Re: Full D/T spread in different counties

I have a small issues, which has lead to a thought.

I would like to create a challenge to have Full D/T of Multis (or maybe 80 unique D/Ts). My issue is that in Sweden, there are 153 Swedes who has full D/T with Multis. However, almost every single one of them has it from a stupid cache series where I know 90% of the canisters has quite fake rating, I have logged the series myself. If I exclude the county where this series is located I am down to 7 Swedes. So 146/153 Swedes doesn't really deserve it in my opinion.

As a Challenge cache owner I would like to counter this, and I have the following ideas (one of them suggested to me by someone else):
* Exclude geocaches in the specific county - Not sure this will be allowed by the reviewers/HQ. No official rule against it, but I can really see how it would be seen as discriminating. A dangerous road for the future of Challenges. For example, the next step would be that someone says "no finds in Germany counts" just because they don't like Germans (Germans is just an example, please don't feel offended).
* Don't allow to use multiple geocaches where the cache title begins with the same text. For example "Pole fishing multis #1" and "Pole fishing multis #34" would be too similar. - I doubt this is allowed since challenge aren't allowed to use the cache name.
* Allow max 9 (or some other number) finds per county. - This would really prevent using the same series for the whole D/T matrix. A creative way to get around the issue in my opinion (the idea was suggested to me). So my 81 D/Ts would have to be spread in at least 9 (81/9=9) counties. The issue here is that such challenge checker would be fairly complex to write, and also potentially very slow.


Anyone have thoughts on the whole concept/problem? Do you think it would be feasible to create a checker that:
* Check for X number of unique D/Ts with the supplied GetFinds-compatible filter.
* Check that there are at most Y number of finds per country/region/county combination.
* Returns a list based on gccode, visitdate, difficulty, terrain, (country), (region), county. Probably sorted on the D/T.

Do you think it would be fast enough even for someone with almost 10,000 multis logged? Geocacher "qrang" has almost 9,000 multis for example. Too me it feels like the problem would have to be iterated a lot, and that it's likely that it won't be possible to do it in less than 30 seconds.

If anyone would be interested in throwing a test together I would be happy, I feel that my LUA skills are too low to get flow enough to work with this. I also believe many others here are a lot smarter than me in the area of smart algorithms.

I believe I found another way around my problem, which makes it less of a bookkeeping challenge, and also simpler/faster. I include geocaches that the PT-attribute and also all geocaches that has the combination Special tool required an No tree climbing, a combination that is very common on the full D/T series, at least in Sweden (since they almost always are 50% pole fishing).

I'll leave this post here for historical reasons though, but consider the matter resolved from my perspective.

Hi magmar 1447
Did you Forget to enable script?

Seems like I did, on one of three. Thank you for informing me, especially since I have a challenge in queue based on the script.

So thinking a bit philosophically, there is nothing to keep someone from putting up another "questionable" series somewhere in Sweden or anyplace else. Once the challenge is created all the rules to create an "easy" path to it are available and therefore easier to create. This just seems like an escalating arms race. Other challenges have seen this before.

My guess is that this is why challenges that need geographic visits have proliferated. They are harder to create "easy" paths and therefore are less likely to enter this arms race.

Filtering on cache name is a no-no under the current guidelines.

@Sloth96 - No there isn't. But I don't believe that most of these series has been created to intentionally ruin challenges, at least not as a target. Therefore I hope that they leave their attributes as they are and that at least not too many series will be created with the sole attempt to ruin the game.

I am still waiting to get approval from reviewers though. It's not crystal clear to them that this should be approved, since it's in a way are excluding some quite targeted series. I wouldn't be surprised if they are asking HQ for guideance.