[Request] Negative attributes in search or all search options in PQ generator

[+TheVoytekBear]

Hi,

As the title says, it'd be nice to have one of the above implemented. Probably the later would be even better because saving search results to a list means the necessity of maintaining it later after the caches have been found.

 

To show on an example what I can't do with neither:

I want to have 2 separate PQs:

1. All challenges in Poland (or any region abroad I'll happen to visit). Some of them are part of geoarts so they will have their coordinates updated. - this is easily achieved by a PQ now.

2. All solved but not found puzzles in a region. They will also have updated coordinates and won't have the "Challenge" attribute.

 

The 2nd cannot be achieved by a PQ at all because there isn't an "updated coordinates" parameter. Creating a search while the area has already challenges with updated coordinates means that, the challenges would get mixed into regular solved puzzles mix. While separating them later in "postprocessing" isn't such a big problem with right tools, in an area with a lot of geoarts the 1000 caches limit can be hit easily.

 

While the question, why I need more than 1000 puzzles at once isn't the issue here, I'll answer before the topic gets derailed: I often travel across the country so I migh't drive next to various caches and preparing each time is a burden. It's more handy to just have "everything" on my phone just in case.

 

Please treat the above as one example where the request might come in handy I'm sure other users would have other use cases for the feature.

Edited September 15, 2022 by TheVoytekBear

[+barefootjeff]

Yes, it was disappointing when they introduced attributes into the search engine that they didn't include negative attributes or allow caches with selected attributes to be excluded from search results. If I recall correctly, one of the justifications given for the Power Trail attribute was allowing people to exclude power trails from searches if they weren't keen on them, yet the search engine can't do that.

 

I own a challenge cache that requires finding 20 caches with the Takes more than an hour attribute. That's the negative form of the Takes less than an hour attribute so the search engine can't be used to look for qualifying caches. I'm sure many cachers would consider taking more than an hour to be a true negative, but there are still a few old school diehards who take the opposite view, like the finder who wrote "The qualifying caches for this challenge are generally the best ones around, and make for great days with family and friends too."

 

Another use for negative attributes in searches is for tree-fishing (Biltema) caches. The reviewers here recommend these be identified by the combination of the Special Tool Required and No Tree Climbing Required attributes, but while you can include the former in a search, you can't include the latter.

 

It would be great to have a unified search tool that combines everything you can do with PQs and the current search engine, but the current trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

[+TheVoytekBear]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

Another use for negative attributes in searches is for tree-fishing (Biltema) caches. The reviewers here recommend these be identified by the combination of the Special Tool Required and No Tree Climbing Required attributes, but while you can include the former in a search, you can't include the latter.

To be fair, this is easily achievable in PQ (unless we treat the crossed tree climbing attribute differently from it not being present at all - I'm not sure how PQ filters that exaclty).