A place I frequently go to changed its name in Arc from “Fine Arts” to “XXX School of Fine Arts, University of XXX” in the last week. The change applies retrospectively to all past visits to that place. I’m not so keen on the new long (and cumbersome) name: I visit lots of places on the university of campus, so don’t need the university named! Is there a way to bulk rename the place to a private place name? I can’t seem to find a way to do this, and I’d prefer not to have to rename each future visit manually (I tried for some days, but Arc didn’t seem to learn, probably because I have so many past visits under the public place name). Or, is there a way to update the place name in the database (I think, Foursquare or Swarm) that would mean that all past and future visits there in Arc are automatically renamed?
EDIT: after reading this post (Places are out of date - #12 by matt), I wonder if the change is due to the switch to the new Foursquare database?
Yep, it’ll be because of the change to Foursquare’s new database. Which you’re not alone in not fully liking! There’s been a bunch of long running issues with the naming patterns, place groupings, and missing places, with their new database. The problem is that their old database is I believe nearing end of life for support and updates. As I understand it, they’re not updating the old database at all. Which essentially forces us onto the new one, even if we’re not entirely happy with it.
You can suggest edits to place names by opening the place in the Swarm app or Foursquare app, and make changes in there. Whether the edits will be accepted or not, I don’t know.
You could use the new Place Merge feature for this. Create a new private place, with the naming style you want, and assign a handful of visits to it. Then tap through to the Place Details view (from the bottom of the Item Details view). From there, tap the ellipsis (…) button at top right and select “Merge places”. That’ll show the other one in the list and you can choose to merge with it. At which point it’ll ask you which name you want to keep.
Thanks! The Place Merge solution fixed the problem elegantly. Thank you for the detailed instructions on how to do this (I’d never have found this on my own!)