Many times, people want to search for letterboxes that match specific criteria that Atlas Quest simply does not support. Usually, requests come in the form of attributes-such as, "Can we have a cemetery attribute" to search on? The answer, invariably, is always no. There are an infinite number of special-case attributes that could be created, and a list with hundreds of possible attributes isn't particularly helpful when most of them are of no interest to most people. Searching the clues for specific keywords, such as cemetery helps, but it's not perfect either. Many times, the word is spelled incorrectly or the clue uses common variations of the word (cemeteries, graveyard, etc.)

So support for keywords has been created. In a lot of ways, it's like a member-created attribute. People will be able to search for your keywords, and it won't get mixed up with false positives that a clue search might generate. Four keywords have already been defined:

Keyword	Meaning
cemetery	The letterbox is located in or near a cemetery.
historical	A vague term that means something interesting happened where this letterbox was planted, not including the fact that a letterbox was hidden in this location.
nightbox	A box that should be found at night. Not that it can be found at night, but rather that it's designed to be found at night. In daylight, the box may be difficult or impossible to find.
restarea	The letterbox is located at a rest area, rest stop, truck stop, travel plaza, or whatever you want to call them along a major road. Ideal for nabbing while on a long drive to get out an stretch one's legs.

A valid keyword must have between 3 and 15 alphanumeric characters in it, and must not use any spaces since spaces are used to separate multiple keywords. (This is why the keywords reststop and nightbox are one word.) If certain keywords start becoming popularly used, they may be added as a designed pre-defined keyword in the future. Keywords are not case-sensitive, so feel free to capitalize keywords if that makes sense or helps readability.

A full list of all keywords used by everyone can be found at http://www.atlasquest.com/boxes/actions/viewkeywords.html.

The following keywords are suggested by boxers, with guidelines on how the keywords are intended to be used:

Keyword	Meaning
airport	The letterbox is within easy walking distance of an airport so that a private pilot may find it without having to secure ground transportation.
artwork	The letterbox is located at or near a work of art (sculpture, mural, etc.), planted to call attention to that work of art.
haunted	The letterbox is located at or near a location reported as haunted or where some sort of paranormal occurrence is supposed to have happened.
horse	A good place to bring a horse.
Interstate	A quick find along an interstate or similar limited-access highway, either in a rest area or within a couple of blocks of an exit. If the stop takes longer than a potty break, it doesn't qualify!
library	The letterbox is located in or around a library.
mountainbike	A designated ATB trail. Don't use this keyword for paved bike trails; mountain bikers who would enjoy paved trails can use the keyword "roadbike".
picnic	A good place to stop for a picnic.
restaurant	The letterbox is located in or around a recommended restaurant.
roadBike	A good place to bring a road bicycle. This generally means there is a good place to ride a bike, and it's paved. It usually means a good place for rollerblades, too.
scenicroute	The letterbox is located on or near a scenic highway.
tourist	The letterbox is located at a place recommended for tourists to visit. The clues can be followed by anyone without local knowledge, although they may require some google research ahead of time. If they do require google research, they have the Mental Puzzle attribute as well.
trail names	Just type in the name of any hiking trail, such as appalachiantrail or pacificcresttrail. Remember to omit spaces. As a general guideline, the box doesn't have to be directly on the trail, but it should be close enough that a thru-hiker would want to hunt for it.
TransCanada	The letterbox is located somewhere along the TransCanada Highway which stretches from St. John's Newfoundland to Victoria, BC, either in a rest area or within a couple of blocks of an exit. If the stop takes longer than a potty break, it doesn't qualify!
tribute	A box that is planted in tribute to a person or group of people. This is not intended for tributes to historical personages — we can use historical for that—rather, for boxes like the ones planted for weddings, loved ones who have died, special teachers, etc.
wildlife	The letterbox is in a location where animals may be observed.

One keyword that is remarkably popular but not suggested is "park." The problem with this keyword is that it tells you absolutely nothing. A city park host to a child's jungle gym, a national park, a car park, and a ball park are all very different places, but without a qualifier, it's meaningless, you have no idea what it means. In many instances, people are trying to use multi-word keywords such as "state park"-but AQ treats those as two distinct and separate keywords. "State" by itself is as useless as "park," but "statepark" might be a legitimately useful keyword, along with nationalpark, countypark, citypark, ballpark, etc.

The following multi-word keywords are commonly misused by boxers. If multi-word keywords are used, do not insert spaces or hyphenate words.

Incorrect format	Correct keyword
parking lot	parkinglot
picnic area	see picnic
ice cream or ice-cream	icecream
city park	citypark
boy scouts or girl scouts	boyscouts or girlscouts
kid-friendly, family-friendly, child-friendly	Remove the hyphen; ie. kidfriendly
boat required	boatrequired
open space	openspace
post office	postoffice
nature trail	naturetrail
I-70, I-94, etc.	AQ treats these hyphenated interstates as two distinct keywords, "I" and "70"/"94", etc. Use the keyword interstate and list the Interstate number in the synopsis, if necessary.