Locationless Caches In Statistics

[+tr1976]

1. Why are locationless caches shown on my statistics page, but not on the "all cache finds" listing?

 

2. Will these disappear from the stats when locationless caches are moved to Waymarking.com?

Edited November 4, 2005 by tr1976

[+The Leprechauns]

1. That's the way it's designed to work in the database. Locationless caches didn't fit very well into the Geocaching.com design. I like how they're organized at Waymarking.com.

 

2. Nope. There's been several announcements to assure everyone that their find counts will stay the same for locationless caches, just as with any other archived cache.

[+tr1976]

That's the way it's designed to work in the database. Locationless caches didn't fit very well into the Geocaching.com design. I like how they're organized at Waymarking.com.

Well, it is not good design if two pages give different numbers. The overall status page lists the locationless caches together with the other logs and gives the total number of X found caches, but when you "zoom in" to see the list of the found caches, the total number is suddenly X-Y, where Y is the number of locationless caches. It should be decided whether the locationless caches are in the sums or not.

[+DavidMac]

The number on the stats page actually reflects the number of finds you've logged (and event attended notes, and webcams logged, etc), while the list of found caches lists the number of caches you've found. There's an important distinction there, which explains why both numbers can be different. For example, if you were to log a cache more than once (say you log 5 smilies on an event), your find count will increase by 5 while the number of caches found increases by one. At some point, it was decided that locationless caches should be moved out of the list (and eventually off the site) since they aren't really caches, but uproar would ensue if people's find counts were to be suddenly be lowered accordingly. Although the cache is no longer included in the list, your find still remains.

[+Lil Devil]

At some point, it was decided that locationless caches should be moved out of the list

I think it was more because they removed locationless caches from the "nearest caches" search, and the "caches found by a user" uses the same search mechanism. Therefore it was more a by-product of reusable code than it was a conscious decision to remove locationless from your finds.