Country Souvenirs missing

[+Sectionhiker2000]

I recently went on a cruise and got Caches in several countries but only one souvenir was awarded. What happened? Missing are Colombia, Jamaica, Panama, Belize, and Honduras

[Keystone]

Please see this list of available country souvenirs in the Help Center.  You'll see that none of the countries you named have souvenirs - yet.  New souvenirs are added from time to time, and Geocaching HQ has announced plans to continue this in 2020.

[+Sectionhiker2000]

Well that sure solves that problem. Thanks a lot

[+ShoesBologna]

On 12/20/2019 at 4:05 AM, Keystone said:

Please see this list of available country souvenirs in the Help Center.  You'll see that none of the countries you named have souvenirs - yet.  New souvenirs are added from time to time, and Geocaching HQ has announced plans to continue this in 2020.

 

Are those souvenirs going to be retroactively awarded?

[+TriciaG]

Yes, they get retroactively awarded.

[Keystone]

Whenever a new country/region souvenir is introduced, the database hamsters* tunnel through the database and retroactively award the souvenir to anyone who logged a find in that country/region.  This is very tiring for the hamsters, which is one reason why souvenirs for all remaining countries haven't been released all at once.

 

*Server hamsters only need to be trained how to run on the wheels that power the servers.  Database hamsters are far more valuable, as it's harder to train them to sort through and read cache pages and logs.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

On 2/8/2020 at 1:54 PM, Keystone said:

Whenever a new country/region souvenir is introduced, the database hamsters* tunnel through the database and retroactively award the souvenir to anyone who logged a find in that country/region.  This is very tiring for the hamsters, which is one reason why souvenirs for all remaining countries haven't been released all at once.

 

*Server hamsters only need to be trained how to run on the wheels that power the servers.  Database hamsters are far more valuable, as it's harder to train them to sort through and read cache pages and logs.

 

When some of the first souvenirs were released they were for regions where a *lot* of geocachers had finds.  When the retro-active awarding process ran for a couple of regions there were issues with some users not receiving a souvenir for a region in which they'd found a cache.   Now that we're getting to countries which have much fewer caches, they're able to easily run the retro-active awarding process for several regions but we still only get 1 new country per month.