[Resolved] New/Updated checker needed (GC3CA9M)

Hi Project GC team.

I am messaging you guys in the hope that I can get the challenge checker titled ‘NSW State Challenge (GC3CA9M)’, which has been linked to my challenge cache, altered to reflect the actual challenge. The challenge checker as it stands now has no restriction on the types of caches used. My challenge cache requires that only PHYSICAL cache types are to be used. As a result, people are logging the challenge as being qualified when they are not.

Also, the challenge cache only requires 14 of the 31 presented in the checker, and these 14 are:

Northern (Nor)
Richmond Tweed (RT)
Outer Sydney (OS)
Illawarra (I)
Hunter (H)
Murray (Murray)
Mid North Coast (MNC)
Sydney Surrounds (SS)
North Western (NW)
Central West (CW)
South Eastern (SE)
Inner Sydney (IS)
Murrumbidgee (Murrum)
Far West (FW)

So I guess if the current checker can’t be altered to reflect the actual challenge cache criteria (eg as someone else created it, is it at least possible to create an independent checker for my challenge cache.

Thankyou in advance for your time and consideration.

Regards,

Warren (Marcus Vitruvius)

Hi Warren,

This list of 31 is due to the fact that several of the LGAs were altered. I'll need to re-map them (if using the LGAs is even still a practical way of judging this challenge).

At least one of the new "counties" spans two of your major regions. For example "Snowy Valleys (A)(1)" spans "South Eastern" and "Murray" (I believe it's a merger of "Albury" and "Cooma-Monaro"). How do you think we should approach this sort of discrepancy?

Can you just remove the ones not in Warrens(Marcus Vitruvius) List?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2018 11:01PM by ahomburg. (view changes)

His list is of the "major regions" the state has been (unofficially as far as I can tell) split into. These are between the region and county levels in geocaching terms. If you look at the picture on the cache page, the colours indicate the "major regions" and the individual shapes are the old local government areas (counties in geocaching terms).

Due to this, all finds within mainland New South Wales should count towards one of the fourteen "major regions". I should be able to map most of the new LGA names to one of the "major regions", but there's at least one which is a merger of two old ones which were classified by that challenge into different "major regions".

Unfortunately, the challenge was never adequately defined and it took me quite a while to map the LGAs to the "major region" classifications when I first set up the checker.

Having looked at the 14 areas required for the challenge, these are still a good representation of the state, and so as the previous person has posted, simply removing the 17 areas not required and incorporating only physical cache types will suffice.

I'm not sure what you mean by not being 'adequately defined', as you will see in the link below, it illustrates the same map I used in 2012, as well as links to each of the areas which further define the boundaries. If creating a challenge checker for this challenge, it is these boundaries which should be used, as per the original challenge cache.


https://web.archive.org/web/20130503233704/http://www.dlg.nsw.gov.au:80/dlg/dlghome/dlg_regions.asp

My apologies, I hadn't seen that historical page being added to the cache listing. When I first set up the challenge checker there didn't seem to be any information anywhere on the internet about which LGAs were in which regions, so I'd spent a long time comparing maps with the image on the cache page.

The problem remains that the checker is based on LGAs and these have changed. For example, what should the checker do with finds in "Snowy Valleys (A)(1)"? Should they be counted as "South Eastern" or "Murray" or completely ignored? The old LGAs are no longer in the system and can no longer be used to classify the caches.

Would it help if I sent you a KML file for google earth that was created to map out the original boundaries?

That would allow us to create a new checker based on a different script. It might be better to use that approach, rather than trying to deal with the altered LGAs.

OK sounds good. What's the best way of getting it to you?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2018 06:56AM by Marcus Vitruvius. (view changes)

My GMail account has the same username. (I'm being circumspect so that spam bots are less likely to find my email address)

Receive the files OK?

Can I get a reply on whether a checker is in progress of being created or not? Thanks.

Anything happening with this one? Interested to see how far of qualifying I am...

Unfortunately no! There has been no response from sumbloke, or the last email that was sent. So looks like this challenge will be without a checker.

Sorry it took so long. I was having a bit of trouble converting the locations file.

https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC3CA9M/39533