South Surrey Scavengers

When creating new waymarks the date last visited defaults to the listing date. But this is not always correct. If I visit a waymark on Nov 10 and submit it for listing on Nov 15 and it is approved say on Nov 18 I now have a listing date of Nov 18. However, the date last visited was actually Nov 10 unless there were other visits in the meantime.

It's been quite a while since any discussion has taken place regarding the direction of the Canadian Benchmarks category. Now that it's up and running what do waymarkers think of it? Any suggestions or discussion topics regarding it? There have been 3 or 4 waymarkers contributing so far? How do they like the functionality? How can we attract more people into this category? Up to this point it was pretty much my design. The only thing I'm planning right now is to find a way to populate the category with information from existing databases. This would result in th upload of 100,000 waymarks if it happened. However, I don't know if this will ever happen. What do you think?

For most waymarks, it would be true that the creator already knew where it was before making the first mark. However, for most benchmarks it is still really a seeking game because in many cases the finder has downloaded coordinate data from one of a number of databases and then they still had to go find it. And in many cases the find is not all that easy. Therefore, I believe that the creator of a benchmark should be able to log it as a visit as well. At least I will be allowing it within the Canadian Benchmarks if anyone so chooses.

Approving new waymarks can be a big big job. Approvers at geocaching.com would usually take a few days to approve a new geocache. Here at Waymarking the category managers have a similar job to them. I don't know what kind of time frame is expected or acceptable for category managers to approve (or decline) new waymarks. We all have regular jobs and family for most of us as well. I expect to review each new submission with 24 hours on weekdays and 48 hours on weekends. Of course, unexpected events can always take us away from our task for a short time and cause some delays. Hopefully, this will satisfy most people in my category.

Some nice updates for managing categories now. Let's keep up the good work.

Having managed a waymark category for a few weeks now there are a few things that I would like to have to make my job easier. First, to be able to call up the approval history of all accepted and declined waymarks in the category. Second, I think its been mentioned before but have the distance to the nearest waymark of the same category and to any other category on the approval page. This allows checking of possible duplicates with different or same names. Third, the ability to archive waymarks and post reviewer notes. And whatever other functionality that Groundspeak reviewers at geocaching already have. Fourth, to be able to sort or filter by attribute. I posted this before on behalf of the searcher but it would also be nice for the manager. As a manager, I may want to see what other waymarks of the same attribute are in the area before approving. The Canadian benchmark category will likely quickly grow into the thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands if a database import is ever accomplished. That plus benchmarks are often very close together and distinguinshing each unique one can be difficult for the manager who was never at the site. So it will be important to have many tools at your disposal for checking the validity of waymark submissions. If anyone has other requests for tools for managing waymarks or comments on mine please post them here.

It seems that all of my pocket queries have disappeared (about 10).

The new Earthcaches are indeed being posted to Waymarking now. Last count there was 22 of them.

The date last visited for Canadian Benchamark Tower Hill, Parry Sound is based on a note written and not an actual find. Shouldn't it be listed as not visited yet?

I'm using the dropdown list to track the types of Canadian Benchmarks. However, a dropdown list only allows up to 10 different types. I will need many more than this If I am to track all the Canadian Benchmark types. There are probably 30 or 40 large recognizable agencies that create benchmarks. There are likely 100's of smaller ones as well. Can the dropdown list be expanded to allow more choices or will I have to find another solution? The more I work on setting up Canadian Benchmarks the more I realize that this category is probably going to give a good test of many of the features of Waymarking due to its complexity and the number of potential benchmarks is on the order of 100,000's. Maybe my expectations are too high in attempting to create a database of this size. But I'm not going to give up easily.

With Canadian Benchmarks, I have setup a variable to track the type of Benchmark (the agency responsible for it). The problem is that there is no way that I can see to search for a benchmark by its variable type. So if you want to see all the Canadian Base Network types you cannot search for them distinctly. All you can get is ALL benchmarks and then you have to open each one and scroll to the bottom to see its variable. Originally, I hoped to set up sub-categories of Canadian Benchmarks so that each type had its own category. But then I thought by using the variables I could classify each one by its variable type and then be able to look them up by the variable but I cannot. What to do?

Canadian Benchmarks is now a category at Waymarking. The number of benchmarks is pretty low right now but its growing. It would be nice to populate the category from some existing databases but right now I'm just trying to get it up and running with proper variables etc.

Well, I've never heard of the needs icon queue but feed Koko some chocolate I guess. Thanks for letting me know whats up.

I would like the icon changed for Canadian Benchmarks. I see that the UK and Portugal have modified icons. However, I don't see any way to do this. I would like to see the letter C wrapped around the current icon. How do I get this to happen?

Canadian Benchmarks have now been added to Waymarking.com. Have some patience while I get all the bugs worked out of the setup. You can check it out HERE

After accepting new waymarks, I added some required variables to the category. Is there a way to update the existing waymarks to include the variable now?

Thx for the input. I think I'll use variables to separate the different types.

As a category manager is there a way to create sub-categories within your own category? eg. I manage Canadian Benchmarks and I may like to create sub-categories called monuments, survey disks, and other types. The master category would not have any waymarks in it. All the waymarks would be in one of the sub-categories.

I would like to see a method for uploading hundreds of waymarks for the category owner. I happened to pick up the Canadian Benchmark category and my goal is to pre-populate it with some of the available online database information. I don't mind compiling it and formatting it before submitting it to the site. But since I'm dealing with the potential of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands waymarks it is not practical to enter them one by one so I'm hoping for this feature to come very soon. A previous poster stated that by populating it this way there may be some that are no longer there or findable. I say good. The Benchmark category at geocaching.com was done the same way and I am a finder of a few of those. It did not matter to me if I didn't find it, it was the search that was fun. Why not list them here, the lists exist elsewhere anyway so it's not as if you're hiding potential sites. By populating the database here it makes it easier for everyone to see what's available. The FTF will have the added challenge of finding something that is not confirmed to be there. But then that's what FTF is all about isn't it?

At this point I would be happy to see ANY Canadian Benchmarks. How is it that Portugal now has a benchmark category while Canadians have been asking for their own category since before there was even Waymarking. Once we get a category set up then we can continue to debate how best to add them all. Although I'm still in favour of a database transfer so that we have a similar list of benchmarks the way that the US has it.

Yup, the short description must have been right at the limit before changing to html and the conversion added enough characters to put it over the limit. Thanks for the info. So, how do we know what the limit is (text or html)?

Looks like a problem with the website alright. I just tried to click on your name in the forum post and got an error as well.

I went back to edit one of my existing cache pages and all of a sudden the html code gives an error and an unrecognizable stack trace. When trying to fix it I stripped out all the code and just entered a single <p> between two paragraphs and checked the html box and even then I can't get the listing to save without an error. Then I even took out all html code so its just plain text with the html box checked but still I get the statement below. Does anyone know what's going on? Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated. Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [sqlException: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated.] System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() +180 Groundspeak.Web.SqlData.SqlConnectionManager.ExecuteNonQuery(String sql, Database database) +148 Groundspeak.Web.SqlData.SqlGeocacheController.Save(Int64 CacheID, String Nickname, DateTime DatePlaced, Int64 OwnerID, Int64 ApproverID, Double Latitude, Double Longitude, String ContactName, Uri URL, Double TerrainLevel, Double DifficultyLevel, Int32 CountryID, Int32 StateID, Boolean IsHtml, Int32 SiteTypeID, String ShortDescription, String LongDescription, String EncodedHints, Int32 ContainerID, Boolean IsSubscriberOnly, String BackgroundImageURL) +1420 Groundspeak.Web.CustomWpt.Geocache._Save(Int64 CacheID, String Nickname, SimpleUser Owner, Int64 ApproverID, WptBase Wpt, String ContactName, DateTime DatePlaced, Uri URL, Double TerrainLevel, Double DifficultyLevel, Int32 CountryID, Int32 StateID, Boolean IsHtml, Int32 SiteTypeID, String ShortDescription, String LongDescription, String EncodedHints, Int32 ContainerID, Boolean IsSubscriberOnly, String BackgroundImageUrl) +127 Groundspeak.Web.CustomWpt.Geocache.Save() +132 Geocaching.UI.hide_report.UpdateCacheFromForm() +1876 Geocaching.UI.hide_report.btnSubmit_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) +3559 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) +108 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +57 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +18 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +33 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +1292 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2032; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2032

I plan on keeping all my Earthcaches at geocaching.com at this time. This waymark thing may turn out to be bigger than geocaching.com eventually but I'm gonna wait and see. I want to get the biggest exposure possible for my Earthcaches so more people will visit them and learn about them. When Waymarking becomes bigger than geocaching then I would consider moving them (unless forced to do so prior to that). However, even if it becomes bigger I think they may get lost in the umpteen number of categories that soon will exist and noone will pay any attention to them. There is a certain status that they have right now on geocaching.com as one of only 16 or 20 categories. Now, allowing an Earthcache at both sites seem reasonable to me and I would have even greater exposure that way. Since one of my goals with listing Earthcaches is to educate people about the Earth Sciences I want my sites listed where they will get the greatest exposure. Unfortunately, the direction seems to be that geocaching.com will only support physical container caches in the future it would seem that our days are numbered. I would hope that the existing ones will remain indefinitely somewhat like the Planet Ape caches even though no new ones may get approved. On a slightly different note, another forum topic is discussing the possibility of having a physical container at an Earthcache site but of course only if the locaiton would allow a physical container. Could Earthcaches morph into container and containerless versions?

I agree, they could all be subcategories of Tidal Places.