Glitch in numerous challenge checkers due to replacement of US Connecticut's 8 historic counties with 9 new "COGs"

Question

Hi, PCG has recently worked on (and perhaps completed?) the shift from 8 historic counties in Connecticut to 9 "councils of government" - see thread.  Here is a helpful map that shows the boundaries of both the old counties and new COGs. Both the Map County tool and some challenge checkers have caught up with the change, prominently including the Connecticut County Challenge Cache (which, amusingly, a couple of years ago I qualified for and claimed with 8 counties, but now would not qualify because none of my CT finds happen to fall into the new 9th COG). 

That CT county challenge checker correctly shows that I have a find in the "Capitol Region COG" (which encompasses all of the old "Hartford County," including the City of Hartford, the capitol of CT).  It lists my find of GC1D8DR, which is in the old Hartford County as well as the new Capitol Region COG.  I also have a number of other finds in that county/COG, such as GC8W248.

But, many (perhaps all?) of the US "State Capitol Challenge" checkers, using different scripts and tagging, have not caught up.  For example, GC7W7ZZ checker, GC9MBK7 checker, and GC7KRYF checker all omit my find in Hartford County/Capitol Region COG.  I have looked at a few other county-based challenges, and for example "finds in 100 counties" type of challenges seem to include the new COGs.

My guess is that those checkers are hard coded/tagged to look for a find in "Hartford County," but that county no longer exists in the Project-GC system.  I could flag this glitch to each of those checkers, but there are at least 20 state capital/capitol-based challenges in the US (just based on looking at the titles of the challenges).  So I am hoping there is a more systematic way to fix this problem.

Thanks for the great work everyone does on PGC, and challenges in particular.  bejs
 

Answer 1

Thank you for all the details.

It seems that you have a good understanding for the change and why it happened, so I won't go into that.

When we do updates like this we usually post the changes on the Challenge checker forums which are followed by the volunteers creating challenge checkers. It's then a collaborated work to make sure that everything that the change affected, in one way or another. Sometimes it's as easy as rename something in the challenge checker, but sometimes it changes the challenge itself and we'll have to consider if the challenge should be archived, updated, or we if we can create some legacy solution.

Imagine for example two counties in a state merging, where the challenge was to log them all. Do the want to decrease the number of required counties then? It's not obvious. Even less obvious if the challenge was to log a certain amount in different counties.

Together with the post about the updates we usually post a list of known affected challenges. We did so with this update as well. However, the three you found wasn't detected, and I don't know why. Today I did a search for Hartford County in the checker tags and found 28 active ones. All these are likely to be faulty. This far I have looked at 6 of them, all being challenges to log capital counties. Those should be easy to fix and we'll make sure that they are fixed.

These challenge gc-codes has been found today:

GC78DFM GC7HP5Z GC7HTEZ GC7JQFT GC7KRYF GC7MBQ1 GC7JQFT GC7W7ZZ GC7Y544 GC8C5KK GC8PK92 GC1A3HC GC91DNA GC9392P GC906R3 GC9DDCV GC9MBK7 GC9N6RB GC9PAXE GC9PJ0Z GC798VD GC9YN6K GCA4MPW GCA4GNR GCA4T0H GCAA1QG GCAA1QM GCAA1QV

Comments

Thanks for a detailed response, and for putting those checkers into a queue for fixes.  You may also want to look at GC3QM3Z and GC78CXG.  Both of those challenges are older one phrased in terms of finds in the capital CITIES rather than finds in the COUNTIES containing the capital cities.  So I should not qualify, and the checkers may well be correct.  But those are the only two state capital challenges that I had identified as possibly broken that you had not already identified.

Thanks again for your attention to this.  bejs

Answer 2

In the following GCcodes GC78DFM  GC91DNA  GC9MBK7  GC9PAXE  GC9PJ0Z I noticed a mistake in the config

" Maricopa County (AZ)" corrected in "Maricopa County (AZ)"