Re: GCAAJGG - British Columbia Favourite Challenge

Hi can I have a challenge checker that checks to see if a geocacher fullfills one of the following two criteria's both of which are confined to the Province of British Columbia under the country of Canada.

This will be based off of the information found in: https://project-gc.com/Statistics/TopFav?country=Canada&region=British+Columbia&submit=Filter

Criteria: Only one of the following criteria are required

- Hidden caches with a total of 2,500+ favourite points received
- Hidden 1 cache in the top 125 most favourite in BC
- Found 75 of the top 100 most favourite caches in British Columbia
for each caches not found by user and is archived enables +1 count for the top 100 most favourite caches.
for example of the top 100 caches 5 of them I have not found and have been archived so for me we use the top 105 most favourite caches in British Columbia.
- Found 100 caches with 100 ( or more ) favourite points

There is a similar checker https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC4DQ01 which in that state checks for the second criteria only



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2023 04:04AM by Adroit Seeker. (view changes)

Have you checked with your reviewer on this? - Often even as an option it is against guidelines to require finders to own a cache.

No I have not checked with the reviewer - however I am aware of the Challenge Cache guidelines from GroundSpeak: https://www.geocaching.com/help/index.php?pg=kb.chapter&id=127&pgid=206

My assumptions is that in the guidelines one can not FORCE one to publish caches to meet completion criteria however it does not say it can't be used as an option to make it attainable.

Under point 14. Positive Challenge Criteria it states: Challenge criteria must be positive and require that a geocaching goal can be achieved.

I was using the first two options to fullfill the challenge requirements for those who come in from out of the area as an alternative way of qualifying.

I will check with the local reviewer, if for now can we proceed with the other ( last two ) options for the challenge and we can circle back to adding in the first two if approved by the local reviewer?

I'd rather wait - if the owned cache criteria are allowed it would be a new script rather than a script extension for just the 2 criteria. It is my experience that guidelines still apply to unrequired criteria.

I've modified the multi-test checker script, so you can use your hides for any test instead of your finds:
https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GCAAJGG/83885

Note that in the two tests that use your finds instead of your hides, they may refer to 'found', instead of 'hidden' (even though, they're actually considering the hides). If this is the only issue that the reviewer has I can fix this, just let me know. However, I don't think this will be published as-is, because I'm not sure allowing some non-required but restricted conditions to the checker will be allowed (as DrAcorn said).

Honestly, very few people will meet the hiding requirements anyhow. Only 56 people in *Canada* have hides with more than 2500 FPs. You have 2 of the top 125 favorited hides in BC (actually comes out at 129, because there are several ties for 125). I'd assume that only qualifies a very small number of cachers, so it seems almost pointless to include those, especially when they would likely qualify under some other condition.

But... I must say I'm curious of the outcome. So, there's your checker... let us know.

Thanks for the script. I am working with the lead reviewer of the area to see if it will be allowed with needing only 1 of the 4 possible qualification criteria. If options 1 and 2 area not allowed I will still proceed with options 3 and 4. We should now within an a week or so.

Having run the checker ( thank you for doing this ), it took me a bit to figure it out.

I think we can summerize option 2 where the "You found x out of a required 1 the most favorite 125 caches" by just displaying the caches that meet the criteria instead of all the non-qualifying caches.

For option 3 - "You found x out of a required 75 of the most favorite 100 caches"
we can change the wording a bit to say: "You have found x out of the required 75 of the top 100 most favorite caches in BC"
Can we also show the list of caches by changing the Found Date column heading to Found and under the colum when found a green circle with a check mark in it, and for the not found a red circl with an X in it? Also can we sort the found ones first then the not found ones after?

For the 4th option - the list is not restricted to caches in British Columbia as I can see running it with my profile that it is listing caches on the ET Hwy which is in Nevada USA and others that are not in BC. This will need to be fixed.

- I've added an option to only print the caches you've found (option #2).
- It's now printing the filter out (so it says "Filters:( excludeArchived:1 , country:Canada , excludeDisabled:0 , region:British Columbia)") for option 3.
- The red circle indicates you've failed that whole criteria. It's not a per-cache in that list. I think sorting it in different ways will cause confusion. Many other challenges use this checker, I'm presuming that users are pretty used to this output format.
- I've restricted option 4 to only be BC

You only fulfill option #2 now (with the change to #4), which is a "hiding" requirement... so if the reviewer doesn't allow that criteria, you won't qualify for your own challenge.

Thank you for the update.

Regarding option 3 if the geocacher has found a cache that meets the criteria but the cache has since been archived it will still count in the requirment for that option. We only exclude archived caches in the list if the user had not found the cache thus always providing a list of 100 caches in the top 100 to pull 75 from. If you redo this I think you will find that I qualify for option 3.

Yes, updated. I thought archived were included by default, but I guess that's not actually the case.

Look at option 3 it is not right it should only be using the first 100 (top 100) caches with favourite points and adding extra top over 100 for the number of caches that are currently achived in the 100 top list that the user has not found.

So for me 5 caches in the top 100 list have been archived so we use the next 5 after the top 100 to be my personal list of the top 100 caches this means for my profile we would use up to and including "The Clarinet" and not any more. I would need to have found 75 of these 100 caches

If my analysis is correct I have found 70 of this 100 top caches so I would not qualify for this ( yet ).

Option 4 look good - just if you can please include own caches that have 100 points ( I have two caches that have 100+ favourite points ) so my founc is 85+2 = 87 ( yeah I still do not qualify for this option either )

So for me to qualify with only using option 3 or 4 I would need to either find:

5 caches in the top 100 still or
13 caches that have 100+ favorite points.

I am still waiting on the reviewer to advise if options 1 and 2 can be used still

Let's wait to see what the reviewer says. It may be the challenge has to be changed entirely. While I'm interested to see if it will be accepted, putting in a bunch of time to perfect something that won't see the light of day... isn't productive.

Lets change option 2 to:

Found caches that total over 250,000 favorite points.

I am still waiting to hear on option 1 if will be allowed - If not it can just be dropped.

Sure we should wait for that verdict, however if it is not allowed we will still do option 3 and 4 at the very least. You can make those couple of tweaks at which time we can put a pause on this.

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