Geocaching Australia

I may be missing something here....
What I would like to see is the descriptive naming of queries....
ie found-caches-home100km.zip, rather than 1234.zip

Is this currently possible? If so - what is it that I'm missing??

If not - is it something that could be added?? please....

We don't do that because of the challenges of strange, weird and non-UTF8 characters that people like to add to try and "break" the system. e.g. check geocaches with emojis in their name. Some software handle them, some don't Not all fail gracefully.

There are also challenges with sending files with names containing strange characters by email. i.e. They get rejected or lost along the way as the data is moved from server to server. In some cases combinations of non-UTF8 characters with UTF8 characters ends up looking like spam where non-UTF8 characters are substituted and that rejects the file back to us. We then we get added to a blacklist for appearing to send spam and we can't send any email at all.

That's the history of why we avoid this, but it doesn't mean we always should or will. At this point there is no simple method of checking or enforcing the character set we use and store in the database and the level of complexity is wide and far reaching. We do have a task to convert database from UTF8 to UTF8MB4 to address data storage characters sets which, when implemented, might mean we can implement your request.

In the meantime I will add it to the development list so it's not forgotten.

Lower case a-z,0-9 would be fine!
Thanks for the explanation, I'll keep an eye out....

Groundspeak has this problem when making URLs. They deal with it by just removing any characters that aren't a-z,0-9 which can, and does occasionally, result in empty names. So there just needs to be a fallback to using the number id if there are no 'acceptable' characters in the name.