RPLS.com

Rebuilding a 30-Year-Old Surveying Community for Its Next Chapter

RPLS.com began in 1996 as one of the first online bulletin boards for land surveyors. Our founder, Wendell Harness, a land surveyor for 26 years, has run the community since 2010, first as SurveyorConnect.com, and brought it home to the original RPLS.com domain in 2023. Today it holds nearly 600,000 posts from more than 16,000 members.

After 16 years as a free site, the community needed a sustainable future, so we rebuilt the platform around a member-supported model. Reading stays free, while a low-cost membership unlocks posting and members-only discussion rooms. Members manage their membership, billing and profile from a full account dashboard, and early supporters locked in their rate as Founder Members.

The rebuild also turned a forum into a complete resource for the profession:

• A Find a Surveyor directory that helps property owners locate licensed surveyors by state and specialty
• A marketplace for surveying jobs, equipment classifieds and want-to-buy posts
• The Line & Grade blog and The Cut Sheet newsletter

Stronger spam defenses mean members spend their time talking shop instead of wading through junk.