About RPLS.com
RPLS.com is a community website for Land Surveyors built by Land Surveyors.
RPLS.com is a peer-to-peer platform providing community-based discussions and support for Land Surveyors and Geomatics Professionals all over the world. Our goal is to serve and support people that know and love Surveying and related topics, so they can keep up to date in their industry, while learning more, and getting more work done.
For non-surveyors and others wondering: “RPLS” stands for Registered Professional Land Surveyors.
In the beginning…
Mark Deal established an important benchmark for the Land Surveying industry.
In the transformative decade of the 1990s, an aspiring surveyor by the name of Mark Eugene Deal envisioned an online hub where fellow surveyors from across the globe could converge and exchange insights, experiences, and memorable tales. In 1996, he launched RPLS.com, an online bulletin board. It became an overnight success in the surveying community.
It was an instant hit!
The growth of RPLS.com became rather overwhelming in the years that followed. Deal repeatedly upgraded his servers during that time but found it difficult to keep up with demand. In 2001, he learned that he had melanoma. He needed to focus on his battle with cancer, so he sold RPLS.com to POB Magazine later that year. He continued to participate in forum discussions until he passed away in January 2002.
POB moved the forums to the i-boards platform where it continued to grow in popularity for nearly a decade. In 2010, POB transformed RPLS.com into a social network dubbed “RPLS Network”, custom built by a third-party developer.
But, it was time for change.
After the launch of the RPLS Network, several surveyors from across the United States were trying to formulate a plan to build a new surveying community website. But how? They contacted Wendell Harness, a Land Surveyor who moonlighted as a web developer, asking if he could build them a new discussion forum — soon after, BeerLeg.com was born.
BeerLeg was launched on June 30, 2010 and was an overnight success, much like the original RPLS.com that Mark Deal had created nearly 15 years earlier. Due to complications with corporate servers blocking the term “BeerLeg”, it was soon changed to SurveyorConnect.com to better accommodate everyone.
RPLS.com returns!
In 2018, POB Magazine announced that they would be permanently discontinuing the RPLS Network. Then, in 2021, BNP Media announced that they would cease operations of POB Magazine.
However, in early 2023, the RPLS.com domain name had expired and became available for public purchase. We jumped on the opportunity and gained control of the domain on June 1, 2023. We are excited to continue the mission that Mark Deal established back in 1996 by combining the legacy concepts of RPLS.com with the history and success of SurveyorConnect.com.
