Geocaching Australia

If one day a faerie had the time and inclination, I thought an interesting addition to the stats graphs might be a map of how your centroid has moved during your caching career.
It would start off locked into your home area, but then an interstate or overseas trip would see it dragged off in that direction.
More finds at home would pull it back, then another trip would pull it in another direction.
It would need a spreadsheet of all your caches with each row recalculating your centroid and plotting it.
Perhaps it would be too processor intensive but for cachers that move around a bit it could prove very interesting.

It is also of interest in conjunction with GC59WFG Centurion Challenge Cache, where to satisfy the challenge, you need to find the cache closest to your centroid, with the catch being that your centroid needs to be at least 100km from your home.

Is the time period each cache find? Day? Week? Month? Year?

Ours would be interesting as we've lived in three distinct areas within SA since we started caching.

caughtatwork wrote:Is the time period each cache find? Day? Week? Month? Year?

That is tricky isn't it.
For caches going about their normal business it won't change much after they've found a hundred or so locally so each week would be fine.
However an overseas trip with several finds a day would make a big impact to a cacher with low numbers, and a week would see a big jump.
Perhaps don't use a time interval, but make it every 5 caches, or even a plot every time the centroid moves at least one kilometer from the last point plotted might be good. Because they are just points on a map, a distance interval might work best.
A cacher with low numbers would have fewer points but with bigger jumps.
A maccamob type would have more points but with small increments.

OK, I'll add this to the development wiki page so we don't lose focus and I'll think about the best way to achieve the result.

As you say, if this is to be plotted on a map, then a cacher with 5,000 finds does not want / need to see 5,000 individual markers with each one only a few meters from the last they want to see a migration over time as their point moves around.

This might have to be a Google Earth type result rather than a Google Map type thing, but I'll have a look at the code complexity first.