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Geocaching by the community, for the community
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hmarq
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Joined: 15 Sep 2003
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 Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 1:07 pm Post subject: Approvals, moderation and logging, Oh my! |
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A peak at the home page might help you place context here.
Wild West Caching, status quo, park mangers, authorities and how to and if/how to tame the beast that is our activity of choice.
Certainly to read the forums over the last week, the wild wester's have been out in force. No rules, no approvals, anarchy lives. At the same time the folks I allude to on the home page have a very real point about being regulated and legislated out of our activity -- and at the end of the day, they'll find this site like they did geocaching.com and look for stuff that breaks *their* rules, regardless of what we do/want.
So, to cast the first stone as it were, what if part of the finder logging step, there were 2 mandatory fields ... 2 checkboxes and a text field. The check boxes would be "Conforms to community definition for this cache type" and "Does not conform to community definition for this cache type" ... if the first is checked you're done. If the 2nd, the text box would need to be completed stating the 'violation' ... ie "placed on private property without consent", "placed in National Park", etc.
Just a thought and place to start the conversation ... but it's a conversation that has to take place and be resolved. |
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hmarq
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 1:15 pm Post subject: |
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Just to complete the thought above ... based on the number of 'conforms'/'does not conform' responses the cache would be scored such that at a certain level searchers wouldn't see it unless they 'opted in' to see them ... or even auto archived is an option.
This is about as close to self policing as you can get without recreating the pyramid stucture of the other sites with central approval.
Thoughts, alternatives welcome. |
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Scout
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 235
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 2:05 pm Post subject: Re: Approvals, moderation and logging, Oh my! |
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| hmarq wrote: | | Certainly to read the forums over the last week, the wild wester's have been out in force. No rules, no approvals, anarchy lives. |
An open, flexible cache listing service is NOT contradictory to a well-regulated hobby. In fact, I claim that the current system in place is more like the "wild west" than the systems being proposed here. Today's system has tens of thousands of caches being placed with a few good platitudes as guidance, but little real enforcement possible. There are only a small handful of approvers, who can't possibly check out all the caches or know what local rules and regulations might be in place.
The system proposed here has a comprehensive rating and tagging system that can better characterize caches than anything in place on any Web site up to now. And it lets the tens of thousands of finders and hundreds of local geocaching clubs have some input into this database. If you want to regulate, that's the kind of information you have to have. You have to break it free of a monopoly that has a conflict of interest between its own business interests and what's good for the community (geocachers, parks, etc.). If you are afraid of regulation, you should be afraid of a system that is open. Because it's open to the regulators, too, not just to the rogue cachers and Webmasters.
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hmarq
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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I'm not sure if that's a for or against 
What I'm trying to do is *quantify* what those tens of thousands of finders do, and apply a scoring mechanism on top of it so that as a user I can set my "threshhold of rougeness", with a sensible default applied for folks that have not shown a prefernece ... so if someone posts a multicache that consists of an active military base, a missle silo and a toxic waste dump it gets appropriately moded down to say -300 and Joe Geocacher that bought his Garmin Gecko this morning never sees it in a search. .... Similarly Bob's Pharmacy cache might exist on a linked page, but it's not showing in the family friendly category. |
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Scout
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 235
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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You can't define a formula until you know what all the factors are going to be. That's under discussion. Most of the talk is just trying to get the types of caches defined. We haven't even started on attributes like terrain or difficulty, where things like military base and toxic waste dump might factor in.
I doubt that we'll ever reach a consensus on a single formula that can be used as a filter. Different people will use different formulas. What we need is a flexible system that allows anyone to create their own formula and plug it into the system's filtering tools. Then, the market system will decide which filter definitions thrive and which will die. We don't have to predict the winners ahead of time.
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hmarq
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 8:32 am Post subject: |
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sure you can talk formulas ... I'm talking about the *Default* behavior of the *Easy" search box ... ie, key in your zip code, get back 100 mile radius. That seach (to my mind) shouldn't return anything too rougish.
I'm trying to find a *simple* way to let *all* users have a voice in moderation ... that means it has to be something as basic as "This cache follows the 'rules'", "This cache doesn't follow the 'rules'" ... and some scoring mechanism behind that.
What the advanced search page has with cache types, modifiers, attributes and the like is a more extended discussion, but no one but some elite set of folks will ever use the policing/moderation system if it's made too complex. |
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Scout
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 235
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 8:58 am Post subject: |
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| hmarq wrote: | | What the advanced search page has with cache types, modifiers, attributes and the like is a more extended discussion, but no one but some elite set of folks will ever use the policing/moderation system if it's made too complex. |
I expect the searching mechanism will be complex AND everyone will use it. It's just that it will be pre-packaged in an easy-to-use way for the majority. The default action of the search mechanism could use a pre-packaged, highly complex filter offered by the Webmaster. Another Web site might offer a different complex filter as the default. Both Web sites might offer a pull-down menu that offers alternative pre-packaged filter sets, accessible by name (e.g., "Family Friendly", or "Extreme", or "Classics", etc.), not by having to fill in a form with lots of regular expressions or whatever. And the Web sites could give users the option of creating their own filter using the full power of the underlying search engine.
I understand that some may be most interested in what the default action of the opencaching.com Web site will be. I'm more interested in seeing that we get a flexible system so that whatever the default is, it can evolve and grow, because I know for sure that whatever we guess we want at first will not be what we want as we go along.
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hmarq
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 9:31 am Post subject: |
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OK, I now see we're actually talking about 3 different things:
1. Policing/moderation/rating method: since people are involved this is subjective, but the collection of the data needs to be simple -- 'yes, no' 'good, bad' 'follows rules/ doesn't' ... and that needs to be universally collected to be of use and minimize weighting error. What the actual *rules* are and how they are defined and by whom is a different discussion and is independant of the implementation.
2. What data is stored, where is it collected from and how is it syndicated ... I realize building flexibility is important, that's fine, but we have to start with a least common denominator and build on it, not chase our tail thinking about what might be cool someday to someone and then have the entire userbase accomadate a potential whim just to list a cache; to that end I'd guess that a new cache page would only *require* about what is required today and the syndicates would have to deal with a bunch of default/empty values for the 'value add' stuff. We can talk about all the cool stuff to add on ad infinitum, but to get out the door, we have to start with *parity* of what exists today and build a user base.
3. Search mechanisms ... yep guilty as charged, I'm focused on the default behavior of how *this site* will search for caches; I'm not going to worry about how someone else builds some other site till we are actually delivering a service (if even then). If we want to be productive here, let's talk about an existing feed and how it doens't meet some arbitrary need ... like say navicache's which seems perfectly servicable as a starting point, less the fact that it has no scoring mechanism (which is mitigated by the fact that it has front end approvals, so presumably all the caches would 'pass' our score too).
Now, to bring that all back full circle, the only place all three of these intersect is with the moderation/rating sytem, which oddly enough is what the thread was titled The method is a critical path item to building the log function of this site. The score itself is important to downline feeds from the site. And finally it's the basis of how the default search facility would be based here. |
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Scout
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 9:54 am Post subject: |
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| hmarq wrote: | | the collection of the data needs to be simple -- 'yes, no' 'good, bad' 'follows rules/ doesn't' |
These are fine. Implement them. So, when I hide a cache, I can check all the right boxes. And when I find a cache, I can rate the caches by checking the right boxes.
But also give me, as a cache hider and me as a cache finder, the ability to extend the tagging system. When I create my first cache and look for the checkbox to indicate, for example, that the site is dog-friendly and I don't find such a checkbox, I want the ability to check "Other" and add a tag saying the site allows pets. Future hiders will see my custom tag and be allowed to check it for their cache, too. Finders who log caches will see it, too, and check it if the hider created the cache before the tag was available.
By allowing this extensibility, we don't have to worry so much about getting all the right tags at first. The community will think of the tags that we forget. The site administrators can watch the new tags and consolidate them as needed to keep the tagging system from getting out of control.
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hmarq
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 9:56 am Post subject: |
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| hmarq wrote: | If we want to be productive here, let's talk about an existing feed and how it doens't meet some arbitrary need ... like say navicache's which seems perfectly servicable as a starting point, less the fact that it has no scoring mechanism (which is mitigated by the fact that it has front end approvals, so presumably all the caches would 'pass' our score too).
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So to address my own point (yeah that'spoor form, but what the heck) ... Navicaches format is very friendly to expat programmers as each cache is a single element with all the data stored as attributes, so it's one tag to process and you get back a hash of the attributes. Quick and painless to parse.
The bad thing is that for what we're talking about it's poor form XML ... the most glaring example being the Pets, Bathrooms, etc. Those are all hard coded attributes and not very extensible ... a better idea might be:
<geocache id="NVAB23">
... other cache data
<cacheattribute>
<attrname>Pets</attrname>
<attrval>YES</attrval>
</cacheattribute>
OR
<cacheattribute id="Pets">
<value>YES</value>
</cacheattribute>
then to add attibutes, it's just sticking in another cacheattribute and the downlines can ignore it if they don't support the id. And honestly, the parser for this isn't that much harder to write. |
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hmarq
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 9:58 am Post subject: |
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| OK, we're crossing in cyberspace here .... and fortunately I believe we're on the same page |
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Renegade Knight
Joined: 15 Sep 2003
Posts: 151
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 11:15 am Post subject: Too much in the middle? |
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To have a box that says "This cache meets standards" or "Doesn't meet standards" seems like a drawn out version of "Archive This Cache".
Once a cache is no longer viable there should be an option to resolve that issue. Getting it approved would require meeting viable standards.
Does there really need to be input on a caches meeting standards between when it was approved as meeting them and when it's no longer a viable cache? |
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hmarq
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Posts: 351
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 11:25 am Post subject: Re: Too much in the middle? |
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| Renegade Knight wrote: | To have a box that says "This cache meets standards" or "Doesn't meet standards" seems like a drawn out version of "Archive This Cache".
Once a cache is no longer viable there should be an option to resolve that issue. Getting it approved would require meeting viable standards.
Does there really need to be input on a caches meeting standards between when it was approved as meeting them and when it's no longer a viable cache? |
Yes and no.
You're assuming a front end approval mechanism, and you're assuming rouge sites play by the rules ... I was trying to solve address the folks that say, submit a cache and it's listed; no approvals required .... then the users actually hunting the cache can decide if it conforms or not. It's also required in that if we accept inbound syndication, even though we may still have an approval process, the sites we accept inbound from might not ...
If you develope a score based on the input of those that find it and then use the scoring model as part of the search routine, you can moderate a cache out of the mainstream, yet still have it available to those that want to live on the edge so to speak.
At least that's how I read what has been talked about (primarily Scout and CR's comments) and how to address it in a mainstream model. |
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Scout
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 235
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 12:08 pm Post subject: Re: Too much in the middle? |
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| hmarq wrote: | | If you develope a score based on the input of those that find it and then use the scoring model as part of the search routine, you can moderate a cache out of the mainstream, yet still have it available to those that want to live on the edge so to speak. |
Exactly. We have to dispel the notion that what's being talked about here is caching without rules. If opencaching.com gets tagged as the "rogue geocaching" site, it'll be a disservice. A system that allows input to those who find caches opens up the approval process to many more people. This is essential if the control mechanism is going to keep up with the growth of the hobby. Everyone is given input to the system. But that doesn't mean that everyone's input is going to be equally respected by the community.
When players submit caches to the site, consider the caches to be in an "unapproved" status initially. By default, the mainstream search engine will probably ignore these. But as experienced players who have gained the respect of the local community review the caches and mark them with the appropriate tags ("public land", "permission obtained", etc.), then the default search engines will start including them in searches. The approval process is opened up to many more people, not just one Webmaster and his small trusted team, who can't possibly cover the world and know all the local customs.
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hmarq
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 1:32 pm Post subject: Re: Too much in the middle? |
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| Scout wrote: |
When players submit caches to the site, consider the caches to be in an "unapproved" status initially. By default, the mainstream search engine will probably ignore these. But as experienced players who have gained the respect of the local community review the caches and mark them with the appropriate tags ("public land", "permission obtained", etc.), then the default search engines will start including them in searches. The approval process is opened up to many more people, not just one Webmaster and his small trusted team, who can't possibly cover the world and know all the local customs. |
Interesting. I hadn't quite grasped this in the original comments, but it make sense. The only thing I can see folks grousing about is that you'd force anyone that wants to be FTF (and there are a lot of those folks in some areas) to search at a more rougish level in order to see new caches that are brought into the system at a depressed score until the first few finders actually 'find' them and tag them as appropriate. ... but a very interesting way to handle the problem. |
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