UKC

Logbooks - climb names you can't find?

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Following on from this recent thread:
- http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=378777

we'd like to improve the searching on climb names so that users don't mistakenly add duplicates of climbs already in the database.

So - if you type a name into "Search for a Climb":
- http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/

please post which problem climb names DON'T get found? Perhaps missing out or adding apostrophes, misspelling, climbs commonly known by another name, etc.

If we can get an idea of the most common mistakes, then we can improve the system to cope with them - meaning users find the correct climb quickly, and crag moderators don't get the extra work of duplicate climb entries.

Many thanks

In reply to Nick Smith - UKC: Oh, and I've just fixed 12 climbs that had a problem with their apostrophes in the database, which meant that it was impossible to find them.

Strangely enough, 10 of them were on Stanage Popular ("Eric's Eliminate", etc)... it isn't personal Chris, honestly!
 Chris the Tall 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

> Strangely enough, 10 of them were on Stanage Popular ("Eric's Eliminate", etc)... it isn't personal Chris, honestly!

Yeah, right.....

 kevin stephens 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:
The Uber classic Orifice Fish (Cathedral Quarry) is mis-spelt "oriifice fish"
In reply to kevin stephens: No, I don't mean climbs in the database that are wrong. If a climb has the wrong name - please email the crag moderator to fix it.

I'm talking about searching for a climb that you know is there, but it doesn't come up in the search.
 Pagan 04 Nov 2009
In reply to kevin stephens:

Fixed.
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Wright's Unconquerable and Wrong's Traverse. Both at Wright's Rock, Churnet.

Someone has used some strange key-stroke instead of an apostrophe.
 sutty 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

You could allow variations with and without apostrophes, that is one thing I have noticed.
Almscliff and Almscliffe is another one where people spell it wrong and when I have been searching, usually for a photograph, they both give different results.

I have noticed also that some very popular climbs have no pictures of them. If someone is going to a crag and finds this, please take a picture to add to the gallery, and logbooks.

For example, just searched for North Crag Eliminate, Thirlmere Eliminate, Triermain Eliminate and Harlots Face and found no pictures on this popular crag, and only three of Overhanging Bastion in spite of it being in 259 peoples logbooks.
 Stig 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

P.M.C. 1 at Curbar doesn't come up because it is incorrectly entered as P.M.C.1

Bet that's been entered a few times! To be honest though I think the best way to improve this situation is to give greater prominence to this:

"If in doubt then please check the full list of routes for any crag by using the Find Crags page"

on the add a missing climb page.
 TimB 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Hi Nick

This climb:

http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=60169

Is correctly found if you type in

Reincarnation

But it's not found if you type in

Réincarnation

(and the alt text on the link hasn't got the é in it either)

 craig h 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Not a climb, but a crag.

Robs Rocks in the Chew Valley can only be found if you remember the ' between the b and s in Rob's.
 lithos 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Nick

maybe if when search fails you did a subsequent soundex search you can do a google like
'Did you mean ..." which would probably help and find many variants

Cheers
 petestack 04 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Not a problem with searching the database as such, but...

Shangri-la and shangri la both seem to find all the available shangri[-]las, but using the hyphen in a photo caption for the Sron na Ciche one seems to stop the photo appearing in the Logbook list of photos for that route.
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC: Whats the chance of allowing the entry of a route without a known grade. i was adding in some lines from Margalef and there are bolted projects in between know lines. Would be handy to be able to add a route with a ?? grade so the line is in order as this would help with determing which the other lines is at least.

Cheers
Tim
 Simon Caldwell 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:
Anything with an apostrophe, eg
Parsons Chimney won't find Parson's Chimney
Pup's Climb won't find Pups' Climb

It would be nice if the auto-matching ignored all punctuation.
 Stuart S 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Nick,
I've been meaning to tell you about a problem I have with an incorrectly spelled crag name. I moderate both Grey Mare Slabs (http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=2245) and Greymare Slabs (http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=188) which are the same crag. Can you merge them under the Greymare Slabs entry (that's the correct spelling, though Grey Mare has been more logbook entries and routes described).
Thanks!
In reply to Steve Perry (Pezz):
> Wright's Unconquerable and Wrong's Traverse. Both at Wright's Rock, Churnet.
>
> Someone has used some strange key-stroke instead of an apostrophe.

Thanks, I've now gone through all 126,000 climbs and fixed a lot of problems we had with 'strange' characters - sexed quotes instead of apostrophes, etc.

I've also updated the add/edit climb scripts so that they automatically 'clean' names that are added in the future.

Cheers
In reply to Stuart S:
> Can you merge them under the Greymare Slabs entry

I've now done that, but I'm not the crags admin any more - it's always best to use the 'Contact Us' link on UKC to email the correct member of staff.

Cheers
Removed User 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC: WHat you need is a 'do you mean...' thing like Google has.
In reply to TimB:
> This climb:
>
> http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=60169
>
> Is correctly found if you type in
>
> Reincarnation
>
> But it's not found if you type in
>
> Réincarnation

Which browser + version are you using? Both versions find the climb for me.

> (and the alt text on the link hasn't got the é in it either)

Which alt text/link?

Thanks
 mux 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Nick ..off topic I know but!

what do we do if the mods of crags aren't doing their job - ie not updating.

like this http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=74

not only is there a lot to update but a few missing also ... the Vicker for one.

I have mailed them but got nothing back..and his profile says he hasn't been seen since 2006
In reply to mux:
> what do we do if the mods of crags aren't doing their job - ie not updating.

Use the 'Contact Us' link at the bottom of the page to report the problem to the Logbook editor. Even better if you want to take over moderation of a crag that isn't being looked after!

Cheers
 mux 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Will do to the first ...

dont think I am local or in the know enough to be mod though.

cheers
 Stuart S 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Cheers Nick - appreciate the help, and will use the contact us link in future - promise!
 AmbliKai 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:
loudoun hill aka loudon hill

Never seems to show up for me.
In reply to AmbliKai: Isn't that a crag name, not a climb?
 TimB 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Hmm, it's working now with firefox (on WinXP).

So either one of your other changes has fixed it, or it doesn't work for firefox on Vista. I'll check again tonight.

For the link, I meant the popup info that I get if I hold the pointer over this:
http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=60169

If I right click on it and select Properties, it shows
"Title: UKC Logbook - 'Réincarnation'"

In reply to TimB:
> So either one of your other changes has fixed it, or it doesn't work for firefox on Vista. I'll check again tonight.

Ta.

> For the link, I meant the popup info that I get if I hold the pointer over this:
> http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=60169
>
> If I right click on it and select Properties, it shows
> "Title: UKC Logbook - 'Réincarnation'"

Ah yes, thanks for that. I've now fixed that forums bug, although it will only fix new links, not ones in messages already posted.

Cheers
 Chris the Tall 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:
Completely off-topic, but can I just say how bloody brilliant the logbook system is !!

Impressive stats too

Users have 955,656 ticks in their logbooks.
Climbs database lists 126,647 climbs on 9,863 different crags in the UK and around the world.
 Al Evans 05 Nov 2009
In reply to tbertenshaw:
> (In reply to Nick Smith - UKC) Whats the chance of allowing the entry of a route without a known grade. i was adding in some lines from Margalef and there are bolted projects in between know lines. Would be handy to be able to add a route with a ?? grade so the line is in order as this would help with determing which the other lines is at least.
>
> Cheers
> Tim

I think this is allowed isn't it? Project One on Pinos was allowed? It is now Bloque 7b by the way (and there is a pic of the f/a).
In reply to Al Evans: no mate i cannot get it to add a route leaving the ?? in without it erroring.

Cheers
Tim
In reply to Toreador:
> Anything with an apostrophe, eg
> Parsons Chimney won't find Parson's Chimney
> Pup's Climb won't find Pups' Climb
>
> It would be nice if the auto-matching ignored all punctuation.

OK, the search on climb names now ignores all punctuation. So:

"Eric's Eliminate" is treated the same as "Erics Eliminate" and "Erics' Eliminate"
same with Parsons Chimney, Pup's Climb, etc.

Climb names like "P.M.C.1" are improved, but not perfect. "PMC1" or "pmc.1" will get found, but unfortunately "PMC 1" or "P.M.C. 1" won't, because of the space.

Similarly, "Shangrila" and "Shangri-La" are treated the same, but they are different from "Shangri La".

Hope these improvements are useful.

Cheers
 chrisw 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Nick, somewhere kicking about Ive got the code for an extension to the PHP soundex match - if no case insensitive matches are returned it rand a recursive soundex match with vowel swaps etc until it found at least match close enough to satisfy the soundex value. It then gives the usual "did you mean.....?" type response. From memory it was based on an example direct from the php site I think. I can hunt it down if it helps
 chrisw 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:


.... actually just looking thru my notes, using levenshtein distance is probably more effective than what we came up with - but will be slow.

If speed is vital (when isnt it!) one of the tricks we have tried in the past is creating the metaphone / soundex value of a string and saving that direct to the table, and indexing on it to save a call to the soundex/metaphone functions each query. The overhead at write time is tiny compared to the time saved at query time when just doing a distance compare.

hth
In reply to chrisw: I'd be interested in the link, thanks. I've looked at soundex (and Levenshtein and Damerau-Levenshtein) ideas and I think they could work well at the point of adding a new climb, as we already know the crag and so there are a small number of possible climb names to match against.

But not so sure how practical it is for the general 'search for a climb' pulldown where we have 125,000+ names to match against in real time as the user types.

Cheers
In reply to chrisw:
> If speed is vital (when isnt it!) one of the tricks we have tried in the past is creating the metaphone / soundex value of a string and saving that direct to the table, and indexing on it to save a call to the soundex/metaphone functions each query.

Sure, but wouldn't you want to pre-compute the soundex value for each word in a string rather than the whole string? e.g., so that "The Right Unconquerable" and "Right Unconquerable" both match. You end up with pretty complex data structures & searching...
 chrisw 05 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

Yes definitely create a value for each key word, though you can cut down a lot by filtering noise words like "the" then asking users to enter the a search clue such as "unconquerable" as a partial match. One of my colleagues has been working on a clever ajax call that actually string slices each word entered (assuming multi word input) and then does background querying until it finds some close matches and offers the top 5 in a flyout dropdown. ISTR his query pool was over 500k records and results were near real time.
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:

As Crag mod for Dinas Mot the biggest issue I've had is with "The Direct Route" with folk entering just "Direct Route". Remove checking of "The" perhaps?

Steve
In reply to Different Steve: Thanks, that's a good idea.

I can see why users might think it is missing, because if they type 'Direct Route' into the climb search, they get a full list of different 'Direct Route' climbs, and 'The Direct Route' doesn't get a look in.
 Simon Caldwell 06 Nov 2009
In reply to Nick Smith - UKC:
Another thing I get quite regularly is people who try to update the climb details with their own ascent information, putting the date they climbed it as the FA, and their comments as the route description!

It's easy enough to discard the update, but this means the person who made it will lose the information that they meant top put in their own logbook.

Is there any way it could be made extra obvious that there are two different options? I think both the edit logbook entry, and edit the 'core' climb details, have the same hyperlink text "edit climb"? I've certainly clicked on the wrong option by mistake before, and though I always notice the mistake immediately this is possibly just because I use the system so much that I know what the correct page should look like.

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