I think my joke fell flat.

Just to point out lest anyone think I'm an ASS (actually I have been a member of the Alberta Speleological Society), you left out the "only half joking" part of the control freak quote, it was tongue in cheek and I was making fun of myself for enjoying being the "boss". I'm not sure if you got that, Bruce. If you did great, then I didn't catch your sarcasm - it is so hard to do with email especially if you don't know your correspondent. It also left me realizing that a lot of people on this list are multilingual (awesome!) with english as a 2nd 3rd or 4th language and they might have missed that I was making fun of myself. I also meant to reply privately to you, Bruce, but I had two email programs running at the same time and answered the the wrong email from you. It's looking grim for me figuring out Therion if I can't even use email ;-) (I make jokes at my own expense until I get to know you and then its fair game.)

There are literally less than a dozen active cave explorers on Vancouver Island and most of them could't be bothered to track down the old data let alone maintain it. There are more people who get out infrequently, survey small caves, but few who want to do longer exploration trips.

I adopted the Glory 'ole caving area in 1998 after my first survey trip because nobody else cared. It was literally my first survey trip and I became the project leader because I was the only candidate. I had to track down retired cavers across the country to find 15 year old data. I resurveyed kms of passage and had to twist peoples arms to help. There's no motivation like "I've got a awesome lead but lets do some resurveying first." Again I hate resurveying.

Martin Davis takes care of the Weymer Creek data (30 + km) and many other areas because well somebody has to. We both are open to other people helping out but so far no-one has stepped up. There's a guy who manages Holely Mountain but he really does't cave with anyone but his crew. There's a guy who started exploration in Thanksgiving cave - but all he has done is scoop passage in the past two years - no surveying. There are whole amazing caving areas that have been abandoned since the heyday of Vancouver Island caving in the 80's: Clayoquot Plateau, White Ridge, Thanksgiving Ridge, Benson River, Tahshish, Skull Lake, crying for someone to explore them and preserve their data. There were three caving related deaths in a period of a few years that probably contributed to the decline of the caving scene here.

It sounds like you have a very different situation in New Zealand.

I would love it if I could have the versioning system and multiple people drawing, that is why I picked Therion. I am hoping to facilitate a consortium of cave mappers tackling Vancouver Island caves. I heed your call to share the load Bruce. Plus I have three kids under 5, if that doesn't count for succession planning then I don't know what does ;-)

Yeah, Therion is not user friendly, but I'll figure it out. There seems to be a great community supporting it. It is by far the most awesome program for keeping final maps up to date and like you said it is just developing. Once somebody develops a user interface that doesn't require coding skills its going to be amazing.

Again thanks for all the help from the Therion community.

Rob Countess,

tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, mini-tyrant of Vancouver Island Caves.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 1:27 AM, Bruce <bruce@tomo.co.nz> wrote:

As below…

>I've always like the idea of a "series" in bigger caves, i.e. a group of related passages that help divide the cave into neighbourhoods.

            Yes, we do that for larger caves.

>I pictured it as a bunch of building blocks (scraps and associated centrelines) that I could put together hierarchically

            I think it is.

>and that I could easy pass parameters from one level to the other or change parameters of one branch or another. In Walls and On Station it was super easy to change the colour of centreline for 2D or 3D display in a hierarchical manner, just right click on the appropriate survey or folder (on Station) or Book (Walls). I used this a lot to visualize the cave. Eg make all newly surveyed passage pink, colour code passage by survey date [cannot], depth [can, for maps, not centreline] etc. With my limited understanding of Therion, I've not yet been able to do this. goes now it is hard to subdivide parameters of a map. It seems like there should be some commands for this. e.g. if survey = Arch then colour = blue, if team includes "Rob Countess" then colour = yellow, if flag = lead then colour = pink, if flag = drafting in then scrap/map = blue, elseif drafting out then scrap/map = red, elseif oscillating then scrap = yellow, else if scrap = black. Actually that last one would be a useful visualization, now I want to do that. It should be easy to set labels to hide if font <7 pt, [can do this but it is a hack]

            Mostly I would say these are very hard to do with Therion, if not impossible (but I would very much like some of them). Think of Therion as ‘still in development’. You might need to get into some serious coding. I get around it in a very limited kind of way by using multiple output formats at once. ie maps and models in pdf, lox and 3d (survex viewer).

Therion output is produced by compiling what is effectively a batch of files, so you have to expect that it won’t have the immediacy of interactive software.

>In answer to your "why not walls": Well i really like some features of Walls. The blunder detection system is awesome.

            From your description I can now see why not Walls. However I read about the blunder detection in Walls once, and was jealous.

>Plus I like being a gatekeeper for my projects. You get to stay up to date and to on and to a degree direct whats going on in your pet projects. When I used On Station everybody knew how to use it. When I switched to walls only a few people knew how to use it.

            Ooh! A control freak. All the great ‘sole owner’ survey projects in NZ stall eventually (20-30 yr timeframe) because of overload or lack of succession planning. The main reason I use something like Therion is that it allows simultaneous drawing by many people. Share the load! If you use version control, you can keep up with what others have done without necessarily doing any of the work.

>So Therion is, so far, absolutely the least user friendly cave mapping software around,

            Probably true I am afraid, but I am sure that could be solved if we get the right sort of instructions and examples.

Bruce

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