This doesn't mean that we want your street address, latitude/longitude, or anything too specific. Just give us your general region, and any salient locale info you can (ie, riparian, forest, coastal, desert - or urban, rural, wilderness). Local recent weather info is greatly helpful too. If you are knowledgeable and want to get into it, go ahead and give us finer info about your ecosystem and/or microclimate - but that's up to you.
Scale is also very important. I know that we don't all nerdily carry around tracking tapes, but there are some universal items that work better than a hand or a shoe in their absence. (Shoes are not that great for scale because there are a huge amount of global variants and even the difference between a US Men's size 8 sneaker and a US Men's size 8 work boot is pretty huge), and while a hand can do in a pinch, it's not the best.
In the absence of a nice measuring tape, some things work better than others: lighters, credit cards (backside up and with numbers blurred), standard coins, and even house keys are all better than a hand or foot. If you find yourself checking out a track without any good base measurement items, you can always make a pen/marker mark on a hand and officially measure against the mark later. As insignificant as it may seem at face value, a half-inch or a single centimeter can often be a big deal in identification later.
We understand that tracking is often a haphazard, spontaneous thing, and that curious/new folks might not think about these things before their first posts, and this is okay. We are not trying to curb or shame anyone. We're just trying to encourage everyone to think and track in an analytical way. Please be kind and reasonable.
