UKC

I went bouldering at Rise Canning Town on Sunday night, don't get there often but always fun to visit.  And was very impressed with how they had labelled the boulder problems upstairs. 

As the pic shows they show the intended grade, average climbers grade plus the max and min grades.

Love this as it's so open and transparent and gives you all the info you need to know - climb a problem and think it was easy? This will conform if you're right or not.  Climb something at the top of your grade range and think it is maybe overgraded (I always do this to myself)?  This will tell you if you're being hard on yourself.

Bravo Rise.  I like this.  Wish more walls would do this.

I see Mile End have recently gone the other direction "We don't believe in climbing numbers, we believe in climbing blocs" and then and explanation of how it's just hardest to easier by colour.  I find this unnecessarily pretentious if I'm honest.  Also pointless, as anyone who isn't a complete beginner is going to get their head around the grade boundaries for each colour in no time anyway.  Might as well just number them?

Anyway.  Rant over, would love to hear peoples thoughts on this!

They could have saved a lot of data processing with a label that says... "Ballpark grade: V3"

I can apparently climb V3 indoors but no way am I at that level outdoors considering I'm overweight. Whatever I guess, the grades work relative to each other so that's good.

Seems like a good idea. Do they take grades from some sort of digital log from the public? Or an average of what the routesetters / staff think?

Taking a large sample of climbers and taking the average grade seems like the most sensible idea (and in fact is the definition of the grade system for some), but is still vulnerable to crowd biases.

They have feedback sheets you can pickup and fill in for each problem (they’re numbered), seems to get more response than ways of gathering this kind of info digitally I’ve seen at other walls.

Basically what all other walls do.  Which is annoying as hell as it could be anything from V2 to V4!

Seems to make sense but I can’t help but think it’s a lot of effort to go through for grading a bloc. 
My nomination for worst grading system goes to my local gym in Switzerland. A completely random colour order which I have to go and check everytime I want to climb something different.

Lots of U.K. places do the same.  Take a picture on your phone! 

Doesn't seem random for anyone who's familiar with Font circuits.

It’s a shame their hold sets didn’t allow them to get yellow and orange the correct way round. I could live with the random beginner’s purple.

Speaking for Berlin here: all lead walls collect grade suggestions when a sector has been reset,  simple sheets of paper + pencil in the sector, and when they have about 20 suggestions for a route they take the average and it becomes official. Grade creep upwards is noticeable; being able to onsight 80% of grade x climbs indoors here doesn’t mean that you even have a bat in hell’s chance of onsighting the same grade in the Frankenjura or wherever. It’s just a kind of ego massaging game, and nothing to be taken seriously, but still fun if you manage to onsight a grade x+1 at the same wall a few weeks later.

PS as a contrast: the few locations which we had before the first indoor walls appeared are exactly the opposite: lovingly and artfully chipped reinforced concrete structures, graded hard as nails. The grades have stayed as they were 30 years ago; climb all the VIIs on the  Berlin Bunker and you can climb a VII (E3 5c?) anywhere in Europe (except maybe on Grit, but that’s not in Europe any more anyway )