Back Country Leader Boards

Discussion of the various leader boards that LonelyCache has or should have
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Corfman Clan
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Back Country Leader Boards

Post by Corfman Clan »

Previously I described how a geocache's score is calculated and what the point leader boards are. Here I want to describe what back country leader boards we will be supporting are and how they are computed.

As with the point leader boards, we will have a set of back country leader boards for each defined region. Currently we have six regions defined: LonelyCache wide, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Each region will have the following set of back country leader boards:
  • Best all Around Geocacher (BAG?).
  • Traditional Cache.
  • Multi-Cache.
  • Virtual Cache.
  • Letterbox Hybrid.
  • Unknown Cache.
  • Webcam Cache: Note that this board is defined but no current region has enough qualifying webcam caches to support it.
  • EarthCache.
  • Wherigo Cache.
If a region does not contain enough qualifying caches for a particular back country board, then the region will not include that board. For a cache to qualify, it must have a score of 5 or greater. This is different than the DGP, where a minimum score of 10 was needed. We lowered the score to better support back country boards for all cache types along with BAG. For the current six regions, 20 qualifying caches must exist for the board to be supported.

A geocacher's back country score is calculated by averaging the score of the top 20 qualifying caches that geocacher has hid and/or found in the region. If the geocacher has not found or hid 20 qualifying caches, then the scores of the qualifying caches he/she has found or hid are summed and the sum is divided by 20. A consequence of this is that the minimum back country score is 5/20 or 0.25, however only backcountry scores of 1 or greater are saved. As previously mentioned qualifying caches must have a minimum score of 5. They must also be of the appropriate cache type for the particular board. I'd like to reiterate here, that a geocacher's hide will only be counted if it has been found.

When we introduce smaller regions based on polygons, such as for counties or DGP type regions, then those regions will only need to contain 10 qualifying caches instead of 20 and we will take the average of the top 10 instead of the top 20. This is similar to what the DGP did in that the DGP Region back country ranking was based on the top ten caches, whereas overall and states were based on the top 20.

Some more information about the back country leader boards:
  • Leader boards will be made up of the back country scores of all geocacher's that have a back country score of at least 1 for that board.
  • Geocachers will be ranked by score. Top scorers will be the board leaders. In case of a tie, geocachers will have the same rank, but will be ordered by geocaching name.
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gjhiker
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Joined: January 18th, 2012, 8:03 am

Re: Back Country Leader Boards

Post by gjhiker »

Why is it that some counties and/or regions have no Back Country Leader Board? Those that I am specifically looking at are Yavapai county, AZ and the Yavapai region, AZ neither of which shows any Backcountry Leaderboards, nor for that matter Multicache or Puzzle cache categories on the Point Leaderboard. There seem to be many many caches with high point scores. Thanks.
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Corfman Clan
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Re: Back Country Leader Boards

Post by Corfman Clan »

gjhiker wrote:Why is it that some counties and/or regions have no Back Country Leader Board? Those that I am specifically looking at are Yavapai county, AZ and the Yavapai region, AZ neither of which shows any Backcountry Leaderboards, nor for that matter Multicache or Puzzle cache categories on the Point Leaderboard. There seem to be many many caches with high point scores. Thanks.
Perhaps there was a system glitch when you were looking. I just looked at both the Yavapai County page and the Yavapai Region page and both had point leaderboards for every cache type and backcountry leaderboards for Best All Around, Traditional, Multi, and Unknown. None of the other cache types had enough qualifying caches to have a backcountry board.
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gjhiker
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Re: Back Country Leader Boards

Post by gjhiker »

Thank you for your reply to my question. I wonder what the problem is since I don't see the complete listing of all categories. I tried it with both Firefox (my normal browser) and Safari with the same results. Incidentally I do see all the categories for Mesa County and Western Slope in Colorado as well as some other counties and regions. I sent screen shots to your email address showing what I see.
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Corfman Clan
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Re: Back Country Leader Boards

Post by Corfman Clan »

gjhiker wrote:Thank you for your reply to my question. I wonder what the problem is since I don't see the complete listing of all categories. I tried it with both Firefox (my normal browser) and Safari with the same results. Incidentally I do see all the categories for Mesa County and Western Slope in Colorado as well as some other counties and regions. I sent screen shots to your email address showing what I see.
Alright, after looking at what you sent, I understand what you are saying. Basically, you are looking at your statistics page, not the region page. All that is shown there are your results. So for what is shown, you can see your rank and points. Click on the link above to go to the region page and you will be able to see results for the whole region.

I apologize, but I don't have the time to put up some pictures to help explain this now. Perhaps next week if you still are unsure of what I mean.
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gjhiker
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Joined: January 18th, 2012, 8:03 am

Re: Back Country Leader Boards

Post by gjhiker »

Thanks for following up on this. I see what you mean and now understand that only categories for which I have points will show.
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