Re: GC6XE3D 100:4:1 Diamond-Badge + 5 Cachetypes

Hi PGC-Team,

i need a checker for an upcoming challenge from me.

The owner must fulfill the following requirements:
1. He has to find in any country, but NOT the cachers home country, a cache in all of the countries subdivision like states, provinces, Bundesländer, Cantons, in short, the cacher need the 100% diamond badge of the country.

2. And he has to find five cache types in that country. the four classic types traditional, multi, mystery and earthcache and one of the rest, virtual, webcam, wherigo, letterbox, event.

Thank you.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2016 05:53PM by capsai. (view changes)

Theire is no script for this challenge
a) A checker can not determen in which country a cacher is living
b) A checker is based on a set number of regions in a certain country. You can not just take all the countries in the world and think that the number of regions are there to check
c) Likewise for counties, as above

I can be mistaken but the challenges like this (pre the new guidelines) have been look at but where never provided with a checker

Okay, because the challenge is in germany, then all countries except germany.

Proove me wrong, but the checker has just to look if a diamond badge is there and then check for the cache types.

Because the profile stats shows the country badges, the data for it must be in the database somewhere.

I think the scripwriter Target should answer your request

Read also the answer on another badge request http://project-gc.com/forum/read?10,875,878#msg-878

The challenge cannot be based on earning a "badge" at Project-GC, BadgeGen, etc. It's fine to base a challenge on the underlying requirement for a badge level. So, "Find 180 virtual caches" is OK, but the equivalent "Earn the Diamond badge for virtual caches" is not. This is because the challenge criteria must be based directly on statistics made available on Geocaching.com.

I disagree a little bit.

At first, i asked my local reviewer and he said that the challenge is okay.

Second is that the cacher can check this challenge with all informations on geocaching.com. The reason is that Provinces, States, Cantons etc are named in the cache listing.

Maybe an other idea: PGC knows the subdivisons of countries and geocaching.com knows it also. So a checker should be possible without looking for the diamond batch?

Sorry, I should have mentioned in my prior post that I am a Community Volunteer Reviewer. I was looking at the written guidance given by Geocaching HQ to reviewers when I made my statement that badge-based challenges (and challenge checkers) are unacceptable. It is very clearly in the "no" column. I have followed up with your reviewer.

Then change "Diamond Badge" in "all subdivisions of an country".

As i said, the subdivisons are named in a cache listing, so it used only data available on geocaching.com

The Diamond Badge was just an idea to reduce server load, because i think "look for a country diamond badge" requires far less computing power than "look in all countries visited by the cacher, if he has found a cache in every subdivision".

There is no script which can do this, It can only be done by mentioning the country name and required no. of regions.
But for all the countries in the world is not possible in fact there are a lot of countries with no regions anyway.

Then the cacher should name the country he wants to check on the checker-page.

And yes, i know that countries with no regions exist, but i see no problem with it.

Checker pages have only a single input field: the user to check. A user can't specify which country they wish to check for.

So are there other possibilities to realise a checker or maybe i can somehow change the challenge requirements a little bit?

I made two proposals for you

1) All the regions in 1 country in the nothern and western part of Europe which have 5 regions or more and a minimum 5 types.
The countries are Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden or Finland
Checker http://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC6XE3D/23742

2 All the regions in 1 country west of Germany or bordering Germany in the south or east accept Luxembourg and a minimum of five cache types in that country. the four classic types traditional, multi, mystery and earthcache and one of the rest, virtual, webcam, wherigo, letterbox, event.
The countries are Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic or Poland
Checker http://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC6XE3D/23741

The checkers are limited because this is the maximum the config is accepting
Please let me know what you think of this

I'm working on a new script for proportions of regions/counties in a country. I wanted to check, though: are you wanting to be so strict on the types for that part of the challenge? It would be a fair bit more work and less versatile if I put in code for those specific types. Are you willing to accept just a straight "at least 5 types" check?

Here's the checker with just the number of types checked: http://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC6XE3D/23789

It also will not count any country without region-level divisions. Let me know if you want to allow them.

Thank you very much, i appreciate it. :)

The checker looks good, also the checkers from vogelbird, but could you please ignore germany in your checker? It's a challenge in germany and it should be not too easy for our cachers here *g*

But right now, i prefer your checker, because it checks countries world wide what i find good because the cacher should fulfill the challenge in any country he wants.

And it's okay that your checker checks for any of the 5 cache types and not for my strict five one, i can change the listing, that is okay for me...

I'll work in the excluded country bit tomorrow

I have remove checkers 23741 and 23742.

Sumbloke : nice script, but can you exclude "region" or "county" ,"=", "".
In some regions or countries there are quite a number of caches which do not have a region or county i.e unknown caches outside the region boundaries (out at sea), They might be messing up the totals.

Example
Cacher Biegstra found in the Netherlands in 388 counties a cache but in your checker he found 389

I thought I'd catered for that, but I'll check it tomorrow when I'm adding the exclusion of a country.

Okay, I've made both of those adjustments to the script