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Australia
December 14, 2017 03:23PM
Updating polygon data for Australia. We have been asked quite a few times about it, but haven't found the data. OSM is far from complete. Vogelbird sent me an email today saying he found links in the QA forum. From there I managed to extract the data needed. Been taking the whole day though. Had some issues to solve on the way.

The old data is from 2011. The new region data will be from 2016 and the new county data from 2017. I can with my eye detect any difference for the regions. The counties have quite a few changes though. A list from our compare-tool has been created.

The counties that only exists in the "old Australia":
Armidale Dumaresq (A)(1)
Ashfield (A)(1)
Auburn (C)(1)
Bankstown (C)(1)
Barkly (S)(7)
Blackall Tambo (R)(3)
Bombala (A)(1)
Boorowa (A)(1)
Botany Bay (C)(1)
Busselton (S)(5)
Campbelltown (C)(1)
Campbelltown (C)(4)
Canterbury (C)(1)
Central Coast (M)(6)
Central Desert (S)(7)
Central Highlands (M)(6)
Central Highlands (R)(3)
Conargo (A)(1)
Cooma-Monaro (A)(1)
Cootamundra (A)(1)
Corowa Shire (A)(1)
Deniliquin (A)(1)
Dubbo (C)(1)
East Arnhem (S)(7)
Flinders (M)(6)
Flinders (S)(3)
Geraldton-Greenough (C)(5)
Gloucester (A)(1)
Gosford (C)(1)
Great Lakes (A)(1)
Greater Taree (C)(1)
Guyra (A)(1)
Harden (A)(1)
Holroyd (C)(1)
Hurstville (C)(1)
Jerilderie (A)(1)
Kalamunda (S)(5)
Kingston (C)(2)
Kingston (DC)(4)
Kogarah (C)(1)
Kwinana (T)(5)
Latrobe (C)(2)
Latrobe (M)(6)
Leichhardt (A)(1)
MacDonnell (S)(7)
Manly (A)(1)
Marrickville (A)(1)
Melton (S)(2)
Mullewa (S)(5)
Murray (A)(1)
Narrogin (T)(5)
Palerang (A)(1)
Pittwater (A)(1)
Queanbeyan (C)(1)
Rockdale (C)(1)
Roebourne (S)(5)
Roper Gulf (S)(7)
Snowy River (A)(1)
Tiwi Islands (S)(7)
Tumbarumba (A)(1)
Tumut Shire (A)(1)
Urana (A)(1)
Victoria-Daly (S)(7)
Vincent (T)(5)
Wakool (A)(1)
Warringah (A)(1)
Wellington (A)(1)
West Arnhem (S)(7)
Wodonga (RC)(2)
Wyong (A)(1)
Young (A)(1)

The ones that only exists in the "new Australia":
Armidale Regional (A)(1)
Barkly (R)(7)
Bayside (A)(1)
Blackall-Tambo (R)(3)
Busselton (C)(5)
Campbelltown (C) (NSW)(1)
Campbelltown (C) (SA)(4)
Canterbury-Bankstown (A)(1)
Central Coast (C) (NSW)(1)
Central Coast (M) (Tas.)(6)
Central Desert (R)(7)
Central Highlands (M) (Tas.)(6)
Central Highlands (R) (Qld)(3)
Cumberland (A)(1)
Douglas (S)(3)
East Arnhem (R)(7)
Edward River (A)(1)
Federation (A)(1)
Flinders (M) (Tas.)(6)
Flinders (S) (Qld)(3)
Georges River (A)(1)
Greater Geraldton (C)(5)
Hilltops (A)(1)
Inner West (A)(1)
Kalamunda (C)(5)
Karratha (C)(5)
Kingston (C) (Vic.)(2)
Kingston (DC) (SA)(4)
Kwinana (C)(5)
Latrobe (C) (Vic.)(2)
Latrobe (M) (Tas.)(6)
Livingstone (S)(3)
MacDonnell (R)(7)
Mareeba (S)(3)
Melton (C)(2)
Mid-Coast (A)(1)
Murray River (A)(1)
Noosa (S)(3)
Northern Beaches (A)(1)
Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional (A)(1)
Roper Gulf (R)(7)
Snowy Monaro Regional (A)(1)
Snowy Valleys (A)(1)
Tiwi Islands (R)(7)
Victoria Daly (R)(7)
Vincent (C)(5)
West Arnhem (R)(7)
West Daly (R)(7)
Western Plains Regional (A)(1)
Wodonga (C)(2)

No challenges checkers has been automatically detected to be affected.

It will take many hours to update the data on the site, the update is in progress. Might not be finished until tomorrow.
Re: Australia
December 14, 2017 04:51PM
Checker https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC3CA9M/17071 is affected - tagged by sumbloke

and

https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC7FDGY/26289 will be changed by myself



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/14/2017 04:54PM by vogelbird. (view changes)
Re: Australia
December 15, 2017 12:13AM
I'll check mine once I have a chance...
Re: Australia
December 15, 2017 12:17PM
I don't think you guys will notice really, but just in case. There seems to be a transition period of about 24 hours still.

The workflow when updating polygons is quite simple. We import new ones, but all geocaches are still assigned areas according to the old ones. We the queue up a recalculation for every geocache in that country. Meanwhile, some geocaches will have counties from the old definitions, counties that doesn't exist anymore even. Some will have from the new definitions, including those that didn't exist before.

Since calculating which area a coordinate is inside is fairly expensive, especially when the polygons are very big (lots of vertices) it takes quite a lot of time. Australia has quite complex polygons and it seems like about 50% has been recalculated since I added them all to the queue.

Meanwhile there might seem to exist more counties than there should, since there are names from both the old and new definitions assigned to the geocaches.

A smoother transition is of course possible, with less issues. But this is the easiest way to execute it, and that's why it's done this way. For most countries we can recalculate within hours.
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