Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Discussion of the various leader boards that LonelyCache has or should have
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Corfman Clan
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Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by Corfman Clan »

I'm hoping one of you remembers how the Recent ChallengePoint Activity 6 Month Net Change and 1 Month CPs From Hides DGP stats worked and can explain here. Since it's been awhile since DGP was updated, there is no way to see those stats beyond a cacher's stats page. LonelyCache really doesn't have to align with what DGP did, but I would like to understand what DGP did and compare to what I'm thinking of implementing.
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firennice
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by firennice »

It kept record of your score a month ago, and six months ago, then that score gave your change in that time frame.
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AZ WANDERING BEAR
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by AZ WANDERING BEAR »

Also, at least on the monthly look back had a list of your finds that generated the increase. Cache point growth in your "portfolio" also played a role though I can't remember if that was documented or displayed.

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Corfman Clan
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by Corfman Clan »

AZ WANDERING BEAR wrote:Cache point growth in your "portfolio" also played a role though I can't remember if that was documented or displayed.
That's the part I don't remember. How the growth worked.
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AZ WANDERING BEAR
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by AZ WANDERING BEAR »

I don't remember precisely either, but I think it was displayed on DGP in separate columns -- finds and growth. I kept a separate spreadsheet at the time which I just located and it only had a row for total growth. So my recollections must be from the DGP site.

It's simple math -- almost. There is a dated total point value, a current total point value, and the difference between the two. The difference between the total value of caches found in the period (1 month or 6 months) and the value change over the time period is your portfolio growth (or loss). The only complicating factor is that the new finds would have a certain growth or decline over the period as well. For simplicity's sake I'd just use the value they have on the day you are calculating the stats vs going back to look at their points when found. The difference would be fairly small with the exception of a cache with high Achilles points (to use an old DGP term) that was found again during the look back period.

It was an interesting stat in a couple of ways. It gave some visibility to how hard others were working. Also provided some insight into just where your growth or decline was truly coming from.

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Corfman Clan
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by Corfman Clan »

Thanks Wade, I think I understand.

What I'm planning to do is the following:

Each time the status are updated, save the points total for all geocachers. We'll only do this for overall points per cacher, not by regions. If we included regions, there would just be too much data. As it is, keeping the points history for half a year for 152k or so cachers will be close to 28 million entries.

So then, when stats are updated, will compute the following three numbers for each cacher:
  1. Current point value
  2. Point value from 31 days ago
  3. Value of all finds/hides (that have been found) from the past 30 days.
Then from those we'll compute:
  1. Total growth = A - B
  2. Find/Hide growth = C
  3. Point growth = A - B - C
Then will do the same for 180 days.
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desert dawg
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by desert dawg »

The DGP had a feature on the front page that showed Recent Notable Challenge Point Activity.
It displayed the latest 10 notable finds
cacher name
point value
link to cache on DPG
I think it would be great to have it continued here in some form and limited to only caches that are worth 100 LCP points or more.
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Corfman Clan
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by Corfman Clan »

desert dawg wrote:The DGP had a feature on the front page that showed Recent Notable Challenge Point Activity.
It displayed the latest 10 notable finds
cacher name
point value
link to cache on DPG
I think it would be great to have it continued here in some form and limited to only caches that are worth 100 LCP points or more.
Yes the plan is to continue that. We'll probably list the top ten finds over the last 30 days. Here's an example from a query I just ran
Top Recent Finds on 7/22/12
Top Recent Finds on 7/22/12
TopRecentFinds.jpg (39.49 KiB) Viewed 5182 times
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desert dawg
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by desert dawg »

Awesome and thank you.. ~
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Corfman Clan
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Re: Recent ChallengePoint Activity

Post by Corfman Clan »

Corfman Clan wrote:What I'm planning to do is the following:

Each time the status are updated, save the points total for all geocachers. We'll only do this for overall points per cacher, not by regions. If we included regions, there would just be too much data. As it is, keeping the points history for half a year for 152k or so cachers will be close to 28 million entries.

So then, when stats are updated, will compute the following three numbers for each cacher:
  1. Current point value
  2. Point value from 31 days ago
  3. Value of all finds/hides (that have been found) from the past 30 days.
Then from those we'll compute:
  1. Total growth = A - B
  2. Find/Hide growth = C
  3. Point growth = A - B - C
Then will do the same for 180 days.
So that's what I did, but there's a big problem with it in that there currently isn't any history to work from. Over time, that will go away but in the interim we were getting funky results. So I pushed out another change to only compute the points growth from July 26th forward, since that is the first day we have history from. That helped, and after some time everything should be fine, right? Well, that depends. The problem with using a saved points history is that it will only work correctly when you have the needed points history. So what happens if we expand LonelyCache? Well, there will be no points history for the new territory. So after any expansion, the Recent Point Growth boards will be incorrect until enough time passes to save the points history.

Then it dawned on me. We have the data, why not just compute the past point totals on the fly as needed? If we did that, then the Recent Point Growth boards will be good from the get go. If we expand LonelyCache, they'll still be good. What's the down side? Well, it's that it won’t account for archived caches. Using PointsHistory, the saved points will include points for caches that were active then but have since been archived. This will give different results than using the PointsHistory table.

After some thought, I decided that the benefits of doing away with the PointsHistory table out weighed the problem of not accounting for archived caches. The changes have been made and pushed out to the system and will show up when the statistics are generated tomorrow morning.

Here's how do we do this:
  1. For each cache, we'll calculate it's point value and number of finders for the current day, 30 days ago, and 180 days ago. We've been doing this for the current day.
  2. For each cacher, we'll calculate his/her total points for each region for the current day. There's nothing new here, we've been doing this.
  3. For each cacher, we'll calculate his/her total points for 30/180 days ago LonelyCache wide and subtract it from his/her value from the previous item and save the results.
  4. For each cacher, we'll calculate his/her points due to hides/finds from the last 30/180 days and save the results.
Another advantage of doing it this way is that we can easily add recent point activity statistics to each region, not just LonelyCache wide. At this time, that hasn't been done. I'm not sure if we ever will, but it would be fairly straight forward to do.
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