Search by Seasonality area / facet

[willmonks]

Hi guys, the search interface doesn't seem to allow a search of crags by seasonality. Eg I'm looking for ideas for climbing in January, it'd be handy to spit out a list of crags which are "in season".

While some crags have a single obvious peak season in the seasonality histogram (eg Nowra & Frog = winter, Coles Bay & Frenchman's Cap = summer), others have two obvious peaks (Arapiles & Grampians = spring & autumn) which should both be returned, and some crags don't have strong seasonality (Blue Mtns, Pt Perp) but should still get a fair share of search hits.

Maybe a suitable definition would be that a crag is: 1) "in peak season" in month X, if month X is one of the "top 2" busiest months at that crag, based on recorded ascents. 2) otherwise "in season" in month X, if the number of ascents in month X is > 50% of the number of ascents recorded in the busiest single month at that crag.
3) otherwise "not in season".

The "top 2" and the 50% are fiddle factors you could tweak to massage for best results obviously.

The idea behind test (2) might even let you rank (and then sort) the results by how strongly in season the crag is in that month (it's "X% in season" if that month gets X% as many ascents as the busiest single month).

It's not going to be perfect because recorded ascents can reflect more when people have holidays than when the weather is ideal, eg at Araps January is the 5th or 6th busiest month but would be one of the worst for season. But a search capability along these lines would nevertheless be a pretty useful filter hopefully.

Anyway, just a thought.

[brendanheywood]

Yeah +1

[Mdemaillard]

near duplicate of #1777

[willmonks]

Bump - I am still doing this manually, and wishing thecrag had this feature!

I don't see this as being the same issue as #1777. If I understand that issue correctly, that seems to seek an output of ascents from a given date range - which is why that function appears under the "Ascents" search tab. (And even if ascents become searchable by month (not just year) under this feature, it won't efficiently reveal seasonality of any particular route/crag/region).

In contrast, the search I'd be interested in would be under the "Areas" or "Routes" search tab, and would provide the ability to output a list of areas (crags/sectors/routes/etc), sorted by their respective seasonality (e.g. on a scale of 0-100% as I proposed above, or similar). A clear example is Flatanger which is strongly seasonal. My proposed search function would take a query for "Europe Areas July seasonality" and should return Flatanger as 100% in season, as one of the hits. But the same search for January should indicate Flatanger is 0% in season (ie at the bottom of the search results). So if I'm planning a big trip to Europe for a certain time of year I can get my head around what crags would be in season.

Because seasonality varies with so many factors (latitude, elevation, aspect, sun/shade, bird closures, etc) this search listing really would help users distill down a massive number of variables.

Note this search should be independent of popularity. E.g. Flatanger, the Bugaboos and Tuolumne might have very different popularity - but their seasonality is basically the same. So they should be equally ranked in seasonality search results (by whatever "seasonality measure" is used).

[butasa]

I write in this post to support the request to add the features for "Search by Seasonality area"

thnaks in advance

[willmonks]

Thanks Butasa. I'm with you. 9 years after suggesting it, I still think this would be a good idea! Can the admins chime in on whether this feature will ever be added?? It seems like it would be such a simple bit of code... All its got to do is work out that a crag is "X% in season" in each month, based on that month getting X% as many ascents as the busiest single month. This wouldn't even have to be calculated live or updated regularly, because seasonality is not something that changes. (e.g. Flatanger is always going to be a summer crag). So once a crag has sufficient ascents data and its seasonality is worked out once, the result just needs to be saved and the system wouldn't even need to keep re-calculating it.

And the value of this feature for trip planning would be huge. This type of feature seems so central to the whole point of thecrag that it seems like a no brainer to add it. At the least I'd be interested to know why the current admins seem to have no interest in adding it!?!?

(It probably makes sense to not do this for crags with insufficient data to make reliable conclusions (say, crags with less than 50 ascents with known month)).

[brendanheywood]

I don't disagree @willmonks I think this would be a great feature

Right now the top priority by a large margin is improving the site performance and scaling and that trumps everything. There is a lot of invisible work going on to that end.