Re: GC9YY43 - 161km Challenge Cache

Hi checker experts,

I would need a checker for the following challenge (GC9YY43):
Find 10 caches of different types (excluding locationless and lab caches) that have a distance of 161km to each other.

In fact 161m would be a no-brainer as this is the minimum required distance, but 161km might be a bit more challenging. At least it took me some travels to complete as you can see in the following flops map: https://t1p.de/fpaj1 (shortened URL).
Providing evidence using a map like this is simple, but coding a checker to proof this challenge might be challenging as well. But I am quite sure you have seen more complicated requests and will manage. :-)

Kind regards and good luck,
Thomas aka topax_xx

Sorry, this sort of challenge is no longer allowed under guideline 10:

Quote
Not acceptable
Challenges based on geographic areas other than countries, states/provinces, counties (or their local equivalent). Examples: user-defined mapping polygons, latitude/longitude, radius, etc.

I read the guidance carefully before I raised this checker request and disagree to the violation of guidance 10!
This challenge is not referring to a geographic area, but can be completed everywhere, well at least everywhere the corresponding cache types are available. It neither defines a region where the caches have to be located nor any other geographical constraints besides the distance to each other.
I assume guideline 10 was defined to enable the challenge can be fulfilled by anyone and does not enforce geocachers to travel to distinct places (before finding the cache container). This is not needed for this challenge at all. There is also no relation to the home coordinates of the geocacher or any other local or global reference coordinate.

Is there eventually a second opinion from another moderator? :-)

The final arbitrators of what is and is not allowed are the reviewers. We only provide guidance based on our understanding of the guidelines and advice we have previously received from reviewers.

I am aware of other challenges being rejected due to use of distances between caches being used in the criteria, citing this guideline. If you wish to ask your reviewer and get back to us, go ahead.

Thank you. I will contact the reviewer and come back to you.

I've recently created a script where you need two finds, with the 'boat' attribute that are 6000km apart. It required a custom script, as there was no existing script that could be tagged to calculate it. It was accepted by my reviewer without question, and your request seems somewhat similar in terms of criteria.

However, I think doing the actual calculation is going to prove exceedingly difficult. Finding the two most distant points in a set is a "known problem" that can be solved in O(N x log(N)) time, thus finding a pair of caches some distance apart is not difficult, and can be achieved in the 60 seconds checkers have to run. However, finding 10 points that are all a large distance apart seems like it wouldn't be able to be calculated within that time frame, especially for users with a large number of finds of many types.

The feedback from my reviewer took some time as he 'challenged' also other reviewers. Conclusion is that he does not agree to the argument that this challenge violates the "guideline 10" but there have been discussions with geocaching HQ in the past that these kind of challenges are "not wanted" as they seem to be "not simple and easy to explain, follow and document" - and presumably not that easy to write a checker for that is now a requirement.
There have been similar caches considering distances between single caches, even from moderators of this forum (e.g. GC7K4KC) or the one bmuzzin mentioned in the previous post, but it's not worth the effort to fight for this one as I have many other cache ideas in stock, so I reject the request and discard this challenge idea.
This forum thread can be closed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2022 04:17AM by topax_xx. (view changes)