Category statistics

[+Alfouine]

As Dougk website statistics has disappeared and after the excellent Erik's contribtion, i decided to create a website about Waymarking category statistics and officers.

I have others ideas to program

Here is the link Waymarking category statistics

 

Thank you for your comments

[+FamilieFrohne]

Looks great (better than my own category overview). I'm curious what you plan to do next.

[+ScroogieII]

WAY TO GO, THIERRY!!

I too am wondering what more we can expect from you. Between yourself and Eric we have much of the statistical aspect of the game covered.

One critique, though: I would have bolded and made Department titles about 1.5em and major subcategories about 1.25em, making each much easier to fish out of the inevitably long list.

Also, one day I would like to see a reincarnation of more of Doug's Altervista pages. Too bad they bit the dust. Speaking of which, does anyone know of Doug himself? Has he, too, bitten the dust? 'Twould be a shame if he has.

Keith

Edited March 24, 2022 by ScroogieII

[+Max and 99]

15 minutes ago, ScroogieII said:

Also, one day I would like to see a reincarnation of more of Doug's Altervista pages. Too bad they bit the dust. Speaking of which, does anyone know of Doug himself? Has he, too, bitten the dust? 'Twould be a shame if he has.

A reminder.

https://forums.geocaching.com/GC/index.php?/topic/355765-dougk/#comment-5823496

[+bluesnote]

Wow, looks great! So much potential for this website. Keep up the great work. Thanks for creating this! The layout looks much better than the default one on the WM site.

 

I do have a suggestion (or two): Maybe add a map feature showing a live (or updated) count of countries/regions that have waymarks. Similar to the current geocaching stats, but this time with all possible waymarks. Would be neat to see how it changes, per time. Maybe even add a month/year aspect so we can see the evolution of waymarks since  Waymarking's inception. Possibly incorporate the map feature where someone could look up a user and see where thy have posted waymarks, since the map feature has been missing for many, many years from the Waymarking site.

[+FamilieFrohne]

6 hours ago, bluesnote said:

I do have a suggestion (or two): Maybe add a map feature showing a live (or updated) count of countries/regions that have waymarks. Similar to the current geocaching stats, but this time with all possible waymarks. Would be neat to see how it changes, per time. Maybe even add a month/year aspect so we can see the evolution of waymarks since  Waymarking's inception. Possibly incorporate the map feature where someone could look up a user and see where thy have posted waymarks, since the map feature has been missing for many, many years from the Waymarking site.

Using a map would be a major project (including learning how to program the interfaces to get what is wanted). And always a licensing issue. And depending on the usage it may be a financial issue (i.e. exceeding the google quota for maps calls). And I would need more data than I currently have for placing the waymarks onto a map. So this could require some time and depending on the difficulties encountered probably never see a release.

 

A list of countries with waymarks is (also currently indirect) available, see the selection box in https://wm.familie-frohne.net/list_country.php -  I'll think about adding a list of countries with #waymarks to the page. But first I have to address some issues when viewing my page with mobile devices, some bugs with certain usernames (containing spaces or special characters) and a possible problem with GDPR and the used google fonts on the site.

 

6 hours ago, bluesnote said:

Possibly incorporate the map feature where someone could look up a user and see where thy have posted waymarks, since the map feature has been missing for many, many years from the Waymarking site.

Where someone has posted is already available. See the for example your entry in the database. Just select the user in question from the post statistics page.

 

6 hours ago, bluesnote said:

Would be neat to see how it changes, per time. Maybe even add a month/year aspect so we can see the evolution of waymarks since  Waymarking's inception.

For a generic overview take the image presented on the page mentioned above. It shows the development of the number of waymarks in each of the 15 departments.

 

 

A country/region specific view is available when selecting an entry from the box (i.e. Vatican City State, which has 77 available categories on 0.44 square kilometers).

 

New ideas on what to display with the available data are welcome.

 

Yours

 

 

Erik.

 

[+ScroogieII]

23 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

A reminder.

https://forums.geocaching.com/GC/index.php?/topic/355765-dougk/#comment-5823496

 

Thanks, 99. Now I remember that post, if only vaguely.

Keith

[+FamilieFrohne]

On 3/25/2022 at 8:57 AM, FamilieFrohne said:

Where someone has posted is already available. See the for example your entry in the database. Just select the user in question from the post statistics page.

 

After some time I have created a really simple world map based on a map image found at wikipedia and included it in the users statistics - see for example the page of bluesnote ...

It is a first shot, so it is also far from perfect, but I think this could be a start for more infos and maps.

 

Edit: Forgot to mention, that there is now also the possibility to see the posted countries as a map: https://wm.familie-frohne.net/img_user.php?t=world&name=

Edited May 2, 2022 by FamilieFrohne

[+bluesnote]

9 hours ago, FamilieFrohne said:

 

After some time I have created a really simple world map based on a map image found at wikipedia and included it in the users statistics - see for example the page of bluesnote ...

It is a first shot, so it is also far from perfect, but I think this could be a start for more infos and maps.

 

Edit: Forgot to mention, that there is now also the possibility to see the posted countries as a map: https://wm.familie-frohne.net/img_user.php?t=world&name=

Really like the feature that shows a user's department development. You can tell when I got a new phone/camera as well as when I'm on vacation or in school. Love it! Great work!

[+PISA-caching]

On 5/2/2022 at 10:19 PM, FamilieFrohne said:

Edit: Forgot to mention, that there is now also the possibility to see the posted countries as a map: https://wm.familie-frohne.net/img_user.php?t=world&name=

 

WOW! Very cool. The gray areas are countries with zero WMs, right? Well, it seems that Serbia is also gray, but has 99 WMs so far. Also Georgia (not Georgia, USA!) is gray, but has 12 WMs.

 

Not a big problem (although some of the "ignored" WMs in Serbia are mine ), but I thought you would like to know.

Edited May 6, 2022 by PISA-caching

[+FamilieFrohne]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

I see that there are probably some regions, that are not ok right now. Since I had to map the names of the regions to the polygons manually I wasn't sure I did it right in all places (obviously I did not ...).

 

But I'll have a look at the data and the polygons that are not right in the next few days - probably until next weekend.

 

Yours

 

 

Erik.

[+PISA-caching]

Serbia is somehow odd, because the WM use "SCG" as the location in a list of WMs, but in a specific WM and the country dropdown it is "Serbia".

 

And "Georgia" might cause a problem because of Georgia, US. In the list of waymarks both countries say "location: Georgia" ( see f.e. Waymark Search Results (Waymarking.com)), but if you look at a particular WM in Georgia, USA it says "Location: Georgia, United States".

 

One other thing I noticed: You obviously used a small blue circle for micro states like Monaco, Vatican state etc., which is a very good idea. But in North Macedonia that circle's blue color adds to the blue of the country and therefore it seems as if there were more WM than in the neighbouring Croatia, but both countries are between 10 and 100 WMs.

 

PS: A big part of my job is to test websites. That's why it is hard for me to keep my mouth shut, if I see a "problem". 

[+FamilieFrohne]

4 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

Serbia is somehow odd, because the WM use "SCG" as the location in a list of WMs, but in a specific WM and the country dropdown it is "Serbia".

Mapping for SCG had a typo in it - fixed and now it displays the correct color.

 

4 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

And "Georgia" might cause a problem because of Georgia, US. In the list of waymarks both countries say "location: Georgia" ( see f.e. Waymark Search Results (Waymarking.com)), but if you look at a particular WM in Georgia, USA it says "Location: Georgia, United States".

That is a problem - indeed. I fixed it manually and partially for the 14 entries, but the issue will arise at the next full import again. And the firsts in the regions for these entries do not match - giving a partially false result ...

 

I have to think about how to fix these entries automatically during import ...

 

5 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

One other thing I noticed: You obviously used a small blue circle for micro states like Monaco, Vatican state etc., which is a very good idea. But in North Macedonia that circle's blue color adds to the blue of the country and therefore it seems as if there were more WM than in the neighbouring Croatia, but both countries are between 10 and 100 WMs.

Removed the circle around Montenegro. The country should be big enough to be recognized without a circle.

 

That will be all for tonight.

 

Yours

 

 

Erik.

[+PISA-caching]

Wow, I wish our coders at work would remove bugs as fast as you do. 

[+fi67]

13 hours ago, FamilieFrohne said:

That is a problem - indeed. I fixed it manually and partially for the 14 entries, but the issue will arise at the next full import again. And the firsts in the regions for these entries do not match - giving a partially false result ...

 

I have to think about how to fix these entries automatically during import ...

One Georgia always has W coordinates, the other one E (except where the Hemisphere Bug interferes).

[+FamilieFrohne]

4 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

Wow, I wish our coders at work would remove bugs as fast as you do. 

I don't need Jira-Tickets or a sprint planning for my own project - just a simple paper to do list with items and errors encountered. So all the bureaucratic stuff and overhead is not needed and I can prioritize the things that I want to work next on. And when you know your code from the start you'll have almost instantly an idea where to look for the bugger .

 

On the other hand: working alone on a project has sometimes disadvantages like:

- noone cares for my sloppy coding - mostly on the frontend part - for getting things done fast (which in turn would make a needed refactoring a little bit painful)

- noone forces me to write unit tests for new behaviour when I don't want to

- noone can give me ideas and insights on my coding or the software/database design at an early stage (like using usernames which contain spaces or special characters - here the use of the users guid would have been a better idea))

 

5 minutes ago, fi67 said:

One Georgia always has W coordinates, the other one E (except where the Hemisphere Bug interferes).

I know. I found three WM's (WM7TB2, WMQPZG and WM10PCD) in country Georgia that should have been in the US state Georgia with their coordinates. The fix for that malformed behaviour is nearly done, but the change requires a full import to get the statistics right again - so this may take a while.

 

[+Max and 99]

2 hours ago, FamilieFrohne said:

I found three WM's (WM7TB2, WMQPZG and WM10PCD) in country Georgia that should have been in the US state Georgia with their coordinates.

The coordinates for all three are very bad and nowhere near the US Georgia. They all have E instead of W in the coordinates. Those officers can make a quick correction. Someone didn't check the map. 😁

Edited May 7, 2022 by Max and 99

[+ScroogieII]

On 5/6/2022 at 6:56 AM, FamilieFrohne said:

Thanks for the feedback.

 

I see that there are probably some regions, that are not ok right now. Since I had to map the names of the regions to the polygons manually I wasn't sure I did it right in all places (obviously I did not ...).

 

But I'll have a look at the data and the polygons that are not right in the next few days - probably until next weekend.

 

Yours

 

 

Erik.

 

WHoaaa!!

 

Erik, you definitely sound like a man with waaaayy too much time on his hands to be undertaking  such things!

Just sayin' 

[+FamilieFrohne]

In the last view days I had some issues with navigating between the pages. Displaying the content on the smartphone for some of the pages was definitly not working well - half of the content was not visible. And adding some new pages to remove the issue with the not displayed content generated a nightmare of changes. So I overhauled the navigation and also used the chance to take a look at the development of various numbers generated in the last years. These data are collected in my database and then put into a separate page after processing (see teaser image below). I hope, you like it.

 

Perhaps this insight is also of interest to you. And perhaps you have some ideas on what also to display with the available data ...

 

[+FamilieFrohne]

On 3/25/2022 at 1:19 AM, bluesnote said:

Maybe add a map feature showing a live (or updated) count of countries/regions that have waymarks. [...] Possibly incorporate the map feature where someone could look up a user and see where thy have posted waymarks, since the map feature has been missing for many, many years from the Waymarking site.

 

Long time nothing happened here. But recently I had some time to tinker on my website and finally added a map feature using OSM and Leaflet for the users, categories and countries sections:

• For an example on the user selection see the mapping for bluesnote: https://wm.familie-frohne.net/list_user6.php?sort=0&uuid=9787cad9-db6d-4165-9693-885b12372e69&name=bluesnote. Here we can filter by the countries / regions and categories where a user has waymarks posted.
• For an example on the category view see the Wikipedia category: https://wm.familie-frohne.net/list_all_map.php?sort=0&cat_guid=d07ecae1-5397-4dfc-a44d-bb1fc4d8f8c8&from=2. Here you can select only the countries where waymarks of this category were posted.
• And finally you may have an example for the country view https://wm.familie-frohne.net/list_country_map.php?cr=Switzerland%2F&cat_guid=

Unfortunatly the handling of the world (i.e. all countries available) with all categories available for all users available is not possible - loading more than 100.000 waymarks into the application slowed my browser critically down and loading more than 400.000 waymarks (i.e. I was trying to load more than the 580.000 waymarks of the United States) crashed my browser completely :/ . California with nearly 100.000 as the state with the most waymarks published worked, but loading took it's time. So displaying large numbers are possible to show on a map, but there may be a delay before all the waypoints are loaded.

Hope you like it. Any ideas for improvements (except timing issues caused by too much data) or something else to show with the available data?

 

Erik.

 

P.S.: Another issue is, that I don't "see" coordinate changes on waymarks - it took me some time to get all the coordinates of the existing waymarks - automated, but still it took several weeks. So if you update a coordinate with errors the change will not be seen on my webpage (until you tell me - perhaps I should write a Tampermonkey script for that you can use also ...).

 

[+PISA-caching]

Just one word: WOW!

[+T-Team!]

I have used Erik's webpages quite frequently recently (THANKS again, great site!). Looking forward to the new developments in 2023. On the basis of his page showing the top posters (total, region, first in country&region), I was thinking who has posted and visited the most unique categories. On the basis of the top 200 posters in Erik's file ( https://wm.familie-frohne.net/count_user.php ), I did a manual check of each WayMarkers' profile (combined, post and visit). Created an document in Excel to capture the data et voila... see file attached. I will regularly update on my profile page. Hopefully Erik can do some of his magic in a future update :-)

 

happy holidays season to every and hope you have a great start of 2023!
Frank

 

Update 28-12

Updated the file (missed a few people and made a mistake by adding someone by error). Used input of all top 230 Waymarkers (700+ posts). Nevertheless, I can not easily see when someone has visited a lot of different categories. I could potentially miss a few waymarkers with high levels of finds, if they have low level of posts.

Edited December 28, 2022 by T-Team!
Update of the file.

[+FamilieFrohne]

20 hours ago, T-Team! said:

Hopefully Erik can do some of his magic in a future update :-)

 

Thanks for the trust in my abilities, but .... since the access to the profile page requires a login my program can't retrieve data from these pages (I suppose that you took the data from the category grid page). The data collected for my database are from the waymark category pages and the according active(!) waymark pages only, as they do not need a login for display. So my database could only give you a value for distinct posted categories (also on active waymarks only, so the number may differ from the profile page).

[+T-Team!]

Ok, good to know and yes indeed, I did check the details in the individual profile pages. 

[+T-Team!]

Erik, a question with regards to the map. Recently (more than 1 month ago), I checked my post (using the map in the tool) and I noticed that I had made some mistakes. Either I had mistakenly put in the wrong Dutch province OR the coordinates were saved as a "West" coordinate which should have been an "East" coordinate. For almost all of the Dutch provinces, I had a "mistakes" and I changed/updated them.

 

When I now check the updates, I do not see the changes in the map. See example below of a Waymark which shows as a "west" issue, which I have changed some time ago. My question is... how frequently does the map information get updated? 

 

 

 

[+FamilieFrohne]

2 hours ago, T-Team! said:

Erik, a question with regards to the map. Recently (more than 1 month ago), I checked my post (using the map in the tool) and I noticed that I had made some mistakes. Either I had mistakenly put in the wrong Dutch province OR the coordinates were saved as a "West" coordinate which should have been an "East" coordinate. For almost all of the Dutch provinces, I had a "mistakes" and I changed/updated them.

 

When I now check the updates, I do not see the changes in the map. See example below of a Waymark which shows as a "west" issue, which I have changed some time ago. My question is... how frequently does the map information get updated?

 

As I wrote a little earlier the update of coordinates is not done automatically:

On 10/2/2022 at 6:11 PM, FamilieFrohne said:

P.S.: Another issue is, that I don't "see" coordinate changes on waymarks - it took me some time to get all the coordinates of the existing waymarks - automated, but still it took several weeks. So if you update a coordinate with errors the change will not be seen on my webpage (until you tell me - perhaps I should write a Tampermonkey script for that you can use also ...).

 

After the import of the new waymarks the coordinate of these are missing in my database. My program runs a query and does an import of these missing values by reading the according waymark pages. For all other waymarks that have already a coordinate this is not done.

 

Checking all the waymark pages again and again to find the changes would take at least 14 days minimum for each run - so that this would be impractical.

 

Seeing your need (and with that also the amount of work coming my way) I refined a small Tampermonkey script (see https://www.tampermonkey.net/). The script that can be found at https://wm.familie-frohne.net/downloads/WaymarkingDBScript.user.js and will add a small window on the waymark page that allows an update of the coordinate (and who approved the waymark) in my database when clicked. See the output below. Simple, but hopefully useful.
 

 

[+T-Team!]

For those of you who might be interested, I created an update of the top 12 posters, finders and combined.

 

Quite proud of the fact that I have 1000 (unique ones) in each of the three categories.

 

grt

T-Team!

 

[+T-Team!]

A new year.. a new update. Happy new year everyone ! Have fun Waymarking.

 

 

[+Torgut]

On 3/24/2022 at 9:16 PM, FamilieFrohne said:

Looks great (better than my own category overview). I'm curious what you plan to do next.

 

I wasn't aware of this. Good I took a look, very very nice! Thanks! 

 

Now, who's gonna be the hero to create an Android app for Waymarking? :-)

[+ScroogieII]

23 hours ago, Torgut said:

 

I wasn't aware of this. Good I took a look, very very nice! Thanks! 

 

Now, who's gonna be the hero to create an Android app for Waymarking? :-)

 

Yeah, wishin' & a hopin' here, just as you are.

For that I'd even pay REAL (CDN) $$$.  

The Scrooge

[+FamilieFrohne]

On 1/6/2024 at 11:48 AM, Torgut said:

Now, who's gonna be the hero to create an Android app for Waymarking? :-)

 

Don't know. But I am pretty certain, that it wouldn't be me - mainly due to

• lack of knowledge (f.e. starting with the fact, that I don't know how to log in programmatically into Waymarking and the need to do so in a (yet) unknown runtime environment),
• lack of ambition (it would be a HUGE project for single person),
• the unknown requirements of that app (what features have to be in there?)
• and most of all: the lack of spare time (family, job and some hobbies (including geocaching and Waymarking) would get in the way).

[+FamilieFrohne]

Yesterday I had to change the current version of PHP used for my website and therefore had to fix some modules, that were using now deprecated features. During that fix the daily import program started and garbled some of the categories in the statistics - unnoticed by me (but some of you already noticed and informed me - thanks for that).

 

In consequence I will run a full import of all categories to get the numbers right again, but this may take a while to complete (24h to 36h depending on the network). That means the import would probably be done on Saturday evening or Sunday morning (Middle European Time / UTC + 1)). Until that time the statistic values may not be accurate.

 

Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

 

Yours, Erik.

[+Ariberna]

Inconveniences? after all your work?
Thank you and thank you.