You are looking at one of the most important pages on SeeClickFix: the "Create a Watch Area" page!
A watch area represents the geographic boundaries within which you (or a public official, or a community leader, or anyone else who wants to tune in) will be notified when a new issue is reported.
Start by giving the watch area a name. If you're making a watch area for yourself, you can call it whatever you like. If the watch area is public, you might want to put a little thought into this - but more on that in a second. After you give your watch area a name, you'll need to put in the email address to which you'd like the notifications to be sent. As always, you can rest assured that its will not be distributed in any way, shape, or form and will never be publicly visible on any SeeClickFix website.
Keywords enable you to filter the issues that are included in the watch area. For example, entering the keywords [street tree banana] will create a watch area that includes only the issues that contain either the word street OR tree OR banana in the summary or description. Notifications will not be emailed out for any other issues, and these issues are the only ones displayed on the watch area's homepage.
Adding a hyphen before a keyword, as in [-mushroom], will exclude all issues containing that word. Putting quotes around multiple words, as in ["red shell"] will include only those results that match the entire phrase in quotes. So, [ street tree banana -mushroom "red shell" ] will include all the issues containing street OR tree OR banana OR "red shell" except for search results that contain the word mushroom.
A description of your watch area is optional, but it will be helpful to users who navigate to your watch area's homepage looking for more information.
Clicking the "Who's Watching" tab on any community page will bring up a list of the public watchers in the area. Users will be able to see each watch area's exact boundaries and its keyword filters.
Additionally, a list of public watchers is displayed on the right side of every issue page. That way, users can see which watchers have been notified specifically about that issue. If a watcher who should have been notified wasn't notified, users can send them (only one) email to let them know about the issue and encouraging them to follow it. As you can see, a public watcher's name is visible in a number of places, so please be sure you get their name right.
