Having a separate field for the box number would be useful as well; it would help eliminate duplicates and give an idea as to how much of a given area was “done”.

PS. Great idea for the site.

Regards,
M@

As regards postboxen inside private premises, some are “official”, some are not. All the official ones that I’ve seen inside private premises are what I call “plastic pillars”; the unofficial ones that I’ve seen in private premises are in a variety of shapes/colors/materials. The most recent one that I saw/added was in a Sainsbury’s, and was part of an advertising stand. There is wording on it to say “posting in this box can not be legally accepted as giving an item into the custody of the Royal Mail” OWTTE.

If we are going to include these, we really need to make it clear that it’s an unofficial box. Otherwise, you (or the contributor) might conceivably be sued if an item goes missing after being posted in one of those boxes.

By the way, am I the only one who inputs last collection times ? I’ve never seen any other contributors include it.

I was thinking the other day that maybe you should modify the concept of “nearest postbox” to include only those where you could walk to before the day’s last collection.

Why do people not include the last collection times, I wonder. They’re printed on the box for all to see.

Also, could you include existing postboxes on the map when adding new ones, to assist in preventing duplications.

I’ve noticed that you’ve manually changed a few of my entries to put the last collection times in the last posting times new fields. Are you doing this manually ? I wrote these entries to assist machine parsing. If you look for a string that starts “LC:” and ends either with a semicolon or EOL, you should be able to extract the last posting data.

I didn’t realise that the postboxes inside premises were not “official” postboxes. I think they should be added, there are a good few already listed already. Keep them coming!!

Let me know how you get on with IE.

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/6493/badboxaw1.jpg

This is a part of Stevenage, SG1. Please compare it with what you get.

As for a “voluntary” box, I mean one that isn’t operated by the Royal Mail, but is provided as a service to customers at such places as Hotels, Workplaces, Halls of Residence, Supermarkets etc.

In practice, they are emptied by the RM on an informal basis, or a member of staff at the Hotel/whatever just collects them together every so often and posts them in a conventional box.

I can get you a picture if you’d like.

The business postbox type works fine on my system, you could try emptying the cache of the browser. It should load as an orange marker, I have checked this on a few systems and it works as it should.

However, on my browser (Firefox 3.0.3), the new “business postbox” is showing up as a large dark red teardrop icon, the sort that you get when you are adding a new postbox.

I’ve added a “voluntary” box, which is inside a branch of Sainsbury’s. I’m not sure if you want these included.