Geocaching Australia Development List

This page lists the development ideas for Geocaching Australia. If you want something added to this list, please post your request in the forum.

For changes to the Wiki, see the Wiki Development List.

Roadmap

• Get collaborative development process going
• Move to mysql
• Single sign-on for gallery, forum, wiki, gca (upgrade all packages)
• Images, swaggies

Work in Progress

Ideology

• finalising the development and release processes

Mind Socket

• Follow up items for basic stats ...
  • Cache results for previous months/years/anytime
• Fix mates and other searches
• Neighbours - similar to mates, but using cacher coords

caughtatwork

• (In Progress) Cache graphs to be moved from caughtatwork.net to GCA. Will display "top 50" style graphs for caches.
• (In Progress) Cache ratings.
• (In Progress) Cache plots for Watching, Planned and FTF.
• Hiders choice: From GIN51E's post: My idea evolves around the Recommended Caches idea although instead it gives the option of a Hider to be able to highlight or nominate one of there own caches as being there best hide yet and most recommended for other cachers to find.

Riblit

• more GPX options, eg unfound caches, etc
• look into fixing postcode database
  • new postcode data has been uploaded - states can check the accuracy

still some concerns - some locations are not listed

CraigRat

On the way:

• Swaggies:
  • Allow an Icon to be attatched to a swaggie and provide a summary of 'found' GCA swaggies (plus icons) on cachers page
• Auto-text in GCA logs to allow embedding of gallery items in a nice pretty way

Fix Bugs/Basic Functionality

• Get swaggies working (import, listing and logs)
• Bed down importing utility: protect against smart waypoint names
• Get cache updates working properly for GCA caches which have a delay between drafting and publishing
• Add locationless to gpx and anchors
• Add links to profiles and website on cacher pages
• auto-populate state field (or at least default to something reasonable)
• Fix character encoding bug
• Fix apostrophe bug in cacher name admin panel
• Fix COPA page - part of bbs update
• Tag virtual caches
• Improve auto-archiving: unarchive a cache when a find is imported through the wizard

Search

Better Search options, searching all items (logs/gallery/tags/cachers/caches etc etc as requested in obscene detail by the one known only as "The Ginger Loon")

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Additional functionality

• Something that Loon wanted about making the footer text into links to recommended caches, etc
• GeoLists
• Postcode editor
• combinations of "planned" lists, possibly based on mates (caches my mates are also planning)
• What do my mates recommend?
• User-friendly layout control of cache pages / logs (use BBCode?)
• Site map
• Show nearby unfound caches after logging - improves workflow
• Automatic winners' page for finders
• Cache attributes
• World wind user selectable altitude setting (World What? Google Earth made it redundant!)
• international caches
• When logging a cache, allow a non-published note to the owner (sends PM?)
• Format the tags / view page (eg. http://geocaching.com.au/tags/view/all/playground/) like the caches page (eg. http://geocaching.com.au/caches/gca/au/). Then I could sort by the appropriate distance or direction. Another request would be to have the Country / Region capability in there so I could also filter by ones is my own state.\

Bonus Sharing

• Moveable cache trails
• iCal feed for upcoming events/caches

Gallery

• Cacher specific galleries in new gallery system

Stats

• Cache(r) half life, plot decline in find frequency
• Cache(r) find frequency. Straight, and vs diff/terr
• team v location: where different teams are putting their caches. colours represent teams
• terrain v difficulty: correlated as most people don't understand the difference?
• terrain v location: urban are are easy terrain, the ones away are harder?
• difficulty v location: opposite to above
• team cache style profiles: terrain v location, coloured blob represents team. colour gets brighter/blob larger as teams plant more caches of that style.
• hit/miss ratio v terrain, difficulty
• time to first find v location, time: hypothesis is that ttff is small in sydney but large further out. other hypothsis is that average ttff has decreased significantly over the past 12 months
• team territorial analysis - thematic plot of where each team is usually active. for each team, assign (say) 5 points for a cache that they have laid, 2 points for a first find and 1 point for a normal find. then start shading areas based on the pointscore and see what you get. should be able to see odlid dave sitting down there in jannali, dogs up in hornsby, etc

Mapping

• Area warnings, eg Lane Cove National Park
• User correctable maps to improve quality
• Integrate GPSBabel to support zillions of formats

Hosted sites

• Database-driven blogger which makes it easy to make websites
• Aggregate comments to one page to make a community
• Links into geodashing, confluence points, etc, not just secondary site
• Autotext in comments, eg replace i! with i!, team names with links
• Auto cross-links between stories (perhaps as part of autotext, prompting bloggers to comment on each other's stories)
• Summarise comments across sites
• Auto-populate comment username