Geohashing talk:Current events

The experience for a brand new user coming to the Main Page and wanting to geohash is confusing. A recent discussion in the geohashing IRC channel led to a number of changes to the Main Page and pages linked from there, including this one. Seeing as it is the second link in the left nav bar, people are going to click on it, and we should make it more relevant than a static page essentially restating what is on the Main Page.

Once upon a time, for the first few months of geohashing, people used to post their geohashing intentions in one big glorious mess on the page for that date. But then people got the hang of using expedition and graticule pages, and by October 2008 no one was doing that anymore. It's still a natural thing to expect. A new user asked me "where are all the expeditions I can go on listed?" He understood the answer, but wanted to know how he, as a new user, was supposed to know where his graticule page was and if anyone was going.

This revamp of Current Events is a new proposed use of the page. It's another way of showing off your expedition where everyone can see it, and an easy way to browse what is planned.

I hope that someone can automate this, to automatically seek and display the pages with the Expedition planning category for each date. This is a start.

Please check it out, use it if you can and rewrite anything that needs it. -Robyn 03:21, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Date links

JimL, the recent expeditions aren't meant to be a repeat of the main page photo pages, but a new thing (or an old and gone thing reinvented) for text links to the recent expeditions. I was leaving them empty for moving old ones to, but you just gave me a better idea. -Robyn 00:50, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

How many days should the old ones stay around for? I think a week. Should they be archived (maybe on the same 2009-06-10 page as the photos) or just deleted? I think they would work well on the photo archive pages, that would be after the photos have left the Main Page. I think I favour archiving them, but only just. The drawback is clutter for people who want to view the photos a month at a time. Does anyone other than me do that? Does anyone who does that care?

The current style of links to the categories is obviously not for archiving as it could be recreated at any time. -Robyn 01:03, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Automated Crawling for Current Events

Since I will likely be bored, and confined primarily to my apartment, this weekend, I will look into creating a bot to crawl the Expedition planning category, and auto-creating the list of planned expeditions for all dates available, as well as for the last couple days. I don't know if we can easily have an automatically populated list like we have on the front page, since it would probably be best to keep the amount of work for creating expedition planning pages down. The unfortunate thing is that with a bot, the data on the page may not be the freshest, but I have some ideas on how to deal with that. --aperfectring 18:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I am of the opinion that the majority (if not all) of this should move to somewhere either on the Bot's page, or its talk page. Any objections? --aperfectring 12:38, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Since it has been a day, and no one objected, I have moved the conversation to User talk:AperfectBot in order to keep this page clean. --aperfectring 19:42, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Colour-coded table

I liked the old format better. What's the code? It's not by place, number of people or success. I find the colours distracting and the centred dates hard to find. -Robyn 00:19, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Color should indicate success. Green is good. Red is bad. Yellow says we don't know yet. Jiml 02:50, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I can't say I was ever a fan of fail/bad/red being associated with coordinates unreached. I was happy when they re-named the categories to reflect this (that did happen right?). Juventas 05:39, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Colors: Green is Category:Coordinates reached Yellow is Not green and Category:Expedition planning Red is Otherwise
I can easily get rid of the colors if desired, I just thought it would be nice to have a nice way to see whether people reached coordinates or not via the summaries. Geohashing *IS* always about the experience first and foremost, but there still is importance associated with reaching coordinates. If there is another, more appropriate, color we could use for coordinates not reached, I would much prefer that to getting rid of them altogether.
I don't think I explicitly set the dates to be in the middle, and it should be easy enough to bring those to the left side.
Overall, though, I think the table view is a much cleaner display of the information. I find it a lot easier to see where expeditions took place, and who went on them, with this format. As time went on, I found that the wall of text that used to be here started annoying me more and more. --aperfectring 07:58, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for moving the dates. Apparently I find wall o' colour more offputting than wall o' text. I now longer enjoy browsing the this page to see what is going on. I can't objectively say whether the table improves the experience, because for me it is overwhelmed by the colours. If I'm alone in this then I'll stop complaining, but I'd far rather see a dot of colour than a whole swath. -Robyn 23:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I really like the table, but would slightly prefer if it had no color. Sara 00:10, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Color removed, let me know what you think. --aperfectring 01:10, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I apologize for getting this discussion off on the wrong foot by saying good/bad. I was trying to be a bit funny, but I guess I hit a nerve, which I can understand since I was making fun of the good/bad concept.... Anyway, I really like the table, and I liked having the colors, but I could see the wide band of color as being too much. Could we get a little splash/splotch as a quick summary of how the expedition went? I know that all expeditions are good in that they happen, and I'm thrilled when I see a window full of expeditions, but a quick summary might be nice. What would folks think of using the red/green arrows and maybe making undetermined ones yellow banded? Jiml 04:21, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I kind of liked it better with colors. But I guess a splash of it will do? :D -- relet 06:18, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Lower case names

Any reason it changes upper case to lower case in the names of people who don't link to their profiles?