This page lists some help and tips for using the
Search
page.
Each section of the Search page operates independantly from the other sections.
For example, setting "Max. results" will not affect the results from a Confluence Trivia search.
Confluence Quick Search
- Enter the latitude/longitude that you want, and press the "Quick Search" button.
- Blank latitude/longitude degrees fields will be interpreted as zero degrees.
Visitor Search
- Enter the first and/or last names that you want to search for, and press the
"Visitor Search" button to perform a case-insensitive search.
- You can use the asterisk(*) as a wildcard character. For example, if you
wanted to find the project's founder, Alex Jarett, and all you remembered
was that his first name was Alex, you could do a search by entering "alex"(without
the quotes) in the First name field. If you remembered that his last name
started with J, but couldn't recall the correct last name, or spelling, you
could enter "alex" in the First name field, and "j*" in the Last name field.
- People who do not have active visits on the site will not be listed in the search
results, unless you select "Include members with no visits".
Google Search
- Enter the search word or words, and press the "Google Search" button.
- You will be taken to a Google webpage, listing Google's search results.
- If you select "WWW", the search results will be from a Google search of
all it's indexed webpages. The default, with "www.confluence.org" selected,
restricts the search results to webpages from our website.
Confluence Trivia
- Press the "List" button for the trivia you wish to see.
- The results will be listed at the bottom of the page.
Confluence General Search
- Press the "Confluence General Search" button for the confluences you wish to see.
- The results will be listed at the bottom of the page. The maximum number of results listed at one time
is 50. If there are more than 50 results, you can use the "Show More Results" button.
- Depending on your search criteria, there may be a delay as the database is
queried, before the results are displayed.
- Altitude
- When using Altitude in your search, note that the altitude data used by the Project
has been obtained from various external sources, and may not be accurate.
- The altitude data is stored in the database as integer meters. If you enter a value
in feet for altitude, the value you enter will be divided by 3.2808 and rounded to
an interger value, before being used in your search, so you may not get the results
you expect(except when feet = 0).
- Selecting 'All', 'Highest', or 'Lowest' will cause any Altitude value (meters or feet) to be ignored.
- 'Highest' and 'Lowest' do not actually select by altitude, but they do cause the results
of your search to be sorted, starting from either the highest or lowest confluence.
- Visited Status
- When selecting 'Unvisited' or 'All', the results may not list all the possible confluences
that lie within the bounds specified at the top of the General Confluence Search section for
latitude and longitude, because the results only list confluences which have been indexed in
the Project database.
- If you select 'Successful' or 'Incomplete', or both, the results will list all the visits that
match your selection criteria. This could include multiple visits to the same confluence,
so the total is the count of visits, not confluences.
- If you select 'All', the results will list the confluences that match your selection
criteria, which may not equal the sum of the total number of results from 'Successful',
'Incomplete', and 'Unvisited'. For example, this will happen when a confluence
has both a successful and an incomplete visit, because that confluence will be in the results from
both the 'Successful' and 'Incomplete' searches, but will only be listed once in the results of the
'All' search.
- Country and Region
- All the countries are available for selection, so if you select a country
with no confluences, you will of course get no results, regardless of the settings
of the other fields.
- If you select a Country that has Regions, and do a search (i.e. use the
"Confluence General Search" button, a new field will be listed, "Region in ....", which will let you
select a Region within the Country. If you change the Country selection, the
list of Regions is not updated until after the next search.
Download Results as:
- This option allows you to download the results of your Search as data. The download will include all the results,
and is not limited by the value of the "Maximum displayed results" field.
- The download data will represent the same results you received from your Confluence General Search.
Depending on how you performed your Search, that may mean that the same confluence is included more than
once in the data. For example, if you go to the Search page and leave all the
Confluence General Search values as their defaults except change Country to "Luxembourg" and
then do the search, the results will list all of the confluence visits to 50°N 6°E.
If you now change the Visited Status to "All", and repeat the search, you will only get one result - the
50°N 6°E confluence. When "All" or "Unvisited" are selected for "Visited Status", the
result lists confluences, otherwise confluence visits are listed.
- When you press the download button, the same criteria that you used for your Confluence General Search
are used again to query our database and prepare the data for download. There may be a delay while this query is performed.
- Once the query is finished, your web browser should do one of two things: either give you the option to download the data,
or to open the data in "the default application". For example, if you have Google Earth installed, and you try and download
the results as a KML file, you may have the option to open the results in Google Earth. If your web browser displays the
file contents rather than providing an option to save the data, you may be able to do a "save as" for the displayed data
in order to save the data to a file. If you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, and are having problems,
the best thing to do is to upgrade to a better web browser, such as FireFox.
- If there is a problem with the query, you may not see any error message, because the indication of the error is done
using HTTP response codes, and most web browsers will not display any message, so although you pressed the button,
you will either get no results (i.e. no file to be downloaded), or perhaps a blank page.
- Some of the data in our database, such as geographical names, is stored using the UTF-8 character set, and therefore where such
information is used in the download data, such as in a description, the download data will contain UTF-8 characters.
If you use the data in an application that does not support UTF-8, some parts of the data may not appear properly.
- OziExplorer Waypoints
- The data is formatted as an OziExplorer waypoint file.
- The default name of the download file is DCP.wpt
- Many of the fields in the waypoint file's records are not filled in, and will therefore use the
default values supplied by OziExplorer.
- For confluences, the waypoint's name is in the form "xxxXyyyY", where 'xxx' is the latitude, 'yyy' is the longitude,
and 'X' is either N or S and 'Y' is either E or W. For Special Visits, the waypoint's name is the name of
the Special Visit.
- For a list of "visit waypoint's", the description consists of the concatenation of: visit number,
a Y or N to indicate a successful visit or not, the visit date in the form YYYY-MM-DD, distance in kilometers,
direction, nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation.
- For a list of "confluence waypoint's", the description consists of the concatenation of: distance in kilometers, direction,
nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation.
- If there is a problem retrieving the region and country from our database, the region and country
in the waypoint's description will be listed as "??".
- Our database stores the confluence Altitude in integer meters, which is converted to integer feet
for the waypoint record, as required by the OziExplorer waypoint file specification. In OziExplorer,
if you look at a waypoint's elevation in meters, you may not see the same value as on our website,
due to rounding/truncation in the process of conversion from meters to feet and back to meters.
- GPX Waypoints
- The data is formatted as a GPS Exchange Format file.
- The default name of the download file is DCP.gpx
- The file conforms to the GPX 1.1 Schema, and the file's <metadata> section contains a timestamp
for when the data was generated.
- For confluences, the waypoint's name is in the form "xxxXyyyY", where 'xxx' is the latitude, 'yyy' is the longitude,
and 'X' is either N or S and 'Y' is either E or W. For Special Visits, the waypoint's name is the name of
the Special Visit.
- For a list of "visit waypoint's", the description consists of the concatenation of: "Visit#" plus the visit number,
"Success" or "Incomplete", the visit date in the form YYYY-MM-DD, distance in kilometers,
direction, nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation.
- For a list of "confluence waypoint's", the description consists of the concatenation of: distance in kilometers, direction,
nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation.
- If there is a problem retrieving the region and country from our database, the region and country
in the waypoint's description will be listed as "??".
- KML Placemarks
- The data is formatted as a Google Earth KML file.
- The default name of the download file is DCP.kml
- The file conforms to the KML 2.0 Schema.
- The placemark's Point Coordinates include the confluence Altitude from our database.
- For confluences, the placemark's name is in the form "xxxXyyyY", where 'xxx' is the latitude, 'yyy' is the longitude,
and 'X' is either N or S and 'Y' is either E or W. For Special Visits, the placemark's name is the name of
the Special Visit.
- For a list of "visit placemark's", the description consists of the concatenation of: "Visit#" plus the visit number,
"Success" or "Incomplete", the visit date in the form YYYY-MM-DD, distance in kilometers,
direction, nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation, followed by the confluence visit's URL.
- For a list of "confluence placemark's", the description consists of the concatenation of: distance in kilometers, direction,
nearest town, 'county', region abbreviation, country abbreviation, followed by the confluence's URL.
- If there is a problem retrieving the region and country from our database, the region and country
in the placemark's description will be listed as "??".
