Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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calumphing_four
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Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Post by calumphing_four » 31 January 12 12:34 am

I was wondering whether GCA can take a feed of the Waymarks listed for Australia (under 5000 at present) and present them in a more usable manner for us?
Thought I'd try and download the SA Waymarks (only 353) but one can only get a GPX Lite file, of 25 waymarks at a time. The GPX Lite file is very light on, and even the GPX file (downloadable one waymark at a time, is still small - with no relationship back to a cacher's ID.
Even the mapping function is quite poor there (only 25 at a time in a very small map window).
Cheers 8)

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CraigRat
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Re: Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Post by CraigRat » 31 January 12 6:40 am

calumphing_four wrote:I was wondering whether GCA can take a feed of the Waymarks listed for Australia (under 5000 at present) and present them in a more usable manner for us?
Thought I'd try and download the SA Waymarks (only 353) but one can only get a GPX Lite file, of 25 waymarks at a time. The GPX Lite file is very light on, and even the GPX file (downloadable one waymark at a time, is still small - with no relationship back to a cacher's ID.
Even the mapping function is quite poor there (only 25 at a time in a very small map window).
Cheers 8)
At 25 waymarks a gpx it wouldnt be managable for us to do to be honest

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caughtatwork
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Re: Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Post by caughtatwork » 31 January 12 8:36 am

There is no "feed" mechanism for waymarking (as far as I know). So the feed would need to be manual. I'm not going to do that every day.

Waymarks are also a little bit like locationless caches. i.e. The location that you get is where someone else has been, so it's kind of pointless in looking them up just to see where someone else has been. As we wouldn't show a description for the waymark (i.e. not our IP), it would essentially a list of places that others have visited.

As you would only see where others have been, is there really a point to importing waymarks? We do keep stats for peoples geocaches, but not waymarks. If there is a desire to collect the stats together, then we can look at doing something, but again, without an automated feed mechanism, we might be dead in the water as far as automation goes.

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calumphing_four
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Re: Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Post by calumphing_four » 31 January 12 5:12 pm

CraigRat wrote: At 25 waymarks a gpx it wouldnt be managable for us to do to be honest
No problems. I thought you may have a back door access that overcame that annoying limitation.
Cheers 8)

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calumphing_four
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Re: Can GCA take a feed of Waymarks

Post by calumphing_four » 31 January 12 5:24 pm

caughtatwork wrote:Waymarks are also a little bit like locationless caches. i.e. The location that you get is where someone else has been, so it's kind of pointless in looking them up just to see where someone else has been. As we wouldn't show a description for the waymark (i.e. not our IP), it would essentially a list of places that others have visited.

As you would only see where others have been, is there really a point to importing waymarks? We do keep stats for peoples geocaches, but not waymarks. If there is a desire to collect the stats together, then we can look at doing something, but again, without an automated feed mechanism, we might be dead in the water as far as automation goes.
They are more a combination of Virtuals and Locationless, so it does make sense to visit where others have been :) . However, since there is no automated feed they are best left in the Groundspeak realm. Just a pain they don't provide the same download mechanism as they do for caches ](*,)

BTW (not that I want them) do Groundspeak provide a feed for :-$ Challenges :?:
Cheers 8)

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