Linking OC Databases

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kfl
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by kfl » Sun Aug 22, 2010 12:29 am

Do you plan to connect the various opencaching.something sites? I noticed several caches in the US on opencaching.de before this site was active. Will there be a collaboration - an exchange of cache data?

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glorkar
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by glorkar » Sun Aug 22, 2010 3:05 am

It would be nice to have all opencaching caches listed on all opencaching sites. Not that I travel, but it would come in handy when going to different countries. For now, to log the caches on oc.de, you have to join that site. I suppose if someone were to join, they could try to get the cache owners to cross list them on the oc.us site.
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kfl
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by kfl » Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:43 pm

glorkar wrote:I suppose if someone were to join, they could try to get the cache owners to cross list them on the oc.us site.
I was more thinking of a common cache, log and user database, instead of cross-listing some caches and some not. The difference would be the language, forums and of course, network response times.

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RVRoadTrip
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by RVRoadTrip » Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:41 am

That is an idea they have mentioned but one big issue I see is trying to merge the databases and encountering duplicate user names. Who gets first pick? And as mentioned before... the language barrier. Google Translate is only so good. :)

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kfl
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by kfl » Thu Aug 26, 2010 2:21 pm

RVRoadTrip wrote:That is an idea they have mentioned but one big issue I see is trying to merge the databases and encountering duplicate user names. Who gets first pick? And as mentioned before... the language barrier. Google Translate is only so good. :)
Opencaching.us just starts. Conflicting usernames could still be sorted out by hand. Most of the time they represent the same user anyway I guess. The longer both are up in parallel, the more difficult this will get. But even if both user databases grew big already conflicting user names could be sorted out by giving the older user the original name and rename the other by prefixing something, giving that user the option to rename to something else later.

The language barrier is there for sure - but if you go on vacation and want to go geocaching as well (of course) and simply I will have to cope with that. That isn't something we cannot really fix. That will probably never change.

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RVRoadTrip
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Re: Do you plan on cross listing?

Post by RVRoadTrip » Thu Aug 26, 2010 2:33 pm

It is not a big issue to register at the other OC sites if you go to those countries. In reality, how many people will this affect? You can use Google to translate the pages so you can read them. It would be up to the main OC developers (who are overseas) to do this and they know that linked databases is desired. I added links to the other OC sites so folks can go look at them.

We are trying to make the US site as accurate as possible. The OC Team is working to improve the Wiki, the main site and the forums so that all bases are covered and users have a good experience. Now all we need is an iPhone or Android developer to create an app that accesses our database.

EDIT: I just caught up with the latest info on linking the databases and the developers wanted everyone to realize what a large, complicated task this is. They are looking at overcoming the duplicate username issue by using something like OpenID, etc. As far as the linking goes... that's massive amounts of code and at this point it is simply in the planning stage. So for the time being, just register at any of the OC sites just as you did here.

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