sort a PQ by percentage of FP?

[+Der Wald-Pirat]

Cache quality can no longer be measured by the sum of FP a cache got. Many caches just got lots of FP because they are at famous spots, at a crowded tourist destination in a big city or were at or close to a mega event.

If I want to find the best caches of a city, not the most famous ones, it is not possible at the moment.

When will it be possible to sort a PQ by percentage of FP instead of FP???

[AZcachemeister]

Cache quality can no longer be measured by the sum of FP a cache got. Many caches just got lots of FP because they are at famous spots, at a crowded tourist destination in a big city or were at or close to a mega event.

If I want to find the best caches of a city, not the most famous ones, it is not possible at the moment.

When will it be possible to sort a PQ by percentage of FP instead of FP???

 

First we will need the ability to include 'number of favorite points' in our PQ.

This has been 'under consideration' for about nine months now.

Once that option has been provided (if it ever is), THEN we can talk about an option to sort by percentages.

 

If you asked for a GSAK macro to do this, you would have it within three days.

[Keystone]

Cache quality can no longer be measured by the sum of FP a cache got. Many caches just got lots of FP because they are at famous spots, at a crowded tourist destination in a big city or were at or close to a mega event.

If I want to find the best caches of a city, not the most famous ones, it is not possible at the moment.

When will it be possible to sort a PQ by percentage of FP instead of FP???

You make a very good observation. Since you've learned that the desired functionality doesn't exist now, you may be interested in reading some of the threads in the Feature Suggestion forum. You are welcome to add your own comments there.

 

Use Favorite Percentage, not raw count ... for sorting and as default

Favorite Points in Pocket Queries and GPX

 

If you asked for a GSAK macro to do this, you would have it within three days.

I wasn't aware that Favorite Point information was available, either in pocket queries or through the API. Can you point me to documentation for that? Thank you.

Edited August 14, 2012 by Keystone

[+GeePa]

I wasn't aware that Favorite Point information was available, either in pocket queries or through the API. Can you point me to documentation for that? Thank you.

 

I am 99% sure that GSAK gets the Favorite points when it downloads a cache from the API so I think that is now included in an API download. This is borne out by looking at the 'example response xml body' on [link removed] page. There you can see that part of the response to an API request for is:

 

<FavoritePoints>2147483647</FavoritePoints>

 

Also, I imagine you could use [link removed]this method to get all the users who favorited a cache and simply add them up to get the total number of favorite points.

Edited August 19, 2012 by Keystone

[AZcachemeister]

 

I wasn't aware that Favorite Point information was available, either in pocket queries or through the API. Can you point me to documentation for that? Thank you.

 

I can't really point to the documentation, but I do know that 'refresh cache data' (via the API, in GSAK 8) adds favorite points accrued by the cache listings updated. There is (of course) a maximum of 6000 waypoints that can be updated daily.

[+The A-Team]

I imagine you could use this method to get all the users who favorited a cache and simply add them up to get the total number of favorite points.

The favourite percentage is the percentage of premium members that gave it a point, not any member. You'd require some method to determine if a cacher is a premium member or not, which does not exist at this time, so GSAK is out.

Edited August 19, 2012 by Keystone

[AZcachemeister]

 

The favourite percentage is the percentage of premium members that gave it a point, not any member. You'd require some method to determine if a cacher is a premium member or not, which does not exist at this time, so GSAK is out.

 

So basically you are saying the Favorites system is flawed because only PMs can give out points?

[+The A-Team]

 

The favourite percentage is the percentage of premium members that gave it a point, not any member. You'd require some method to determine if a cacher is a premium member or not, which does not exist at this time, so GSAK is out.

 

So basically you are saying the Favorites system is flawed because only PMs can give out points?

Huh? No, that most certainly is not what I said. I just said that with the data currently available, calculating the FP percentage in GSAK can't be done, because there's no method to determine the membership level of a user (short of manually grabbing it from their profile page).

[cezanne]

If you asked for a GSAK macro to do this, you would have it within three days.

I wasn't aware that Favorite Point information was available, either in pocket queries or through the API. Can you point me to documentation for that? Thank you.

 

I rather understood this comment of AZcachemeister to say that Groundspeak has not yet done its "homework" (that's part of the first part of the posting) and so that's the real problem. Feature requests for GSAK are typically dealt with very quickly even though GSAK users do not pay for the service per year.

 

Cezanne

Edited August 14, 2012 by cezanne

[AZcachemeister]

...I just said that with the data currently available, calculating the FP percentage in GSAK can't be done...

 

Well, I don't see why not, and I don't see why the PM status enters into the equation.

 

I do understand that (possibly) for such a statistic to be truly valid you would need to know how many PMs found the cache, and how many of them gave favorite points.

 

As you say, the only way to do that would be to manually check every finder's profile to see if they are PM and then calculate the percentage 'by hand'. This might not even be accurate due to the possibility that some may have become PM sometime after finding that cache, thus their non-favorite of the cache would be irrelevant...and now that I think about this I don't believe there is a way to tell WHEN a user became a PM, or dropped the membership...either you is or you ain't RIGHT NOW.

 

This is getting complicated!

 

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'. This could be done right now in GSAK (assuming you have all the logs and favorites points updated), and can be viewed in real-time using a Greasemonkey script called GC little helper.

 

I also see an interesting GSAK macro to search for caches favorited by a certain user, which could also be extremely helpful, as well as one to find the top 20 favorited caches in your database.

[+The A-Team]

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'.

I guess this is the source of the confusion. I interpreted their post as requesting that the already available FP percentage on cache listings be made available for PQs. That percentage is calculated based only on premium members. Of course, if you don't care what the member's status is, you can do it today with the information available. I just didn't think that's what they were asking for.

[cezanne]

 

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'. This could be done right now in GSAK (assuming you have all the logs and favorites points updated), and can be viewed in real-time using a Greasemonkey script called GC little helper.

 

Are you sure that this script shows the percentage over all found it logs? I thought that it shows the same numbers as the Groundspeak site and these numbers are percentages over all found it logs by premium members.

 

I also see an interesting GSAK macro to search for caches favorited by a certain user, which could also be extremely helpful, as well as one to find the top 20 favorited caches in your database.

 

The issue is that GSAK is lacking necessary data. There are so many talented people out there who could come up with very useful routines, but the data issue keeps them from doing so.

Personally, I never understood why Groundspeak invests a lot of time and effort in playing around with the layout, integration of social networks etc instead of coming up with functions that are really useful for cache filtering. What GSAK offers is what it would be natural to expect from gc.com.

 

 

Cezanne

[AZcachemeister]

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'.

I guess this is the source of the confusion. I interpreted their post as requesting that the already available FP percentage on cache listings be made available for PQs. That percentage is calculated based only on premium members. Of course, if you don't care what the member's status is, you can do it today with the information available. I just didn't think that's what they were asking for.

 

 

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'. This could be done right now in GSAK (assuming you have all the logs and favorites points updated), and can be viewed in real-time using a Greasemonkey script called GC little helper.

 

Are you sure that this script shows the percentage over all found it logs? I thought that it shows the same numbers as the Groundspeak site and these numbers are percentages over all found it logs by premium members.

 

I also see an interesting GSAK macro to search for caches favorited by a certain user, which could also be extremely helpful, as well as one to find the top 20 favorited caches in your database.

 

The issue is that GSAK is lacking necessary data. There are so many talented people out there who could come up with very useful routines, but the data issue keeps them from doing so.

Personally, I never understood why Groundspeak invests a lot of time and effort in playing around with the layout, integration of social networks etc instead of coming up with functions that are really useful for cache filtering. What GSAK offers is what it would be natural to expect from gc.com.

 

 

Cezanne

 

HMMM...

 

After checking, I now see that that script does indeed add no new information, it just brings it forward to be displayed in the favorites box on the page.

 

@Cezanne

Yes, you (and I also) might think Groundspeak would spend more time on making the site more useful to the existing customers.

[+StarBrand]

...

@Cezanne

Yes, you (and I also) might think Groundspeak would spend more time on making the site more useful to the existing customers.

 

Since it is a fairly simple programming task to add such features to the website - I can only conclude that adding new filters either creates an unreasonable burden on the servers/datbase or it somehow conflicts (in a political way) with other goals of the website.

[cezanne]

...

@Cezanne

Yes, you (and I also) might think Groundspeak would spend more time on making the site more useful to the existing customers.

 

Since it is a fairly simple programming task to add such features to the website - I can only conclude that adding new filters either creates an unreasonable burden on the servers/datbase or it somehow conflicts (in a political way) with other goals of the website.

 

I do not think that this is the case here.

 

As the server or database load is regarded, both would not be effected if the number of PMs who found a cache would be stored and thus could also easily be output to programs like GSAK. I do not know whether this number is stored right now or whether it is recomputed whenever one requests to see the favourite percentage for a cache (the latter option would be quite stupid). In the first case, one also could easily offer a second option for cachers - sorting via percentages and not only sorting via absolute number of favourites.

 

It rather seems to me that Groundspeak is in general quite reluctant about changes of the key part of their code and one of the reasons might be that very often when they change something, new bugs show up. They seem to be even more reluctant to add further fields to their gpx files.

 

Anyway, there are so many easy programming tasks that would improve the usabilty of the site and still they are not taken care of.

 

Cezanne

Edited August 16, 2012 by cezanne

[+Der Wald-Pirat]

I imagine you could use this method to get all the users who favorited a cache and simply add them up to get the total number of favorite points.

The favourite percentage is the percentage of premium members that gave it a point, not any member. You'd require some method to determine if a cacher is a premium member or not, which does not exist at this time, so GSAK is out.

 

The purpose of sorting by % is finding caches like this: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=446b4fd2-5419-4620-a076-1dd4e821a5d7

11 FP, 79%

Great cache, but new or not visited so often, because of a difficult riddle or location far off.

 

The few non premium finders don't matter for this purpose if non calculated out.

[+Der Wald-Pirat]

Anyway, what I think the OP was asking for was a way to filter a PQ based on favorite points percentage of over-all found logs, irrespective of the finder's 'status'. This could be done right now in GSAK (assuming you have all the logs and favorites points updated), and can be viewed in real-time using a Greasemonkey script called GC little helper.

 

I installed that helper. Still can't sort by %.

What else must one do?

Edited May 25, 2013 by Der Wald-Pirat