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About RPLS.com
The online home of the land surveying profession.
RPLS.com is where the surveying profession gathers to talk shop. It’s the place a surveyor opens at 6 a.m. to ask a question, settle a property-corner debate, troubleshoot a piece of gear that won’t power on, find the next crew member, or just keep up with the people who understand the work. We’ve been doing this — under one name or another — for nearly thirty years.
We’re independent and surveyor-run. No corporate owner, no ad network calling the shots, no algorithm deciding what you see. Just a community of professionals who care about getting the work right and keeping the trade’s hard-won knowledge in good hands.
Why we’re here
Surveying is a profession built on judgment — the kind you can’t get from a manual. It’s passed down on the tailgate, learned through mistakes, and sharpened by arguing the fine points with people who’ve seen more than you have. RPLS.com exists to give that exchange a permanent home: somewhere the answers don’t scroll away, the old hands stick around, and a question asked today can still help someone five years from now.
Our goal is simple — to serve and support the people who know and love surveying, so they can stay current, keep learning, and get more work done.
(For anyone wondering: “RPLS” stands for Registered Professional Land Surveyor.)
Who we are
We’re a peer-to-peer community of land surveyors and geomatics professionals from across the country and around the world — licensed surveyors, party chiefs, technicians, students, and the retired hands who still can’t resist a good boundary discussion. Some have been here since the dial-up days. Others signed up last week. What they share is the work, and a willingness to help the next person figure it out.
Behind the scenes, RPLS.com is run by someone who came up in surveying before moving into web development — so the person keeping the lights on actually understands what a level loop is and why it matters. That surveying background has shaped this place from the start, and the respect for the work hasn’t faded.
What we do
Most of the life here happens in the discussion forums — thousands of conversations covering field technique, instruments and software, boundary law, business, regulations, and the occasional tall tale. It’s the heart of the site and always has been.
Beyond the forums, we host a surveying jobs board where firms post openings and surveyors find their next role, websites for surveyors for professionals who want a clean web presence without becoming web designers themselves, and advertising and vendor partnerships for the equipment makers, software companies, and trainers who serve this profession — and who reach a committed, logged-in audience here that no raw traffic count can match.
Whatever the entry point, it all comes back to the same thing: surveyors helping surveyors.
Our story
The story starts with Mark Deal.
In the mid-1990s, an aspiring surveyor named Mark Eugene Deal pictured an online place where surveyors anywhere could trade insight, experience, and a few good stories. In 1996 he launched RPLS.com as an online bulletin board, and it became an overnight success in the surveying community.
It took off faster than anyone expected. Mark upgraded his servers again and again just to keep pace with the demand. Then, in 2001, he learned he had melanoma. Needing to focus on his health, he sold RPLS.com to POB Magazine later that year. He kept posting in the forums he’d built right up until he passed away in January 2002. The benchmark he set for this profession is the reason we’re all still here.
Under POB, the forums moved to the i-boards platform and kept growing for nearly a decade. Then in 2010, POB rebuilt the site into a custom-coded social network called the “RPLS Network.” For a lot of longtime members, the new direction didn’t feel like home anymore — and a group of surveyors started looking for a better place to land.
They reached out to Wendell Harness, a land surveyor who moonlighted as a web developer, and asked whether he could build them a proper discussion forum again. He could.
The site went up in the spring of 2010 under a name only a surveyor would love: BeerLeg.com. A beer leg is old field slang. Set your tripod where it blocks the line and you’re buying the first round at the end of the day. The definition went on koozies and t-shirts, under a tagline that worked twice over: We’re On Line.
It lasted about 6 weeks. Members started writing in to say they couldn’t reach the site from the office, because corporate firewalls were blocking anything with “beer” in the domain. The name had to go. SurveyorConnect.com launched in mid-August, 2010, and much like the original RPLS.com fifteen years earlier, it was an instant hit. The community had a home again, run by one of their own, and the traffic climbed faster after the rename than it had before.
The wheel kept turning. In 2018, POB announced it was permanently shutting down the RPLS Network. In 2021, BNP Media announced it would cease operating POB Magazine altogether. Then, in early 2023, the RPLS.com domain quietly expired and became available to the public. We jumped on it and took ownership on June 1, 2023 — bringing the original name back home and uniting the legacy of Mark Deal’s RPLS.com with the community that had grown up as SurveyorConnect.
Same people. Same mission. The name that started it all, back where it belongs.
A note from Wendell
I’ve been the one keeping this community running since 2010, and I don’t take that lightly. Over the years I’ve tried hard to keep the site fresh — and yes, a few of those experiments didn’t pan out. I know I’ve put this community through more than one software change, and I appreciate everyone who stuck with me through them. The setup we have now has been steady for a good while, and I think it’s the best home this community has had. My roots are in surveying before I moved into web development, and I’m proud of that heritage — it’s why I look after this place like a member who genuinely cares, not like a company that bought a list of names.
Thanks for being here. Let’s keep it going.
— Wendell
