box type if I made an error?

Delete the listing and relist it using the correct letterbox type. If the box already has lots of finds on it, you can contact an administrator who can change the box type manually. If you reuse a stamp for a different box type, you should retire the old listing and create a new listing with the new type so people can record the type of box they actually found.

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How do I edit the name of my letterbox?

Make sure you are logged into Atlas Quest, pull up the box details or clue for your box, then edit the 'Edit Box' button near the right-hand side of the page.

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What the P-club and F-club restrictions?

You can restrict your letterboxes to only AQ members with a specified number of plants and finds. Keep in mind, these restrictions are based on official AQ counts so members who do not record their plants or finds on this site may not be able to access your clues. You are only allowed to restrict boxes up to your own P and F-counts, so if you have a P-count of 12 and an F-count of 132 on Atlas Quest, you will not be able to restrict your boxes beyond 12 plants and 132 finds respectively. If you are truly a spectacular planter and finder of letterboxes, AQ will also not allow you to exceed a P-count restriction of 250 or an F-count restriction beyond 9999.

If you have no plants or finds, you cannot restrict boxes by one's P or F-counts.

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What are member group restrictions?

You can restrict boxes to people who share a common member group as you. By default, all boxes will go into the Everybody group, that—not surprisingly—everyone is a part of. If you are a member of any protected or private groups, you'll be given the option to restrict your box to only other members of that group. Since anyone can sign up for a public group, those groups will not be available as options.

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What are whitelist and blacklist restrictions?

A whitelist is a list of everyone you allow to see your letterbox, while a blacklist is a list of everyone who is not allowed to see your letterbox.

Whitelists and blacklists are specified as contact groups. The primary purpose of contact groups is to contact groups of people you know, but they also do double duty as whitelists and blacklists if you choose to use them in that manner. A letterbox with a whitelist or blacklist restriction will require members to be logged in in order to see them on Atlas Quest to check if they are on the whitelist or blacklist.

A whitelist is a good way to limit your boxes to close friends or family. A blacklist, however, is actually a poor method of hiding boxes from specific members since it is easy for them to create another account or find the box with friends who can still see the letterbox listed. You can use it, but there's no guarantee it will prevent the people on your blacklist from accessing your box or clues.

Some people want to restrict boxes strictly to members on Atlas Quest, and you can do this by creating an empty blacklist. By adding a blacklist, even an empty one, Atlas Quest requires that someone must be logged in to see the letterbox. If the blacklist is empty, however, everyone who is logged in will still be able to see the box.

To apply a whitelist or blacklist to your boxes, you must be the owner of the letterbox, then follow these steps:

  1. Create a contact group. You'll probably want to make the group private and give it a name such as "My whitelist" or "My blacklist," then add everyone who should be a part of that group.
  2. While listing a letterbox, change to the Restrictions page. If you have any contact groups (which you should now, if you did step #1), they'll all be listed as options for whitelists and blacklists. Select the appropriate whitelist and/or blacklist for your restriction.
  3. Save the box—now only people on the whitelist and not on the blacklist can see your box.

To add or remove someone from a whitelist or blacklist, edit the contact group that is being used as the whitelist or blacklist. You do not have to edit or change the box listing in any way to apply such changes.

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How do you go about planting and listing a letterbox?

Before planting letterboxes of your own, it's usually a good idea to find a few first to get a sense of what's out there and what people are expecting in a letterbox. That does not mean you have to do things exactly like others do—but it's at least good to know where you might be doing things different from the standards in your area.

When you do finally plant a letterbox, use the Add Letterbox page (always found under the Letterboxes menubar option) to list your box on Atlas Quest. Fill in the blanks provided. Many help pages are available by clicking the Help icon if you aren't sure what is expected in a particular blank.

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes

What is the Stamp Image for in virtual solutions?

When someone solves a virtual, the prize for successfully 'finding' the box historically has been an image of a rubber stamp. Carve a stamp like you normally would, then scan an image of it for others to 'find.'

Help Home > Atlas Quest > Adding/Editing Letterboxes