Improving Moveable Caches
Posted: 22 January 12 6:48 pm
I did a few caches around the city this morning, with literally dozens of movable caches showing up nearby. I checked the logs for each one on my GPS and as far as I could tell, they'd all been picked up and moved on. It was a tedious process, and as I sat in the heat later on at home, feeling a bit annoyed about it, I had an idea. I'll throw it out there for what it's worth...
Would it be possible to modify the log types on movables to be something like "Picked up" , "Placed", and "Found"? That way you could differentiate between "I've found the cache and am currently moving it to a new location" (Picked Up), and "I've found the cache but left it where it was" (Found). As long as people made the right log entries the system would then know reasonably reliably whether the cache was currently at the listed coords, or in someone's possession.
The next trick would be to convey that info to the user. For on-screen display, perhaps you could just show the status as "In Transit". For GPX dumps from queries (http://geocaching.com.au/my/query), you could set the status to disabled (as I assume the GPX standard doesn't support "in transit"). Or maybe there's another field that could be used - my goal being of course to get something in GSAK that I could use to filter out caches that are "in transit".
Anyway, that was pretty much it. So any thoughts on the benefit of such a system, the difficulty of implementing it, refinements, better ways of achieving the same result? Am I just suffering from heat induced delusion?
Would it be possible to modify the log types on movables to be something like "Picked up" , "Placed", and "Found"? That way you could differentiate between "I've found the cache and am currently moving it to a new location" (Picked Up), and "I've found the cache but left it where it was" (Found). As long as people made the right log entries the system would then know reasonably reliably whether the cache was currently at the listed coords, or in someone's possession.
The next trick would be to convey that info to the user. For on-screen display, perhaps you could just show the status as "In Transit". For GPX dumps from queries (http://geocaching.com.au/my/query), you could set the status to disabled (as I assume the GPX standard doesn't support "in transit"). Or maybe there's another field that could be used - my goal being of course to get something in GSAK that I could use to filter out caches that are "in transit".
Anyway, that was pretty much it. So any thoughts on the benefit of such a system, the difficulty of implementing it, refinements, better ways of achieving the same result? Am I just suffering from heat induced delusion?