+filler & bcat Posted July 27, 2005 Share Posted July 27, 2005 As per the AUP: 5. Access and Interference Much of the information on the Site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to Groundspeak by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site for any purpose without our express written permission. Additionally, you agree that you will not: (a) take any action that imposes, or may impose in our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure; or ( interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Site or any activities conducted on the Site or other measures we may use to prevent or restrict access to the Site. So authoring automated bug racer web applications are strictly forbidden? Any chance of leeway with 'written permision' (i.e. is it ever granted)? Curious ... Link to comment
Jeremy Posted July 27, 2005 Share Posted July 27, 2005 So authoring automated bug racer web applications are strictly forbidden? In short, yes. Any chance of leeway with 'written permision' (i.e. is it ever granted)? Probably not, but it is possible. Link to comment
+filler & bcat Posted July 28, 2005 Author Share Posted July 28, 2005 Would Jeremy & Co. be open to scheduled (0400?) nightly fetches of ~20 racers cache pages along with their cache hops? Figure Oz->Tx would take anywhere from a dozen to a few dozen hops to get home. Worst case scenario, this would involve scraping ~1000 pages. Best case scenario, I get with it and remove redundancy (i.e. new cache hits now pushed to an SQL backend get scraped; others ignored). Leeway? Link to comment
+sbell111 Posted July 28, 2005 Share Posted July 28, 2005 (edited) If you are only doing that few racers, can't you just open the pages manually and get the info? No scraping required. Edited July 28, 2005 by sbell111 Link to comment
+Maingray Posted July 29, 2005 Share Posted July 29, 2005 How about parsing emails from watchlisted travel bugs, or is that also considered scraping? Link to comment
+tobsas Posted July 31, 2005 Share Posted July 31, 2005 How about parsing emails from watchlisted travel bugs, or is that also considered scraping? I can't see how this could be scraping as the eMail is delivered to me with or without parsing and this process happens on my computer without any connection to gc.com. However, the coordinates of a cache are no longer included in the watchlist-eMails and this is a rather important information if you want to paint a map with the correct positions of the participants. So it's no longer possible: If I get the watchlist eMail that a participant has moved, I have to visit the page of the cache the TB is situated now and collect the coordinates so that the new position of the TB can be painted into the race map. The other race has no map because it's not so important with that race (visit some stadiums) and I don't want to spend even more time to collect the coordinates of another amount of TBs. Greetings, Tobias (If it's important for anyone: I'm the organizer of Rund um Deutschland 2004 and WM2006-Run, both are situated more or less in Germany, they have 29 and 21 participants, the first will be active at least until the end of this year [prob. longer] and the second one at least until august of next year.) Link to comment
MapheadMike Posted July 31, 2005 Share Posted July 31, 2005 Any chance of leeway with 'written permision' (i.e. is it ever granted)? Probably not, but it is possible. Whose permission: Groundspeak's or the TB owners? Link to comment
+CompuCash Posted July 31, 2005 Share Posted July 31, 2005 As per the AUP: 5. Access and Interference Much of the information on the Site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to Groundspeak by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site for any purpose without our express written permission. Additionally, you agree that you will not: (a) take any action that imposes, or may impose in our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure; or ( interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Site or any activities conducted on the Site or other measures we may use to prevent or restrict access to the Site. So authoring automated bug racer web applications are strictly forbidden? Any chance of leeway with 'written permision' (i.e. is it ever granted)? Curious ... can someone please inform the rest of us - what is a bug racer web application? inquiring minds want to know - and so do I - cc\ Link to comment
+Pork King Posted August 1, 2005 Share Posted August 1, 2005 can someone please inform the rest of us - what is a bug racer web application? inquiring minds want to know - and so do I - cc\ I imagine it's some sort of program that automatically keeps up with Travel Bug movements and maps them for several Travel Bugs involved in a Trave Bug Race. Link to comment
+tobsas Posted August 1, 2005 Share Posted August 1, 2005 can someone please inform the rest of us - what is a bug racer web application? I imagine it's some sort of program that automatically keeps up with Travel Bug movements and maps them for several Travel Bugs involved in a Trave Bug Race. I can't speak about the others, but here's what I offer to keep up with the race: On this page you find the rules in english, esp. the race track. (The participants have to visit states of Germany and neighbor countries in a specific order.) To keep track on which states a participant already visited, I have this page where you find in the upper half the visited states and the next state to visit for each participant. On the bottom of this page you find a map of the participants and their last three caches. Additionally if you click on a participants name you find a map of the complete track of this TB, for example the map of the winner of the race and only TB to complete the whole track so far. In short: All maps are created automaticlly when the coordinates were available in the watchlist eMail as soon as this eMail arrived. I didn't have to do anything. Even the the states were determined. (Please note the GC.com doesn't know states in Germany, so a friendly fellow geocacher wrote some code to link the state the cache is situated based on the coordinates.) Greetings, Tobias Link to comment
+filler & bcat Posted August 1, 2005 Author Share Posted August 1, 2005 tobsas: Python? Perl? How much ImageMagik hackery was required? Care to release the source? Link to comment
+tobsas Posted August 1, 2005 Share Posted August 1, 2005 tobsas: Python? Perl? How much ImageMagik hackery was required? Care to release the source? I wrote the whole code in php which runs in shell-mode (not sure, if this is the correct translation; and yes, I know that is not the best way but it was the quickest for me). The script gets the eMail from procmail, gathers all needed informations and paint the maps. I will not publish the code on a website but if you're interested, I can send it to you, just drop me an eMail (and allow me two or three days, I'm quite busy at the moment and have to check if there are still some passwords inside ;-) ). And please don't expect well documentation, it's a rather quick and dirty hacked code and there are still several lines code inside for testing purpose. Oh, and the names of the variables and any documentation is in german... but I think with some php-knowledge and dict.leo.org you should be able to get the meaning. ;-) Greetings, Tobias Link to comment
Recommended Posts