Re: Challenge checker for geographic spots - is this possible?

Hi there,
I would love to place a challenge for "low mountains". I live in a quite flat area (Lüneburger Heide, Niedersachsen, Germany), and there are a lot of mountains less than 100 meters in height. Many of them have a Cache on top, and usually there is some kind of story around such a significant spot, this is why it is quite interesting to visit them.
I would love to place a challenge like "Find 10 or more Geocaches on a mountain ("Berg") lower than 100 meters above NN. The Cache must be located within IE 50 meters of the top."
Is it possible to set up a Challenge checker for this purpose? I have a vague idea how challenge checkers work, but I don't know if it can check geographic spots like a mountain top near a found geocache. Is this possible and if yes, has anybody time and fun programming this for me?
Thanks a lot
austriaka (Karin) from Germany

Although it would be theoretically possible, I don't think it would be allowed because it would probably count as "...based on geographic areas other than countries, states/provinces, counties (or their local equivalent)." (Guideline 10)

You should be allowed to pick certain counties or provinces (which are areas that have been deemed allowed for challenges), and say find caches above 100m in elevations in those counties/provinces. So, if you choose a bunch of local counties where these "Bergs" exist, and use that as the basis, that would likely be allowed. Sometimes reviewers are reluctant to publish elevation caches at all, since that information is not available on geocaching.com, but usually an exception is made as elevation for a criteria in challenges.

I thought it would be fun to have a challenge for mountains of low altitude. There are a lot of challenges for high altitudes, which ist almost impossible to obtain, if you are in a place with no mountains ;-)
The other way round, find spots named a mountain with low altitude is more a name challenge together with altitude information than a pure elevation challenge.

So before asking a reviewer if he or she may publish a challenge like that my question is if it would be possible in a technical way to script such a checker? I guess you would need something like a database of named spots together with their location and altitude to check against nearby geocaches. I do not know if this even exists.

Thank you!

If you have a list of coordinates for all your mountain tops, it would be possible from a technical point of view.

But the guidelines don't allow it.
The best you could do is say "Find a cache with an elevation of at least 90m in County xyz of Germany".

But maybe a "Find x caches below sea level" might be an interesting alternative for you.
Or something similar to my challenge https://coord.info/GCA8KVV.

Thanks for your summary.
BTW I don't fulfill your challenge (35 of 50). ;-)

Or sum of 10 lowest or highest caches in XY county should be maximum/least XY meters

geoPetros (Slovakia)
info@geopetros.sk
Challenge Guidelines

I don't think KaiserVonChina was suggesting you necessarily make an exact copy of their challenge. But that form of challenge might be better than what you've suggested. You could take their challenge as a template and adjust the threshold to one you think is suitable (maybe 30 since you have achieved that many).

This thread has not received any further feedback and will therefor be moved to ARCHIVE Checker requests (impossible). Should the requester have any queries he can raise his question on this thread in the archived section



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2025 12:57PM by vogelbird. (view changes)