How about a Wiki-like solution? If anyone can add a new placemark, perhaps also anyone should be able to delete placemarks..?

Of course, this would likely require some sort of difficulty barrier, so that no moron goes deleting whatever they point their finger at. A non-trivial process (ie. posting an almost-exact duplicate of the placemark to be deleted, with the word DELETE added in the title) could do the trick.

If that proves to be troublesome, perhaps the author of the offending/duplicate/stupid/erroneous placemark could be notified by e-mail, that their placemark is being modified/deleted, and they might want to replace it, should they notice that a delete-happy kid is removing their perfectly valid placemark. This, however, could have the effect of placemark-happy users insistently replacing their beloved placemark on the middle finger Libby could show the world if she could.

Yet another idea could be to have the mod team - or some additional helpers - review deletion/modification requests, and only apply them once accepted. I believe this would be the best idea, as a dozen or so of deletions could be accepted in one minute-person.

Based on my relatively new experience, I think the best suggestion is Education.

Perhaps if users with few posts under their belt are allowed to save placemarks to "My Places" or on their computers (which I do) and are not allowed to add to the Community other than by being able to post the placemarks in posts would help to keep the overall clutter to a minimum.

Of course, that requires a bit of human intervention for a time, at least.

But... Get them used to saving them on their own and not flooding the BBS layer with placemarks for all to wade though would be very helpful.

This way, users that are interested can see the postmark, but those that are not would not see them at all, and not be bothered.

Barring that, a new forumand layer "What's This?" is an excellent idea. That way the postmarks would have the option of being turned off.

From personal experience, the places I go to a lot to see if there's new placemarks with questions, are very cluttered, and that's a difficulty.

I'm relatively new to Google Earth, and I just discovered something that cuts down on the level of annoyance which comes from placemark clutter. I'm sure most of you veterens have already done this, but other people may have not: change the label/icon size to small in tools>>options. That somewhat reduces the problem of placemarks covering up too much of the ground. Personally I think they should another size to choose from, like "extra small."

I agree with the idea of making placemark postings not mandatorily go into the Keyhole BBS layer. In my opinion, placemarks should, by default, not go into the BBS layer. There should be a check box at the bottom of the post page (like the "add signature to this post" button) that you have to click in order for your placemark to be added to the BBS layer. Placemarks along the lines of "what is this" just don't belong in a permanent layer (not to mention all the other stupid placemarks I've seen).

Before I go on, I have a question. Say that you post a placemark, and when the server gets updated, it is added to the BBS layer. If you delete that post, will that delete the placemark the next time the server gets updated? Can a placemark be deleted in that manner, even after it has been added to the BBS layer? I would would assume it couldn't, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.

Now, about preventing future duplicate/erroneous/pointless placemarks. In my opinion, this should be the moderators' responsibility. Some of you may think that seems like too much work, but that's the only way things are going to get better. I don't know how many mods there currently are, or how many members there are here, but we need a lot of mods to get the job done properly. They need to be strict too. If someone posts a duplicate, a mod just needs to delete it. Period. Or, if it's possible, they could just delete the person's attachment, and then post in the thread telling them why it was deleted. If you just delete the entire thread, people will just re-post the placemark and/or bitch about it being deleted.