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The stats page is dead, long live the stats page!


regoarrarr

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After talking it over with Elias, it appears that the block of my IP was unintentional, and has since been removed. Unfortunately, we did lose about a week's worth of logs. Because of the way my site gets logs, there's really no good way to get those logs, short of individually putting them in via the Missing Logs page. So, you'll have to put in any caches you did over the past week by hand.

 

We also did have some talks about the future and possible better interaction between sites like mine and the geocaching.com database, and they sound promising. So that's definitely good news as well.

 

Finally, all this has given me a second wind of sorts to work on the stats page. The one thing that I think really needs to be added is some sort of automated way to change usernames. It currently takes about 2-3 minutes to do that. Of course that's not a big deal, but most of the time I can't really take the time out of whatever I'm doing to do that.

 

I can't really make it fully automated, because of the following scenario - what if EvilJoeCacher comes in and enters into the form that his "old" username was BruceS. Then all of Bruce's logs get deleted and moved over to EvilJoeCacher's name. Unlikely, but definitely possible and definitely not a good thing. Anyone got any good suggestions?

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I would think it would have to work somewhat like the fixlog thing works. You put in your ID and it goes out and pulls your current name, then updates the database. This would assume that in the current database, there is a like between username and ID so it can match things up.

 

--Marky

"All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers learn to steer with a backlit GPSr"

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Hiya,

I love the site too! Great work man!

 

Have you thought about using Pocket Queries and just doing daily updates?

The Pocket Queries are just XML files anyway, so there would be no need for a database.

 

Just a thought!

 

Will

 

I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagited life would have suited me - yet I sometimes long for it.

Byron

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It's great to have the stats page back! Woohoo!

Thanks for all your hard work Dan, your page is a great addition to the sport!

 

-------------------------------------

Hope is the destination that we seek.

Love is the road that leads to hope.

Courage is the motor that drives us.

We travel out of darkness into faith.

 

-=The Book Of Counted Sorrows=-

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Thanks to Dan, to Elias, and to my fellow cachers for letting Geocaching.com understand how important many of us feel the Stats Page is.

Glad you could work it out, and even gladder that you are working together to improve our activity.

Thanks to all one more time!

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Any way you could use geocaching.com's security to reduce the risk from EvilJoeCacher types? Can Jeremy & Co. provide you with an "old name --> new name" list? That way if anybody makes a name change request on your site you can check it against the geocaching.com records. If the request gibes with the geocaching data, then the change goes through. If it doesn't, the change is aborted and the cacher gets a message explaining why. Going one step further: when users change their user name on geocaching.com, could you get that data automatically, and switch the logs without any name change request at all?

FWIW

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...and have data files that contain essential information to compute stats... however, the IMDB data file format stinks, because it is stuck with the legacy of the full user interface being these files in the dim past, and therefore, the data files aren't really all that data processing friendy.

 

...examples of useful data files, to have a properly designed database...

 

USERS: Two fields, username and User-ID (a number)

 

...this way, if a user changes names, the rest of the stuff follows to the new name nicely...

 

CACHES: Cache Name (other stuff), including Cache-ID (a number), including Lat/Long in UTM format (things are much easier with this)

 

FIND-TYPES: Text-description (such as "NoFind"), Find-Type-Index (a number)

 

FINDS: A database of the following fields, one find per line:

Cache-ID

User-ID

Time/Date of find

 

...this would allow you to compute no-finds that later become finds...

 

If these databases were available, a nightly program could copy these to 'shadow servers' across the net, and then people could grab data from the shadow server

 

This would really make the site usable by people designing software.. statistics, report caches along a highway, etc... And could make screen-scraping a thing of the past...

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