Most Wanted and Nearby caches

[Corfman Clan]

I'm currently working on adding a capability similar to the DGP's "My DGP Most Wanted" feature. In a nutshell it would list geocaches ranked by points per mile from your home base. You also had the capability to mark caches to be ignored, or in other words, not to show up on the list. When we were first developing LonelyCache it was one of the DGP features that a lot of you wanted to carry into LonelyCache.

Well, I'm finally looking into adding some functionality that has been desired but there was just too many other things that needed to be addressed first.

To start with, what I'm planning to implement is:

• A user's home location on Geocaching.com will be used as the home base for the most wanted list. If the user doesn't have a home location set, then this feature will not be available.
• A cacher's Geocaching.com ignore list will be honored. That is caches bookmarked on ones ignore list will not be included on the most wanted list. This will most likely be able to be toggled on or off. It's my understanding that the ignore list is only available to premium members. At any rate, it is only available via the Geocaching.com Live API with Premium members.
• Premium only caches will only show up on a premium (and charter) member's most wanted list. This is the current behavior for a cache's nearby cache list.
• A cache will need a minimum next find cache point value to show up on the list. I'm thinking 25 for a default but it will probably be able to be specified on the Most Wanted page.
• Some maximum distance out from the home location will be used. It will default to some value, perhaps 50 miles, but it will probably be able to be specified on the Most Wanted page.
• Some maximum number of caches to include on the most wanted list will be used. It will probably be 100 as that is the number of caches displayed on a page for many of the LonelyCache lists.

I'm also thinking of modifying the Nearby Cache feature to exclude caches on ones ignore list too. This seems like something that would be desired.

I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks.

[Fugads]

I feel like I already get this functionality simply by narrowing down to the County level and looking at the list of top ranked caches for the county. Yeah, there are some really big counties, but for me this works pretty well and I have a good idea of what my "most wanted" caches are, at least in my home area. Where I think this feature would be really nice is if I was visiting an area further away. Once I get further than 200 miles away, I don't really have a good feel for county names, or names, so just locating the right regional/county page takes a little while (a clickable map like DGP had would be nice for this, or is there one already and I'm just missing it?). To be able to enter a location and identify all the "best" LCP caches within 20-50 miles would be great. This doesn't sound like what you have in mind, but perhaps if there is a way to enter a "home location" that is not your GC.com home location, you could get this functionality.

Oh and showing 100 caches is a bit much for me. When I'm scrolling down those lists, I rarely make it past the 25-30th ranked item. but that's just me.

[ZenGuru]

A useful feature at geocaching.com is the ability to change your "home" to another location temporarily. Good if you want new cache locations for another area. So if you live in NM and are vacationing in NV, you can get notification Nv while you are there. It should work the same for lonely caches.

[Corfman Clan]

I hear ya on being able to specify the location to use. What I was trying to avoid, at least initially, was dealing with the parsing and validation of coordinates. There's several different forms of entering them that that's not a simple problem to implement. It's not overly complicated but there are lots different cases to deal with.

Here's some examples of the same location:

• N 33° 41.345' W 112° 05.678'
• N 33° 41.345 W 112° 05.678
• N 33 41.345 W 112 05.678
• N33° 41.345 W112° 05.678
• 33.689083 -112.094633
• N 33° 41' 21" W 112° 05' 41"
• Etc.

[rocketsciguy]

I'm looking forward to this one! I thought the changeable "BaseCamp" in DGP was a nice feature, and automatically using the API to grab home coords is an improvement. Love to see both!

I hear ya on being able to specify the location to use. What I was trying to avoid, at least initially, was dealing with the parsing and validation of coordinates. There's several different forms of entering them that that's not a simple problem to implement. It's not overly complicated but there are lots different cases to deal with.

Here's some examples of the same location:

• N 33° 41.345' W 112° 05.678'
• N 33° 41.345 W 112° 05.678
• N 33 41.345 W 112 05.678
• N33° 41.345 W112° 05.678
• 33.689083 -112.094633
• N 33° 41' 21" W 112° 05' 41"
• Etc.

I'm surprised to hear that there isn't a magic C-sharp routine to do that for you.

I see three paths to handle this problem. 1. Restrict input to acceptable format(s) only (six integer fields, signed decimal, etc.); 2. Use an external geocoding service (maybe Google) to take any string (whether it's coordinates, a full address, a ZIP code, an airport code, a landmark, etc.) and spit back out either a set of possible coords or the most likely match; or 3. do the parsing yourself (which is what I know you want to do). Along the lines of #3, you could possibly borrow somebody else's smart algorithm (FizzyCalc or GSAK, e.g.). But you'll probably get usable functionality quicker if you do #1 with a single option that's consistent with internal database storage (latitude decimal degrees and longitude decimal degrees).

Whatever way you go with, it would be nice to be able to confirm with the user that the input matches the interpretation -- in the correct hemisphere for instance. Graphically would be idea (call up a Google map with an arrow), but not necessary. One quick sanity check would be to verify if the coords are within the graticules bounding the LonelyCache territory (min_lat < lat < max_lat && min_lon < lon < max_lon) and throw a warning if it is outside those bounds.

[Corfman Clan]

I'm surprised to hear that there isn't a magic C-sharp routine to do that for you.

Well, I don't know if this is magic but it does use some interesting regular expressions: https://github.com/sibartlett/Geo/blob/ ... rdinate.cs

[rocketsciguy]

Well, I don't know if this is magic but it does use some interesting regular expressions

In my experience, regular expressions are magic!