Re: Challenge exceptions

The focus of the last 3 days has been on challenges. The results will soon be announced more officially, but here is some insight.

There has been a new tab added to the Profile stats, Challenges. The tab is for paying members only. It should be added for most of those users by now. Hopefully with the final version for everyone tomorrow.
That tab includes a module that looks for Challenges that might be pre-signed with a note, and show checker result for each of those.

As a side task to this I have finally made a web interface to add exceptions to the challenge matching. Ie, add challenges that does not have the word challenge in the name, and remove challenges that has the word, but aren't challenges.

Since way back there is a user group at Project-GC named CC-Moderator. All members of that group now has access to https://project-gc.com/Tools/Challenges?moderate (It's available as a link with the text Moderate in the gray sub-bar on the Challenge page). I am uncertain who is in that group, but it should be most users who have had script writing access when it was created. 30 users are members of that group right now.

There are 880 exceptions in that list. I imported data from the "Not a challenge" checker script. Those who owned the tag now owns the vote in this system.

For a cache to be excluded or included it requires that it has at least 2 points (positive or negative, >= +2 or <= -2). Most caches listed there currently has -1 points.

When most of the geocaches in that list has at least 2 points I will start updating the site so that it uses that list instead of the current name matching. After that, we will be able to remove the "not a challenge" checker script.

PS! I have made 68 votes myself today.

The "Challenges signed (but not yet logged as found)" section only has a spinning JSON image here, but I suppose this is still work in progress? Awesome changes to the statistics pages though! Some changes are very subtle but us power users notice those little changes too, so thanks for all the work you're doing.

pieterix Wrote:
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> The "Challenges signed (but not yet logged as
> found)" section only has a spinning JSON image
> here, but I suppose this is still work in
> progress? Awesome changes to the statistics pages
> though! Some changes are very subtle but us power
> users notice those little changes too, so thanks
> for all the work you're doing.


I noticed as well this morning. It was done and ready. Not sure what happened, but I will investigate it today. I probably broke something just before release.

Hi all,

just stumbled over this discussion and this new feature - a very nice idea.
And thus I tried it out with my profile and also got the "rolling circle" @ 'Challenges signed (but not yet logged as found)'

@ganja1447, didn't you in the meantime find, what has happened between "done and ready" and "release" or is there a new issue since two days in the past?

itsbrody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi all,
>
> just stumbled over this discussion and this new
> feature - a very nice idea.
> And thus I tried it out with my profile and also
> got the "rolling circle" @ 'Challenges signed (but
> not yet logged as found)'
>
> @ganja1447, didn't you in the meantime find, what
> has happened between "done and ready" and
> "release" or is there a new issue since two days
> in the past?

Since yesterday it should be fixed for real. Seems like the bug fixing required three iterations. One of them was just a super lazy mistake.

We have gotten bug reports a bit here and there from different channels. It didn't take long to realize it was plenty of users affected.

Thanks, ganja1447 for your continued support.

I can confirm, that there is a display now, although I don't understand it, currently. Might be because its "work in progress"...

Further the explanation text in its footer is shown in English (only) independent of the selected UI language.

That text string has been updated after the first releases. The translators hasn't gotten to it yet, or we haven't downloaded their work. It will be translated.

Fantastic, will make things much easier for everyone.
I've just notice a very minor UI bug - the statistics (particularly your upvotes/your downvotes) don't get updated on the page when you perform an up/down vote - only when the page is refreshed. May be worth having the fields recalculate on the press of the vote buttons.

Also what is the sorting on the page? It may be worth grouping/tabbing by current number of votes, ideally with +2 and -2 at the bottom collapsed so that they only need to be loaded if someone wants to look at them. Once the initial batch is done I'd hope the number of new candidates (+- 1) will be relatively small numbers which people can then quickly review and tick off.

mole125 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Fantastic, will make things much easier for
> everyone.
> I've just notice a very minor UI bug - the
> statistics (particularly your upvotes/your
> downvotes) don't get updated on the page when you
> perform an up/down vote - only when the page is
> refreshed. May be worth having the fields
> recalculate on the press of the vote buttons.
>
> Also what is the sorting on the page? It may be
> worth grouping/tabbing by current number of votes,
> ideally with +2 and -2 at the bottom collapsed so
> that they only need to be loaded if someone wants
> to look at them. Once the initial batch is done
> I'd hope the number of new candidates (+- 1) will
> be relatively small numbers which people can then
> quickly review and tick off.


The statistics are cached as well, so they aren't even updated on every page load. So are the statistics for challenges higher up on the page.

The sorting is based on abs(points) ASC, cacheId ASC. So it's pretty much the same effect as you as for. The list isn't resorted upon votes, that would just make the user lose track.

Great, that sounds close enough then for the sort order and you are right resorting would not be nice.
Hopefully it won't take long for us all to get through the backlog if we all take a bash and then keeping on top of newly identified caches should be pretty straight forward.

What's sad is the fact that there will be ~1000 exceptions for ~20000 challenges. It's a quite high percentage actually. I hadn't realized before how many mystery caches there were with the word challenge in them. I would have guessed less than half.

The good news is that once they are done there shouldn't be much more to do - the rules are much stricter about where challenge can be used.

The problem is when it was unregulated and the fact 'challenge' is a pretty good synonym to describe certain classes of puzzles. There are 393997 unknown caches in the world so the percentage that had the word challenge in is pretty low (though perhaps better would be to look at just the English speaking countries).

I lied a bit. It's sorted on number of votes and not abs(points). I should probably change that. In theory there could be a geocache with 4 votes which still has +-0, which will then not be noticed.

Finland has a trend (or at least had) to name all Challenges Haaste. I am currently going through 129 of those and adding those to the exception list. It's quite cumbersome since it's a language that is quite far from Swedish and English.

ganja1447 Wrote:
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> Finland has a trend (or at least had) to name all
> Challenges Haaste. I am currently going through
> 129 of those and adding those to the exception
> list. It's quite cumbersome since it's a language
> that is quite far from Swedish and English.

I just checked the local list of finnish challenges and it seems that every known challenge in Finland does have "challenge" or "haaste" in the title. I did not find any without this text.

Cool, it was a lot of haaste I added.

In the end I changed the flow to auto-add all unknows which didn't have the word challenge, but one of three others. To cover those localized. It's a long list to go through niw though. But I think about half already has 2+ points.

I've noticed there are a number in the list which are archived which possibly could be excluded, but then we seem to be making good progress so it may not be worth the effort.

FYI, I will add permission to the moderate page to a few more users. The access list used is old and contained everyone who has access to disable checker tags for others.

I will now add all "Experts" from the QA system to the list and also the top 25 script owners, sorted on number of active tags on their scripts.

The access list will increase from 31 to 41.

I like this. I've come across a few challenges which didn't meet the standards in the past. I'll see if I can find them again to add them...

Oops, I accidentally added one that I didn't mean to. Is there any facility to remove caches from this system that have been added in error? Or do we just need someone else to vote for it to move it out of the questionable section?

Specifically this is for GC2GDF6 which I missed was one of the few of the caches I was looking at which did already have "Challenge" in the title.

sumbloke Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Oops, I accidentally added one that I didn't mean
> to. Is there any facility to remove caches from
> this system that have been added in error? Or do
> we just need someone else to vote for it to move
> it out of the questionable section?
>
> Specifically this is for GC2GDF6 which I missed
> was one of the few of the caches I was looking at
> which did already have "Challenge" in the title.

If you up-voted, just click the up-arrow again and your vote will be removed. For down-votes, click the down arrow of course.

When it reaches 0 votes it will be removed from the system. Probably takes a page refresh for it to be visually gone though.

Thanks, that got it.

Can I suggest you add a second-level sorting to put caches the user has already voted for at the end of the list for that number of points? That way someone who has added a lot (such as yourself) will be more easily able to find which ones could do with being checked.

Edit: make that:
1. confidence level (increasing)
2. number of votes by user (increasing)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/19/2018 12:44AM by sumbloke. (view changes)

Would it be enough/better to hide all caches you have voted on?

It's as easy as running this JS in the console (F12, console, paste):
$('#cc_moderate_existingExceptions span.voted').parents('div[data-cacheId]').hide()
I could of course add it to a button as well.

$('#cc_moderate_existingExceptions span.voted').parents('div[data-cacheId]').show()
will show the content again.

That's probably sufficient. We shouldn't have big lists once the initial part is done anyway, so it may not be so relevant.

I'll add a button for it, then I will make a new release of the web.

I noticed there were just a handful caches that needed votes today, thanks to you and a few others, therefore I have made the rest of the web use this list now.
Ie: Unknowns matching the word challenge, minus those down-voted, plus those up-voted.

Now the list is short (only 4 votes needed currently) it isn't so bad. Its the split between where the votes are needed, votes are sufficient that most interests me (colour highlighting when not enough confidence would be another option), but if the number stays small as it is now the investment probably isn't worth much.

I have made quite a few changes to the UI today.

Instead of just counting votes it now calculates a confidence score (same formula as FP Wilson). A score of 32% is needed for the exception to be used later on (when the web actually cares about this list).

It then became natural to sort the table on the confidence score instead of the number of points, obviously.

32% was chosen because 3 down-votes and 1 up-vote gives 30%. I wanted the acceptance to be just above that. Two up-votes only (or 2 down-votes) gives a confidence of 34%, which will be accepted.