Editing a watch area after it's been created, or just deleting it

The people have spoken, and it turns out that they have some questions. We are happy to answer them! Here are two good ones we received recently:

shallatt asked: I created a watch area with innacurate boundaries. How do I delete it and start again?

and dellast asked: I accidentally mistyped our organization name - how do I delete this watch area?

Since both of these functions - editing a watch area or just straight-up destroying it - can be easily performed from the same page, we thought we'd answer them both in one Knowledge Base article.

To start with, once you've created a watch area (erroneously or otherwise) you'll receive an email from us. It will have the subject line "Seeclickfix watch area (whatever you titled it)". It should look something like this:

Click on the link labeled "You can edit this watch area here." When that page opens up, the URL is going to contain a long string of characters in it. This is because this the link contains information pertinent to the watch area that has been encrypted; that way, the only people who can edit a watch area are the ones who are going to be receive email notifications from it.

If you were making a watch area for someone else (say, for example, a public official) and you make a mistake, don't worry. As soon as they notice that something is wrong with it, they'll get in touch with us and we'll go ahead and fix it for them. However, if for some reason you can't bear to let your mistake stand for a moment longer, shoot us an email at contact /at/ seeclickfix /dot/ com and we'll take care of it for you.

So, when you click on that link, it will take you to a page like this:

And this is where you can make the magic happen. Do you want to edit the watch area's name? The email addresses it goes out to? Make a watch area public or restore it to private status once again? All the options you had when you first made the watch area are presented to you here once more.

If you'd like to change the shape of the watch area, you can click and drag the white blocks which represent the nodes of the watch area's boundary-shape. Keep in mind that if you want to shift a significant portion of the boudary, or even more the boundary as a whole, it can get pretty tedious moving the whole thing point by point. It might be easier to just get rid of it and start over....

which brings me to my next point. If you want to just destroy a watch area altogether you can do that as well from this page. Have a look at this screenshot. It's identical to the previous screenshot, but with one small change.

In case you didn't notice it, in this screenshot we've added a small green arrow pointing to the link where you can destroy the watch area. And by destroy, we really do mean destroy. Not only will the watch area be deleted, any record that it even existed will be eliminated from cyberspace. Once you click this link, there will be no turning back. Think carefully before you take that final step.