TroyWolf

The "Wolf Brothers" enjoy dualsport geocaching. (Riding our dualsport motorcycles.) Our first dualsport caching experience together was hunting around Milford Lake in Kansas. We found 11 that day. Here are the photos & details.

With advanced search options, it appears we can search by cache type, but I see what you mean...there are more options. Ah, so I see now....that the PQ's give you a lot more data than the simple .LOC files. Cool. Thanks for the warning, Jeremy! I hope you realize I'm a supporter--not an antagonist. My point was not "give me what I want or I'll write code to make you wish you had". It was simply that people (not necesarily me) will find a way---and sometimes the way they find causes a bigger issue than if you'd provided the feature. You are probably aware of this, but I should point out that it is not difficult to construct a screen-scraping app that is impossible for the server-owner to detect. The UserAgent field is easily constructed to appear as a legitimate browser and a smart developer codes in random delays between page hits so the web server does not get slammed with 100 request within seconds and to prevent pattern detection. (Which means it would in fact not be a bigger server load than a human manually doing the same thing.) Again, please don't consider this as a threat from me....I respect the usage policies, and am happy to help with your efforts however I can. Thanks for your excellent work, and the helpful reply. You helped me understand the PQ feature a lot.

I think it's fair to mention that PQ's do not give you immediate results. You create them, then wait for them to run (once per 24 hour period) and get the results in an email. This does you no good if you are trying to load up waypoints the night before a trip. I purchased a premium membership thinking, oh--I'll be able to get all these in one file. I was surprised to find this was not so. Don't get me wrong--I'm glad to pay $30/annual to support the site...just this PQ feature did not quite satisfy what I thought I would get. I'm a programmer....I don't understand what's so difficult about a "Download all 237 results in one file" option. I mean--the database query has already run and returned all those results. It would be LESS load on the server to give users a "download all in one file" option rather than have them paginate through 15 pages of results and download a file for each. It's a win-win I think.

Hi. My first post, a new premium member, and new to geocaching--6 finds so far. There was no way I could read all of the previous posts in this thread, but I skimmed because I was looking for an answer to a question I have regarding this same subject. I frequently go on dualsport motorcycle rides. These are typically 150 to 250 miles country road mini-adventures. I like to load all the geocaches that are in the area I'll be riding so they'll pop up on my GPS while riding...then I can hunt if I feel like it (and I usually do). Before becoming a premium member, I would search based on a zip code or coords roughly in the center of the area I'd be riding. I'd get 100 to 500 results or so. At 20 per page, to download the waypoint files, I have to download 5 to 25 pages or so......then cut & paste the XML together to create one .LOC file to drop into my Garmin Trip & Waypoint Mgr. This works great, but of course I'm thinking...man I wish I could get all 300 in one download. So I quickly read the premium member features and incorrectly understood that I'd be able to get result sets with up to 500 caches in one file. I see the query option---and that it has to be queued for batch processing.....yuck. I typically don't get around to loading up my GPS until the night before a trip. So I'm back to downloading one file per page for the result set....argh. I apologize now for the length of this post, and I sincerely appreciate feedback from those of you with knowledgable replies and helpful ideas. Now I have some questions..... What can you query with a Pockey Query (PQ) that you can't do with a normal advanced search? I'm sure I'm missing something here. I understand that I'll get a single file with up to 500 caches from the search results, but other than that...how is the search and ability to find data different from the advanced search? And..if they provide the same results (perhaps I'm incorrect), why can a person do an advanced search and immediately get back a result set (with pagination) yet a PQ must be queued up for batch processing due to server load? How is the PQ search any more load on the database and server than an advanced search? The other point I might make is this--I'm a programmer--specifically a web developer of data-driven applications. If server load is the worry, understand that if you don't give the people what they really want, they'll get it other ways---often in ways that put more load on your server than would be caused if you provided the feature. For example, a solution I'm capable of developing, and would consider if I don't find any way to download 100 to 500 waypoints in a single download, is a page-scraping solution where my program runs the search, then automatically hits each page of the resultset, clicks All, and downloads the file. The program would of course then combine the multiple download files into a single data file. This would undoubtedly cause a greater hit to the server than if the feauture were part of the site's offering. Hopefully you guys will explain that I simply missed the way to download a larger resultset as a single file! Let me say a huge THANKS to all that run the geocaching.com website. It's a very nice looking website and the speed and functionality are very good. I love the Google Maps API integration! What a great service to the community. I'm glad to pay the premium membership to do my part.

I'm a geocaching newbie. Found my first cache 2 days ago. Going to ride my dualsport motorcycle about 350 miles or so of dirt roads this weekend. I searched the areas I'm going to be in, and there are of course plenty of geocaches to be found. Woohoo! So...I do a search based on zip code, and get several pages of results. I love that I can click "Check All" then "Download Waypoints". I can simply drag & drop the *.loc file into Garmin's Trip & Waypoint Manager software and the Waypoints are ready to import into my GPSmap 60cs. BUT....is there any way to download all the search results in a single loc file? If I have 94 pages of results, I do not want to page through each one and download 94 files. Thanks!