Since I have to post pictures in order to be accepted as a full member I guess I'll give you scrappers, vandals, and cops some pics of a rad spot!


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Hope you enjoyed. Those of you full members in awe of what you perceive to be negative text, I thoroughly believe that there are two spots in Portland publically shared, created by someone I have explored with in the past that each time somebody has flicked the place and posted on the UER security guys have added a layer of security to the spot. One spot, not the one these pics are from but another perhaps by the same person that created this thread; each time I have gone to it the exact place of entry I entered from last time has been barbed. I have gone there now about 4 times. The person that created this thread I thoroughly respect you and get that you felt you had to post in order to be granted full membership. Just be careful guys because Security companies are saving big bucks trolling UER. Once I am granted full membership I will post plenty, in hopes those that monitor access have not been lied to and had a cop stealthily get in.

I'm pretty sure that security doesn't keep tabs on UER. They probably patrol the grounds regularly and look for new places that have been obviously used to get into the place, like a giant metal bag hanging off a hill, or a short flight of stairs, or a giant stack of lumber. I highly doubt that me posting stuff is the reason that POEs are getting locked up.

Posted by JennyUE I'm pretty sure that security doesn't keep tabs on UER. They probably patrol the grounds regularly and look for new places that have been obviously used to get into the place, like a giant metal bag hanging off a hill, or a short flight of stairs, or a giant stack of lumber. I highly doubt that me posting stuff is the reason that POEs are getting locked up.

I'm not trying to rock the boat here, but suadensky95's concerns do have a point, so we should use some discretion. Check your message.

Posted by suadensky95 Since I have to post pictures in order to be accepted as a full member I guess I'll give you scrappers, vandals, and cops some pics of a rad spot!

Really?? I'm really trying to help you Suadensky, but your attitude is not making this easy. The whole full membership thing, first of all, as I've told you, is NOT as big of a deal as you think it is, but second, if you want to get it, it's a two way street. If you can't participate positively in this community then you aren't going to get our trust. No one is asking you to share locations publicly, and sharing locations has nothing to do with getting FM. It's about contributing positively to this community.

I don't want to derail this thread, so PM me again if you want to discuss that further.

And as far as cops / security being on UER, it's not absolutely impossible, but I have enough experience with law enforcement to tell you it's pretty far fetched. But if they did go through all the effort of somehow getting FM, it really wouldn't help them very much. Not to mention it wouldn't last. We would find out eventually. And, at least as far as I'm aware, I don't think that has ever happened - or if it has, it's far from a common occurrence.

Posted by DJ Craig And as far as cops / security being on UER, it's not absolutely impossible, but I have enough experience with law enforcement to tell you it's pretty far fetched.

The issue is when excessive details are posted in the public section, because it gets indexed into search engines which would lead them here through Google.

Posted by Deuterium The issue is when excessive details are posted in the public section, because it gets indexed into search engines which would lead them here through Google.

I totally get that, but this thread doesn't have any such excessive details as far as I can see?

Posted by DJ Craig I totally get that, but this thread doesn't have any such excessive details as far as I can see?

I don't see any concerns as far as this thread.
I was just mentioning that there's no equivalence of coffee shop conversation privacy. Everything you post in publicly visible threads are indexed by external search engines, so anyone in the world who search by keywords can see it. Worse yet, many companies use brand monitoring so they get a notice when names are mentioned.

Posted by Deuterium I don't see any concerns as far as this thread. I was just mentioning that there's no equivalence of coffee shop conversation privacy. Everything you post in publicly visible threads are indexed by external search engines, so anyone in the world who search by keywords can see it. Worse yet, many companies use brand monitoring so they get a notice when names are mentioned.

Definitely a valid concern with public threads. I've had it happen with local places that I care about myself and I know it sucks. It's why we have the full membership system - anything that requires full membership will not be indexed by Google. And if people bring issues to our attention, we're generally willing to convert public threads into FM threads where needed.

Posted by DJ Craig Definitely a valid concern with public threads. I've had it happen with local places that I care about myself and I know it sucks. It's why we have the full membership system - anything that requires full membership will not be indexed by Google. And if people bring issues to our attention, we're generally willing to convert public threads into FM threads where needed.

This is more general and more in the long term. What we could use is an additional level of privacy, so anyone who takes an interest and bothers to visit here can see and browse, but off limits to scraper bots and search engines. This way it's like an open invitation meeting while not being an open podcast radio.

Personally, I think people need to just be able to accept that sites are going to change, going to be remodeled, and going to be demolished. That's why we have to keep going out and looking for places; they aren't going to last forever.

Just in the year I've been exploring, I've run into lots of people out at abandoned locations. I used to ask people "Are you on UER?" and they would not even know what I am talking about. Now I don't even ask anymore, figuring that if they don't know about it, there's no need for me to tell them. My point is that there are lots and lots of people who visit abandonments, and most of them are not dialed into the hobby in a way that we are here.

Sometimes locations get closed up on their own, without there being a specific event or reason for it happening. Maybe the property owner stopped by for a quarterly inspection and noticed that the place was all opened up. Or maybe someone was squatting there and it pissed off the neighbors, so they called the cops. Bad luck happens.

Maybe you just need to look at it like a trade: your couple of locations which have been posted VS. all of the knowledge and advice that is available on this site. You don't know what some old piece of machinery is? Post a photo and ask about it here, and it's very possible that you will receive an answer. Not sure of the types of risks associated with splashing around in drains? Just look around and you will find advice from experienced people who should know. And I haven't even gotten started on the networking potential. In only a year, I have met up and explored with folks who now "owe" me explores in Texas, Oregon, and Paris. To me, these benefits outweigh the loss of a few locations which are probably already well known to your local tagger community anyway.

Having met and done a few explores with Suadensky, I can say that he is a smart, respectful explorer. When he applies for Full Membership, I will most likely be vouching for him, so long as there haven't been any flame wars started on these boards by that time. I will say that he does seem to kind of "brain dump" while writing, which at first made it confusing for me to know what he was trying to say. Sometimes the sarcasm is pretty well mixed in, and seems real to the reader.

Finally, I wanted to say that if Ganesha and I had been so paranoid about defending our spots, we wouldn't have had anywhere to take you guys when you came up from Portland last month. Yes, the act of sharing could contribute to a location's death, but let's face it, they are all dying anyway.

Paranoia is always lurking in the minds of us lawbreakers. So please consider these sanity checks:

1. Search engines don't deal in pixels; they deal in text. Yes, you can search for images on Google; but those searches use text attached to the images (this is why the results are so scatterbrained). To defeat Google, be vague about place names or use nicknames for them in public posts. Where even the nature of the site combined with its general location seems like too much information, get more generic; for example, "abandoned industrial site" is the Seattle group's nickname for a place Suadensky95 visited one night recently.

2. Posting a picture of a site's interior such as a lonely chair isn't going to improve anybody's knowledge about the site's address or your POE. Of course if you mention the real business name along with your pic in a public forum, that's something Google can get a grip on. But still ... the POE? (Edit: make sure the GPS feature of your camera is turned off.)

3. It's conceivable that some tagger might select a publicly posted photo here, look for similar photos on other sources and find one that does have location information attached. But it would be a lot faster for that tagger to just work with his other sources of location-revealed photos in the first place -- unless he were determined to vandalize a site simply because you were there.

4. This leads to an aspect of paranoia I'll just touch on, not being a psychologist. A desire to inflate one's importance is part of paranoia; it's establishing that "I matter." "Deep inside a ruin, I saw a lonely chair; I posted a pic of it, and when I went back somebody had tagged the place." These events are most likely coincidences. I doubt that taggers are following your every move and wouldn't have a clue without you.

There are other ways to participate in the UER community. You can post in the photography thread and say nothing about where the pic is from. You can concentrate on advanced photographic techniques and equipment, history, internet research techniques, security, your and others' adventures, tutorials.

If you can't find any form of participation that appeals to you, then it may be that UER is not for you.

I stay out of politics here, but here's an example of what's gone wrong and hopefully it will help each of us in making our own judgment calls.

http://www.uer.ca/...=118180&currpage=1

Deuterium referenced a currently-private thread. For those who can't see it, it's about a pet hospital in a small town that had moved across the street. The person who explored the old hospital and posted about it gave away its location via his own small-town location. He described his POE, violating the TOS (tho from his write-up it seems like it was obvious enough). The hospital complained to UER, and in response Av moved the thread and, I'd guess, made it private. Personally I would have in addition scrubbed the post and told the poster to be more careful.

My conclusions:

1. It was the property owner, not taggers (not that owners aren't a worry).
2. The poster was indiscreet.
3. The owner or someone working with him determined that the location was in UER, in order to complain to Av. So, cops and perhaps others do watch UER.
4. Other explorers, taggers, vandals, etc. would have gotten in there no matter what precautions UER took. It happens.

Because this thread has gone off-topic, I've split it. Discussion of Suadensky95's issue is now in UE Main. I re-established JennyUE's thread in UE Pacific Northwest, http://www.uer.ca/...=1&threadid=120032

Im so sick of UER taking the blame for places beefing up security and whatnot

if this was 2003 I could understand it, but in 2015 your precious place is on more than UER and the search engines have indexed those sites as well

Here are some truths people need to swallow

1. you can't control people
2. you can't control the internet
3. you can't control property you dont own
4. you can't control urbex

Ill never understand why people can't be happy they got into a place and got pictures or whatever. who cares what happens after you leave


in the end 9 times out or 10 the trouble makers are local towns kids who dont even know what a uer is going into these places, and thats usually who the cops know of and are looking for


.. there is no urbex task force combing uer trust me.

Feel free to delete my membership to this site.

I would agree with what a lot of others have said here: UER is a relatively safe place for your locations when used correctly (No POE details, ect.).

Perhaps the most convincing reason would be how little of a problem everyone else thinks it is. Plenty of people posts pictures here publicly, and I have not seen any complaints until now of doing so getting the location locked up.

Suadensky95, you claimed that you saw two locations closed up due to pictures being posted here on UER. Your argument was that security saw those threads and closed the areas up. If that's actually what happened, and if we consider the rarity of other members reporting similar experiences, then you are either very unlucky or (at least to a degree) wrong.

Posted by suadensky95 Feel free to delete my membership to this site.

I think this is rash. Maybe you disagree with what others are saying in this thread or with the rules for gaining full membership, but I'm sure many people would appreciate the contributions you could make to this community. The deliberately blurry backgrounds of your close-ups seemed to have some cool stuff in them, for what that's worth.

I actually agree with everything that you guys are saying. Spots are going to be blown up eventually. I get it. With that being said though why don't more people add stuff to the database? I could add probably 20 spots to it for Oregon that are actually cool and not a stupid small abandoned half torn down houses in no where. Perhaps people don't post much on it because they think that it's part of the fun to find spots on one's own. However If people simply post something like mill Oregon and are careful of the pictures that they post, meaning not showing much background details/clues on where its @ it could actually make the game more fun. There are a lot of people that are convinced that they do not have many cool locations in there city, but if people began gang banging the database up people's minds would seriously expand. I went to the Seattle convention I believe mid august, and enjoyed it to a degree, but the thing that I really missed out on was the joy of actually finding the spots on my own. With that being said being told that there is a "mental hospital in southern Oregon" as a clue gets me super pumped up and excited to go explore in southern Oregon.

A significant reason/motive for me in UER is to compete with others, and try to be the most badass explorer in my city. On the private database if I am ever accepted I think we need to make it a contest who can post the most sh*t on it, with awesome pictures... but the winner also is the one that posts great shots but has the least follow up reply's on the thread. Meaning little people were able to find the spot despite being shared on the database.

Posted by TD I would agree with what a lot of others have said here: UER is a relatively safe place for your locations when used correctly (No POE details, ect.). Perhaps the most convincing reason would be how little of a problem everyone else thinks it is. Plenty of people posts pictures here publicly, and I have not seen any complaints until now of doing so getting the location locked up. Suadensky95, you claimed that you saw two locations closed up due to pictures being posted here on UER. Your argument was that security saw those threads and closed the areas up. If that's actually what happened, and if we consider the rarity of other members reporting similar experiences, then you are either very unlucky or (at least to a degree) wrong. I think this is rash. Maybe you disagree with what others are saying in this thread or with the rules for gaining full membership, but I'm sure many people would appreciate the contributions you could make to this community. The deliberately blurry backgrounds of your close-ups seemed to have some cool stuff in them, for what that's worth.

Touch down!!!!!

I'm a cop and I'm going to seal all of your guys locations.

Touch down!!!!! I'm a cop and I'm going to seal all of your guys locations.

Then I will have to start finding new ones, sir!