rragan

Probably worth remembering at this point that the PGC was a solution to one of the more requested features during the Input phase. It does not follow that people MUST use it, it's merely an option available, that Groundspeak decided to use a third party, rather than developing in house. If folks prefer NOT using the PGC (for reasons I can't fathom), it once again becomes a bookkeeping exercise. The listing challenge description must link to an approved checker and currently PGC is the only game in town.

Here is the official response to my question on challenges o spell a word with geographic names where you hav found caches. "After discussions here at HQ and with the reviewer community, it has been determined that your challenge idea would not represent a geocaching achievement. Finding caches in four states or countries or counties is potentially a geocaching achievement. However, the opionion here is that requiring those states or countries or counties to have names that begin with specific letters is more a matter of bookkeeping than an achievement. Therefore, the idea would not be publishable as a challenge cache. I'm sorry we don't have better news, but we do appreciate you writing to request guidance on the issue." I guess I don't understand bookkeeping in the sense GS means it. There would be a checker so the users need keep no records or do bookkeeping. If and when they qualify PGC's map would point out they were qualified at a glance. The script would tell you specifically which parts were not qualified so again no bookkeeping by the user.

Which I suppose is true for completely incorrect definitions of the word "polygon." I'm puzzled because it seems like HQ went to a lot of trouble just to kill challenges. It would have been simpler to say the only closed boundaries defining an area for challenge caches are country, region/state, county.

Neither would I, but the answer might be interesting anyhow to understand what the rules actually are. The latest Cache-A-Maniacs podcast feature Rock Chalk who works at HQ and had a fair bit to do with the challenge guideline changes (at least it sounds that way). His comments on various restrictions and what is allowed and not was informative. Too bad the BiPolar didn't make it to the question list. This page has a link to the MP3 of the show.

Some of us are half done. Maybe that is worth something.

Once your Geochecker is tagged to your cache page at Project-GC.com, you can run names of local cachers through the checker yourself. Anyone can test up to ten times per day. Paying supporters of Project-GC have no limits on using checkers. Tip: Help your reviewer by saying "I ran a bunch of local cachers' names through the checker, and the following 12 accounts all passed: " The Challenge Checker that I have tagged for the unpublished cache won't run when I enter another cacher's handle with the error that the cache doesn't exist. **never mind, it just worked*** You could use the list of finders of any of the Antarctica caches and see if they are in state. Also asking on the local FB groups might help. For one requiring as much travel as this one, I would petition the reviewer to let out of area qualifiers be considered given that they already are great travelers and could well come here and sign the log. Maybe expand the net to OR and WA

My guess is the Not acceptable #10 is aimed at "Spell a word using owner or reviewer name" primarily but it is deliberately fuzzy to make the text simple and to allow some wiggle room to reject things not called out explicitly but which they don't like. It's like the extra text it would take to deal with the problem of "find 25 challenge caches" because they are defined by a word In the title which you aren't supposed to depend on. This is a messy edge case that snap icon or an attribute would fix but they didn't go that far. As for the other, a streak requires one per day and you may not demand more. Nor may specify the cache type required for a streak so a month of puzzle cache finds would not be allowed.

This is strictly my opinion, not guidance we've received or anything of the sort. I see the same problem as always. At 4 letters, it is probably reasonable; that is, until we start getting $,#,!,+ and F,#,@,^ as the words to create. Then someone else thinks EASY is too easy and we get floccinaucinihilipilification and we have to judge the merits and availability of every letter in the alphabet in relation to where the challenge is located. When we have to judge, it becomes like a WOW factor and will lead to inconsistent reviews which makes for many appeals, unhappy reviewers and challenge owners, especially when random area A is okay with a 7 letter word and random area B is not okay with a 6 letter word. The other issue is that we'd inevitably run into: -Spell "your username", "Challenge Owner's Username", name of "my favorite sport team", etc -Start and end letters, third letter, or some other letter combo(s) -Can use county and country, or state and country, or county, state and country (fourth letter of country ONLY) -Is the "name of country": Germany or Deutschland? -Is the "name of city": Mumbai or Bombay? Again, my opinion, is that this is a can of worms I'd prefer not to see opened. But reviewers already are making these kinds of "reasonably attainable" decisions: Have enough local geocachers already attained (or are fairly close to attaining) a Fizzy challenge using only Traditional type caches? Have enough local geocachers already attained (or are fairly close to attaining) a 50 Souvenirs challenge? Have enough local geocachers already attained (or are fairly close to attaining) a Double Jasmer challenge? It's certainly possible that one review area can support a Double Jasmer challenge but another review area cannot "and will lead to inconsistent reviews which makes for many appeals, unhappy reviewers and challenge owners." Of course, one way to avoid this kind of subjective decision making (and inconsistent reviews) is to get rid of the "reasonably attainable" guideline. It seems like in dubious cases, the Florida reviewer is asking for a list of 10 cachers in the state who qualify for the proposed challenge. The burden of proof is on the requester.

I don't see why that would be denied if reasonably attainable in your area. It is more the 'achievement' style based on additive stats. It might easily happen that a project-gc checker would need more than 30 seconds in the worst case and also exceeds the allowed storage limit (and it gets even more involved if no cache is allowed to be used twice which would not have been an issue if the 9-th category which is not a cache type were not required). I need to run a couple of existing scripts against alamoguls account and see how they do. I was worried his finds could time out or storage out my script. I suspect I can improve it a bit storage-wise but at the cost of more time. I wonder how GS will treat scripts that cannot check because the user has too many finds.

This is strictly my opinion, not guidance we've received or anything of the sort. I see the same problem as always. At 4 letters, it is probably reasonable; that is, until we start getting $,#,!,+ and F,#,@,^ as the words to create. Then someone else thinks EASY is too easy and we get floccinaucinihilipilification and we have to judge the merits and availability of every letter in the alphabet in relation to where the challenge is located. When we have to judge, it becomes like a WOW factor and will lead to inconsistent reviews which makes for many appeals, unhappy reviewers and challenge owners, especially when random area A is okay with a 7 letter word and random area B is not okay with a 6 letter word. The other issue is that we'd inevitably run into: -Spell "your username", "Challenge Owner's Username", name of "my favorite sport team", etc -Start and end letters, third letter, or some other letter combo(s) -Can use county and country, or state and country, or county, state and country (fourth letter of country ONLY) -Is the "name of country": Germany or Deutschland? -Is the "name of city": Mumbai or Bombay? Again, my opinion, is that this is a can of worms I'd prefer not to see opened. This is a bit of a slippery slope argument. If we allow easy ones someone will try to show off by creating a really complex one only they can qualify for. Showing off. Re the individual points. - spell your username. I guess it is possible with the geo names but much harder for arbitrary user names. It would take a different script since mine will trip over spaces. It does handle UTF8 so It can deal with European alphabets. - totally doable with more tag parameters. How many of these are because the other variants exist in the local area and so another one is blocked? Strictly speaking, no more arbitrary than saying use the first letter. - Now your just going crazy to make a challenge that much harder for everyone else. Showing off. This one a reviewer ought to toss out on the too complicated rule - the name of the geo region is whatever PGC has on file - Cities not allowed but is the country Sri Lanka or Ceylon. See previous item. Yes, it would create more work for reviewers which is a bad thing. Maybe GS will reject it in the next few days. Time will tell.

When I first saw the 'Generic alphabet checker' that can use county (and the no longer allowed cache name and owner name) I shortly pondered whether it would deserve a try and about what would be the difference in outcome compared to different required numbers of counties for my own country Austria. I suppose that for most cachers that haven't visited all counties, an alphabet of counties is easier as big parts of the country in terms of area are alpine and the country is quite inconvenient formed having lost major parts after WWI. Starting fom Vienna, the big-head of Austria, the most western Austrian county is more than 500km (and a big mountain range) away. You can visit twelve other european countries if staying below 500km as the crow flies and four of them (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia) fall completely in this radius. Maybe it would be worth the efford to build a challenge from countries/states/counties comparable to 'all crownlands of the Austrian Empire'. Then I discarded the idea, not because starting letters are rather unequally distributed here and not all letters play a role, but because I would suspect that there was the wish to end all "letter soup" attempts, but no one thought about -that- loophole when writing the new guidelines and that "These listing elements: cache titles, cache owner, GC Codes, publishing Reviewer or listing text" would immediately be adjusted with adding "names of country, state, county (or equivalents)" What if a more resourceful cacher next then comes up with a soup challenge that uses letters from attributes, sizes, or letters extracted/converted from numbers like found at lat/lon D T? Somehow I remember faintly at least one (grandfathered, don't know whether it has a checker) challenge that asks you to spell a certain word with first letters of countries where you have finds. I filed an appeal yesterday to find out officially if first letters of geographic names is allowed. You can't game the challenge by making up odd cache titles so that problem is gone. If they say a spell the word EASY with country names where you have finds is disallowed, then you switch it to find a cache in Estonis, Albania, Switzerland, and Yemen (but enumerate all the E,A,S,Y countries) I've achieved the same challenge but in a complicated way. We will see what they say.

Before you spend much time on your checker, I highly recommend sending a pre-emptive messsage to Appeals and ask if this idea will pass. Personally I'm betting it won't. Just because you found a loophole in the current guidelines, doesn't mean they won't close it. It's pretty obvious (to me) that they don't want word challenges at all. Ok, I will do that. I tried a loophole using bookmark lists and they rapidly closed that one. The script is done so either way it was a useful exercise.

Yes. And we're finding out about them here. And those challenges are probably causing some headache for the reviewer team, especially if they've agreed to all be on the same page (worldwide) and some are still either making exceptions or not being thorough enough. Or maybe some COs are still playing the game of editing their listing post-publish. Who knows. Either way, this thread is so that we can know what's going on with Challenge Caches, what works and what doesn't. Maybe those post-publish archivals will happen less regularly. Who knows. I'm personally just interested in finding out ways to be creative in the new guidelines. Agree. It's like cases go to the Supreme Court for a final decision. GS has some "sense" of what is in the spirit of geocaching but writing that down in simple rules is hard. New challenges are making case law.

Interesting that you should make that suggestion. I thought that if GS allowed challenges based on *city* names that spelling out a work using the first names of cities might be kind of interesting. I could spell out lots of words using the first letter of countries in which I've found a cache but for those that are constrained by how far they can travel a similar challenge cache based on city names might be fun to do and achievable by a lot more geocachers. The difficulty level of a challenge has always been up to the CO. Some set nearly impossible ones but more considerate COs do thing like Bronze, Silver, Gold challenges with each being harder than the previous one. This gives an early reward and incentive to work towards the next level. Cities can't be used because there is no way to automate the checking. Picking short words or providing more free letter would allow graduated difficulty. I suppose that in some area there are Bronze, Silver and Gold challenges of a similar type but there has never been anything official which limits a challenge of a specific type to three levels of difficulty. One might think of a Bronze, Silver, and Gold challenges which require to find caches in 5, 10, and 15 countries but there was nothing stopping someone from creating challenges for finding caches in 7,9, 13, and 32 countries. Where I live there are very few challenges at all. A search for unknown caches with challenge in the title shows only 8 caches within 50 miles and a couple of them aren't challenge caches. Automating checking of caches within a specific city is no more difficult than caches in a specific country, state, or county. Using the geonames API one can send lat/long coordinates and retrieve place names. For example: http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=42.44&lng=-76.49&username=demo Will return the following: <geonames><address><street>Stewart Ave</street><mtfcc>S1400</mtfcc><streetNumber>152</streetNumber><lat>42.44002</lat><lng>-76.48973</lng><distance>0.02</distance><postalcode>14850</postalcode><placename>Ithaca</placename><adminCode2>109</adminCode2><adminName2>Tompkins</adminName2><adminCode1>NY</adminCode1><adminName1>New York</adminName1><countryCode>US</countryCode></address></geonames> [size=2] [/size] In those results you'll get the countryCode, State (adminName1), county (adminName2), and city name (placename). Of course you can determine city names but they are not on the list of three geographic area types allowed for challenge caches.

There was a similar challenge published recently, World Scrabble Challenge, but the owner made the spelling part optional. I cannot connect to Project-GC at the moment, but I seem to remember a discussion there that indicated that the reviewer forced the spelling part to be optional. While it didn't technically violate the guidelines, Groundspeak apparently doesn't like word challenges in general. Maybe you'll have better luck with your reviewer, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I was an active party on that thread. Without digging back through it, as I recall the CO just decided to simplify his challenge rather than wait for a checker script and maybe have it rejected. PGC is not responding just now so I can't check my recollection.

Likewise. Though the initial claim for the moratorium was that the weight was on publishing appeals, not finder complaints. My hope here was that we might get some first hand reports by which we can determine what does/doesn't work, not necessarily discussing the merits (good/bad) of the quoted guideline clauses (I failed in a couple of comments myself, but I'm really, really trying to look at the cup half full here) Again, going strictly by what they quoted, it seems that explicitly limiting the location of finds by anything other than known geographical boundaries inlcuding Country, State, and County, will be denied. If the instructions can be changed so that finds can theoretically be anywhere (or bound by the above regions), even if there are limitations on how qualifying finds are related to each other, it'll pass muster at least on that point. Nope, it gets negative because people complain about the negative instead of bringing it to light and seeing how we can work within / around it There are other threads to discuss the state of challenge caches. Oh, I'm certainly not enamoured with the new system, but really, truly, I hoped to have at least one thread that could remain somewhat positive about challenge caches /:) (please, please let's continue with the more topical discussion!) It's good to actively watch the challenge publication feed (advanced search for 'challenge' by whatever region or the world) to see what gets published - in the hopes that there are some new(ish) ideas, so they can be posted here to perhaps help inspire. Additionally, if anyone works on pubilshing caches, any information about what's approved (positive) and/or disapproved (negative) with the reasons given will help us better understand the thought process, and maybe if someone reads this thread it may make the reviewers' job just a tad easier I'm not sure that would work either - it falls in line with the 'bookkeeping' clause. I don't think GS intended to limit the clause only to cache name and owner; the spirit of that clause was about finders having to keep track of text content for qualifications, scouring through lists, etc (at least how I interpret their 'bookkeeping' word), which they state is not a geocaching-related activity. I mean, you could try, but I'm guessing it wouldn't work.And if it did, it could also open the floodgates for loads of 'arbitrary' spell-this type challenges based on whatever text field they haven't explicitly listed. =/ I don't get the bookkeeping aspect. With a checker there is no bookkeeping, you either qualify or you don't. The location where you make the find is not under user control short of saying hey went there. I guess I won't know until I try to publish a cache with the script. Oh well, it gave me an excuse to learn Lua and the PGC APIs.

Interesting that you should make that suggestion. I thought that if GS allowed challenges based on *city* names that spelling out a work using the first names of cities might be kind of interesting. I could spell out lots of words using the first letter of countries in which I've found a cache but for those that are constrained by how far they can travel a similar challenge cache based on city names might be fun to do and achievable by a lot more geocachers. The difficulty level of a challenge has always been up to the CO. Some set nearly impossible ones but more considerate COs do thing like Bronze, Silver, Gold challenges with each being harder than the previous one. This gives an early reward and incentive to work towards the next level. Cities can't be used because there is no way to automate the checking. Picking short words or providing more free letter would allow graduated difficulty.

Since I pointed out the need to get back on topic, I will go ahead and describe my plan for a challenge type that I've not seen that should be ok with the new guidelines. We know using titles as a source to spell words was liked but is now gone. The new challenge type would let you be challenged to spell a word but the source of letters is countries, states/regions, counties where you have found a cache plus free letters allowed by the tag definer. I have the script written but until PGC lets me join the ranks of scripters, I can't easily do final testing. Some may grumble that this rewards folks who can afford to travel a lot. I envision a local area like a state having a challenge word that can be done only visiting counties in the state so challenges with modest travel can exist. One ought to be able to layer other constraints like allowed DT level on the acceptable finds but this is an area that I need to test. My mock PGC API is just not general enough.

In the blog entry announcing the return of challenges, GS closes with these thoughts: "We love how challenge caches encourage people to set fun goals and expand their caching horizons. There’s no question we want these caches to thrive for years to come. We have high hopes that this new framework for challenge caches will reduce some of the pre-moratorium difficulties for reviewers and the community. But challenge cache owners are integral to the success of this framework. It’s important that they work within these guidelines in order to reduce the burden that reviewers felt prior to the moratorium. If after a period of evaluation we find that a lot of the pre-moratorium issues are still causing problems, then we’ll know that this new framework isn’t the answer. We don’t have a backup plan. The only remaining option would be to not permit challenge caches as they currently exist." Any speculation beyond the explicit statement is unwarranted. GS says they want challenge caches to succeed. They hope the new guidelines will address the issues they were causing. In any event, this thread is not the place to discuss the future of CCs. Make a new thread for that. The title of the thread defines the topic. Now the conclusion may be that the new rules mean that no one can think of any interesting/imaginative challenges that fit within the new rules. Is there a thread that characterizes the nature of the large number of appeals going to reviewers? Are they from CC creators or finders who claim it but are deleted by the CC owner? I'd love to read through it.

Being always keen to learn, how do I see the archive log. I guessed archive.org might have it but no luck. Is there an extra URL parameter to see page history? Thanks

I'm curious how regions and country breakdowns help. There are no regions/countries in the vicinity of your Southern Arctic latitude. I can think how it might be done for the Arctic circle.

In a week or two (hopefully if things go well) PGC will reopen script authoring to new folks. I have a script ready to go which could provide another style of challenge that should comply with the guidelines. *tease*

Well heck, apparently you can indirectly mention that a challenge idea exists and somehow it'll get tracked down (as noted in this thread) . :blush: I hear you, but, at the same time, because of GS's desire to make such restrictions concrete, all the CO had to do was show that a few local cachers had already achieved it -- which for some reason wasn't hard to do in that area, apparently -- and it no longer mattered that it was, by any reasonable standard, completely impossible. (Again, note that I'm entirely against appeal as a requirement to begin with, I'm just pointing out the inconsistency between the goals, the rules, and the results.) It wasn't up for long and 5 people passed the checker.

Country, state and county boundaries all require polygons to define. PGC has all the definitions and checkers rely on them. They even sometimes tweak the definition when they find it is inaccurate. From guideline 10 "Challenge cache criteria must come from information broadly available on Geocaching.com and must be verifiable through information on Geocaching.com." To pick an example that is problematic, county boundary info is not broadly available on geocaching.com nor is it verifiable there. It is verifiable with checkers on PGC that has "official" county boundary polygons. The last part of guidelines explicitly adds counties which sort of dodges the issue with them in the first bullet point in guideline 10.

I too had problems with the rejection of the Bi-Polar challenge. Guideline 10 (user-defined polygons) was the cited reason. Lines of latitude are not under user control, unlike polygon sets. Is it fair to say that the new guidelines allow only country,state, county and any other way to define is not allowed? If so, a small clarification would eliminate the ambiguity. That said, it still seems like there ought to be at least a point and radius definition since some counties are very large and provide very little granularity in terms of defining an area. This is still easily checkable -- witness the .1 mile radius circles between caches. Oh, and why aren't continents an allowed region?