Issues with creating a place, troubleshooting KML file

[southern_appalachia]

Hi! I have been working on making a KML shapefile for the Coosa Valley district in Alabama and Georgia for some time now, and I’ve finally finished it. I used Google Earth Pro and a manual text editor to create the file. There are three separate polygons, the largest of which has four inner boundaries. I tried uploading it to iNaturalist to create the place, but it returned this error:

There were problems importing that place: Failed to import a boundary. Check for slivers, overlapping polygons, and other geometry issues., Place geometry can’t be blank

I’m sure the problem here is that I’ve messed up the KML file in some way, and I’ve got no idea how to fix it. This is the first time I’ve ever attempted to create a KML file, so I’m kinda out of my depth.

If anyone would like to help me troubleshoot this file and is able, I’d appreciate it a lot. Here is a link to where you can download the KML file I created: https://mega.nz/file/P18Rnb5J#pTfSLs-9K3QwWv5TBuw-9OmYnWcGYaVhxwqYVgPtPgc

[pisum]

in general, every ring you create has to start and end at the same point.

just for example, the ring that defines your last polygon does:

<Polygon>
	<tessellate>0</tessellate>
	<outerBoundaryIs>
		<LinearRing>
			<coordinates>
				-86.89382306779513,32.9732802089964,0 -86.8902795219107,32.9765431765358,0 -86.89136705263351,32.97938650129463,0 -86.89568252063464,32.9757499880925,0 -86.89788444711589,32.97541506754887,0 -86.90015219694,32.97652519866929,0 -86.90046365118788,32.97652443810644,0 -86.90178341014168,32.97458467820024,0 -86.9036253204888,32.97413016949104,0 -86.90480323995054,32.97311373952528,0 -86.90543711036977,32.97179690401453,0 -86.90537075415261,32.96910048670911,0 -86.90620792457659,32.96849170366068,0 -86.90807669162091,32.96889239080826,0 -86.90875580731119,32.96858359245651,0 -86.90871507391493,32.96687178025292,0 -86.90890155690481,32.96640719661985,0 -86.90904960565754,32.96623046059332,0 -86.89382306779513,32.9732802089964,0 
			</coordinates>
		</LinearRing>
	</outerBoundaryIs>
</Polygon>

… but the ring that defines your second-to-last polygon does not:

<Polygon>
	<outerBoundaryIs>
		<LinearRing>
			<coordinates>
				-86.91291628630846,32.96467476159516,0 -86.91445374533173,32.96600970134412,0 -86.91714456215736,32.96699613863436,0 -86.92249270433906,32.96619630094196,0 -86.92534503233307,32.96777990306182,0 -86.92565524105304,32.96839706505379,0 -86.92536411128657,32.97065772976696,0 -86.92178812515567,32.97414177992663,0 -86.92048618828088,32.97667865101299,0 -86.92115589823213,32.97784710157567,0 -86.92538800688027,32.97416633507397,0 -86.92936486187639,32.97165770469547,0 -86.93161858223144,32.97078334735811,0 -86.93594404648091,32.97051836045558,0 -86.9376840050647,32.97291026588753,0 -86.94524729877917,32.96951828721729,0 -86.94890875107318,32.96872721169574,0 -86.96061753543674,32.96682588223614,0 -86.9604826938843,32.96559307245908,0 -86.95953338140089,32.96441568641863,0 -86.95839398663679,32.9646042119096,0 -86.95452509789423,32.96696548788915,0 -86.94097563193779,32.96664696786928,0 -86.93788618433825,32.9657760580067,0 -86.93599937956812,32.963654311154,0 -86.93385994394376,32.9622291597797,0 -86.93034236882548,32.9627522391019,0 -86.92114044861447,32.96030235770069,0 -86.91516089905626,32.96340979019517,0 -86.9140252000709,32.96374594272284,0 -86.91257212265486,32.96461360505219,0 
			</coordinates>
		</LinearRing>
	</outerBoundaryIs>
</Polygon>

the simple fix probably would be to just copy and paste each bad ring’s first point to the end of its coordinate list.

but i’m not sure exactly how you ended up with rings that didn’t start and end at the same point. so whatever you did there is the real problem, and you should probably figure out how to prevent that from happening in the future.

[southern_appalachia]

Thank you for your time and input!

Now, this might sound silly, but I actually did that to the rings manually in a text editor. See, because I didn’t really know what I was doing, I initially made a set of paths in GE Pro instead of polygons, and I had to convert those to polygons. I ended up doing that manually by copy/pasting the coordinate sets from the paths I made into an empty polygon, and it worked. But when I tried to upload it, it gave me that error. I spent some time reading online and fiddling with the shapefile to try to get it to work, and one thing I tried was removing the last duplicate coordinate, because I got it in my head, “Oh, maybe this is considered overlapping? Maybe it thinks it’s overlapping to have two points on the same place, and these overlapping points are here because I placed them to connect the paths I made.” So I tried removing those last duplicate coords in each of the rings to see if it would fix it (it of course didn’t), and I just forgot to put all of them back in before making this post.

…

Now I’ve tried fixing the rings and it’s got me even more confused, because I just added in those ending coords again and tried uploading it to confirm that it still wasn’t working… and it worked! I’ve successfully created the place. So I guess I accidentally fixed it in the process of all this and those broken rings were the final problem? What’s got me tripped up now is that it definitely wasn’t working earlier before I removed the ending coords from the rings, so now I have no Idea what it was that was breaking it before that.

But all’s well that end’s well, I guess. So thanks again for your help! I appreciate it a lot! Have a wonderful day! :D