Showing My Finds On My Website

[+DreadPirateRoberts]

I would really like to have the ability to show my cache finds (or my recent cache finds) on my personal website. The simplest way to do this would be to use a PQ to give me all of my finds and ingest the results into a database, and then pull from that database on my website. I could even use the google maps api to show my finds on a nice map.

 

However, from discussions towards the end of this thread, that concept seems to be in direct violation of the Groundspeak TOU.

 

But let's say I were to keep an independent database. Let's say every time I found a cache, I took a waypoint reading with my GPS at the cache site, and then used those waypoints to populate the google map markers. I could even make the markers on the map link back to geocaching.com and search by lat/lon (not even by the GCXXXX waypoint name), so that I would be using no information derived from geocaching.com on the map. That couldn't be in violation of the TOU, could it?

 

So, the point is, the end results of the two above scenarios would be virtually indistinguishable, yet one would clearly violate the TOU, and the other would not (as far as I can tell). If you were to look at my website, how would you know if I was violating the TOU or not?

 

I don't bring this up to start a fight or be diffucult, just as food for thought as updates to the TOU are being considered. I would love to be given some limited rights to display information about my finds on my personal website.

 

EDIT after thinking a bit more about this, I realize the big problem: it's making cache location information available to the general public, and it comes right at the time when TPTB have made that information available only to signed-in members. You could view the source on my webpage and get cache coords without logging into GC.com. Hrm, there doesn't seem to be an easy solution to this one.

Edited October 25, 2005 by DreadPirateRoberts

[+mini cacher]

I don't know where the line is drawn, but no TOU in the world can stop you from standing on a spot in the world, taking a reading and posting it... even if you were standing on top of the ammo box when you took the reading. You can at least have a map with little pins for all the caches you found. Now, what else you put in there is questionable. You could probably put a link to GC.com with a long/lat search (the coords are not always, if ever, going to be the same). You probably could not use the cache name or waypoint name.

[ElmoClarity]

How about just putting a link to your stat bar on your page? You can get the link code on your member page.