What's new on Geocaching Australia

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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caughtatwork
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Re: Become a Mayor of a locale

Post by caughtatwork » 24 October 11 10:55 pm

pwags wrote:How easily can we check our "mayoral potential" in other locations?
Not sure this will work as you expect, but if you check your Mayoralty page, you can see the locales where you are approaching the minimum number. If you are over the minimum number (10) and you still don't have the Mayoralty, then someone is ahead of you. Find a cache in that locale and see who is mayor. Click the mayors name and see how many that have for that Mayoralty.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 24 October 11 10:55 pm

Laighside Legends wrote:Do burke and wills count?
What about trigs?
Did you read the wiki?
Locationless caches and moveable caches do not contribute to the mayoral status as locationless don't have a location to be mayor of and moveable caches, well, move.
If it's not excluded, then it's counted.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 24 October 11 10:57 pm

Zalgariath wrote:Awesome! Can we generate a list (maybe state by state) of all the regions so we can see who is on what count or will this amount of crunching kill the interwebs? 8-[
caughtatwork wrote:
pwags wrote:Is there any way we can see the count of finds for each cacher in each locality? How easily can we check our "mayoral potential" in other locations?
Trouble with the first one is that there are 3,645 distinct locales that have GCA caches. The time to trawl them all to find the mayoral candidates would be lengthy. As people hide new caches, both in AU/NZ and the rest of the world, the volume of locales goes up. i.e. We would need to check Abbeywood, Abbotsbury, Abercrombie Caves, Aberdeen, Aberglasslyn, Abergowrie through Zanthus and Zeehan to work out who has the highest find rate in those locales.

For an individual cacher (like yourself) that's probably doable. Let me play.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 24 October 11 11:02 pm

budgietas wrote:Maybe something similar could be done for hiders - this would encourage more gca listings as well.

Without the hiders nobody would get such status!
I purposely left off hiders.

We have seen over at opencaching.com that encouraging people to hide to get "stuff" whether it be tangible or not is a path to crappy caches thrown out for the numbers.

We do have exceptions like the cache races, and a few other things, but in general (yes there are exceptions) we don't encourage people to hide to get "stuff".

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Re: Become a Mayor of a locale

Post by caughtatwork » 24 October 11 11:03 pm

canary wrote:
As Mayor of Leura, can I boss pjmpjm around? Order him to clean up my house? Wash my car?

Oh, I'm going power mad on Day 1!

Long may I reign!
Be careful of who toes you tread on on the way up, they may be attached to the ass you have to kiss on the way down.

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pwags
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Re: Become a Mayor of a locale

Post by pwags » 25 October 11 12:01 am

caughtatwork wrote:
pwags wrote:How easily can we check our "mayoral potential" in other locations?
Not sure this will work as you expect, but if you check your Mayoralty page, you can see the locales where you are approaching the minimum number. If you are over the minimum number (10) and you still don't have the Mayoralty, then someone is ahead of you. Find a cache in that locale and see who is mayor. Click the mayors name and see how many that have for that Mayoralty.
Works well. Nice! Thanks, c@w.

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Zalgariath
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Zalgariath » 25 October 11 4:02 am

Yep, like the "Potential" box... good solution!

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Big Matt and Shell
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Big Matt and Shell » 25 October 11 8:07 am

pwags wrote:
Laighside Legends wrote:Do burke and wills count?
They must - I guess that's how I managed to get my mayoral status, as there are plenty of them in Melbourne's CBD, and not many other GCA caches there.
They look like it. I have potential mayoral status in Walgett and Ivanhoe but as there are no other GCA caches out that way I'm unlikely to get over the 10 cache threshold.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 25 October 11 8:19 am

Big Matt and Shell wrote:
pwags wrote:
Laighside Legends wrote:Do burke and wills count?
They must - I guess that's how I managed to get my mayoral status, as there are plenty of them in Melbourne's CBD, and not many other GCA caches there.
They look like it. I have potential mayoral status in Walgett and Ivanhoe but as there are no other GCA caches out that way I'm unlikely to get over the 10 cache threshold.
So close and yet so far.

I have a similar challenge in Melbourne. I've found all the GCA caches for the locale, but there is another mayor in place who has found more (i.e. the ones I've hidden).

Patience will be needed for some locales before you can take over the incumbent mayor either via passive means or via a palace revolt.

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Cache Listing Editing or New Cache

Post by caughtatwork » 25 October 11 2:47 pm

When you edit or create a new cache at the moment, you hit the save button and provided you have no validation errors, the cache is written to the DB and you are shown a page that confirms you have done the edit and you can now proceed to the cache page.

You then click to see what your cache page looks like.

Stupid :(

Now when you have finished your edit or your new cache, provided there are no validation errors, the page will now do a redirect to the cache page so you can immediately see what it looks like. One less step, one less click.

Nothing major, just a further step in simplicity.

Development time around 4 hours or $300.00

Tuena
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Tuena » 25 October 11 3:08 pm

I was looking at how I could become a Mayor & decided I'd have to look at the incumbent mayors & plan a challenge.

The closest I could find, in numbers, was (Fuddley) Nanango QLD. Checked how many finds I had but my figure disagreed with the official GCA figure. Close examination revealed that one of my finds was in South Nanango.

Then I looked at Wollongong but despite having 8 finds they were in Wollongong, North Wollongong, West Wollongong, Port Kembla etc.

Then moved onto Sydney as relatively close. It was here that I discovered an anomaly. Unlike Nanango & Wollongong, some GCA caches located in the Sydney metro area are shown as being located in Sydney despite them being located in suburbs.

Examples: Parramatta ICEM, Maroubra Trig & Bondi North Stack Trig are shown as located in Sydney whereas they are in Parramatta, Maroubra & Bondi respectively. Parramatta is located in Sydney, West Wollongong is not located in Wollongong. If I found the Parramatta ICEM I would be making a find in Sydney, not Parramatta.

Unfortunately there is no consistency as a search of Parramatta revealed 3 trigs which are located in Parramatta. :shock:

Can anything be done to remove this anomaly?

The incumbent Mayor shouldn't worry too much as I haven't visited Sydney or suburbs since 2005. However...those robes & the perks are attractive.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 25 October 11 3:34 pm

Tuena wrote:I was looking at how I could become a Mayor & decided I'd have to look at the incumbent mayors & plan a challenge.

The closest I could find, in numbers, was (Fuddley) Nanango QLD. Checked how many finds I had but my figure disagreed with the official GCA figure. Close examination revealed that one of my finds was in South Nanango.

Then I looked at Wollongong but despite having 8 finds they were in Wollongong, North Wollongong, West Wollongong, Port Kembla etc.

Then moved onto Sydney as relatively close. It was here that I discovered an anomaly. Unlike Nanango & Wollongong, some GCA caches located in the Sydney metro area are shown as being located in Sydney despite them being located in suburbs.

Examples: Parramatta ICEM, Maroubra Trig & Bondi North Stack Trig are shown as located in Sydney whereas they are in Parramatta, Maroubra & Bondi respectively. Parramatta is located in Sydney, West Wollongong is not located in Wollongong. If I found the Parramatta ICEM I would be making a find in Sydney, not Parramatta.

Unfortunately there is no consistency as a search of Parramatta revealed 3 trigs which are located in Parramatta. :shock:

Can anything be done to remove this anomaly?

The incumbent Mayor shouldn't worry too much as I haven't visited Sydney or suburbs since 2005. However...those robes & the perks are attractive.
Parramatta ICEM is actually in North Rocks.
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geo ... nsor=false
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/ga3389

Maroubra TP is indeed in Maroubra.
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geo ... nsor=false
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/tp4948

Bondi North Stack is in Bondi North.
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/tp5837

What happens with locales is that we do:
a. Get the locale from the Google Maps API. This is generally considered the most accurate for our purposes.
b. In the event that the Google Maps API is not available (returns a status not = "OK"), then we fall back on the postcode / locality table we have at GCA. The accuracy of the postcode locality table is less than stellar, but is rarely used as a fallback.

It would appear the 3 instances you have identified all calculated the locale via a fallback.

I'm not sure there is much we can do about this as we don't want to hold up a cache submission just because the API has failed. I'll try and think of an alternative where if you think the locale is wrong, you can click on a "refresh" locale link to force an update / check.

Laighside Legends
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Laighside Legends » 25 October 11 4:05 pm

What about using this part of the zones feature
I know there aren't many there so there would have to be a fallback option...
And we can always add to it and edit it as necessary...

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 25 October 11 4:32 pm

Laighside Legends wrote:What about using this part of the zones feature
I know there aren't many there so there would have to be a fallback option...
And we can always add to it and edit it as necessary...
Postcode boundaries and locality names are not the same thing.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Laighside Legends » 25 October 11 4:40 pm

How? :-k

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