In reply to Wil Treasure:
Excellent - this gives me an excuse to agree, moralise, forgive and bump all at once.
I had a good laugh at those ridiculous tick marks too, on holds that are perfectly visible from above and below. What makes it even funnier is that they appeared a few days ago when they were marking basically the only two dry holds in the quarry!
I used to get annoyed by all the pointless tick marks and chalked footholds and so on that Wolfcrag started attracting a few years ago - but I rose above it.
Wolfcrag will never be pristine or conventionally beautiful or ethically pure, but it is a place where many different sorts of people and generations of climbing culture come together and learn about each other in the lovely diffident way that climbers tend to.
So where once my 'Wolfcrag warm-up' consisted of smoking a rollie with my back against the sun-warmed rock - often pretty much directly under the now dubious death-block - nowadays I deploy my Zen-like-calm and warm up by methodically brushing off all the excess chalk left behind by climbers of a different ilk.
In a way the tick-markers and foothold friction-reducers are doing me a favour.... because I gave up smoking twenty years ago.