+Nurse Dave Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 It's getting a little out of hand when people are talking about making a stats site take into account or at least the # of caches in the cacher's state, or a cache density or average difficulty. What good would that do? Are you going to discount any finds out of that person's state since you can't handicap those? People go to Vegas and pick-up a ton of virts just walking down the street. There is no way you can get numbers to acutally reflect how hard a cacher works or the how many opprotunities they have to cache. The guy that travels around on business gets a lot more chances at caches than one that lives in a cache dense area and never leaves. People that are interested in these stats are just saying they were fun to compare when there was a stats site before and it would be a simple thing for Jeremy to allow it again. I don't remember a huge uproar of people saying they wanted the old stats site turned off because their finds were nobody's business. Link to comment
+RuffRidr Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 Pull up a map of Colorado and look at the cache density differences. Or Nebraska, or Kansas, or Minnesota, or Wisconson... If you really want local listings, you can do that. NEFGA does a perfectly good job of that without forcing it on everyone else. You're right!! The NEFGA site does a great job at showing stats for Northeast Florida. I bet it is pretty nice for those folks who live in that area. Unfortunately, here in Arkansas we are not so lucky. We don't have any website like that here. I am sure there are many, many other areas in this world that are also as unfortunate. This is where the arguement for having stats on gc.com comes in. Personally, I wouldn't care if it is on gc.com or some other site. Heck, it was great the way it was on Dan's site. I'd just like to see it somewhere. I don't understand the 'forcing it on others' comment you made. I would imagine any system put in place by gc.com would be an opt-in system. How is this forcing it on anybody? --RuffRidr Link to comment
+Doc-Dean Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 Those stats are certainly interesting! I agree that the above linked website is a good way to burn through server requests but it is facinating. Just think how useful a real stats page would be if it was ever done. Then it could be done right so its not as impactful as that other webpage. Link to comment
+PandyBat Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 Sorry, but if loading a couple dozen 200x50 pixel gifs is "killing the server" , there are deeper architectural issues than that. I have NO clue what you just said in all this but it clearly indicates that I am not a computer programmer by any means. These stats gifs are not just limited to a couple dozen on that one page. Those stats gifs are robbed from GC.com all over the internet. They aren't "robbed"; they are externally linked to. There was an announcement that these were available. I see these stats gifs posted in personal websites, other geocaching websites, etc. That's gotta be some kind of significant burden on the servers or whereever it comes from, doesn't it? As I said, if regenerating and 6K image by looking up 3 things from a GUID (user name, find count, hidden count) every couple of days (on average) is killing the server, it's badly implemented. Also, wouldn't it be some kind of violation of the copyright law for them to be posted on that page or anywhere else? If you have to ask for permission to use the GC.com logo, shouldn't it apply to these stats gifs as well? I'd have to look up the original announcement, but there's a clear expectation when you make information available (such as by putting it on the web) that it's there under standard "acceptable use" policies and external linking to web sites has been repeatedly declared by the courts to be acceptable use these days. I'd still like to here why Jeremy considers this "abuse". If the answer doesn't involve legalities, answering the above is a distraction. If the answer is technical, perhaps we can help. Ah...I see. Thanks for explaining! Link to comment
+Doc-Dean Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 If you found more than 54 caches, you are in the top 10 percentile of all geocachers on the geocaching.com web site. If you found more than 60 caches, you are in the top 9 percentile of all geocachers. 8th Percentile: > 68 7th > 78 6th > 92 5th > 109 4th > 133 3rd > 168 2nd > 230 1st > 369 Wow. Looking at those stats from the opposite direction, it shows that most geocachers don't actually find many caches. The stats also tend to suggest that a large number of people try the game and quickly drop it. Or they have tried the game and are just starting... Nothing here suggests a large dropout rate, just the majority have less than 60 finds... Link to comment
Find Now, Log Later? Posted May 8, 2004 Share Posted May 8, 2004 (edited) Or they have tried the game and are just starting... Nothing here suggests a large dropout rate, just the majority have less than 60 finds... Okay. Nothing also suggests that the majority of people who have registered with the website remain as active members. The website is approximately 4 years old. Statistics provided by the website owner show that 90% of all geocachers that have played the game during the existence of the website have logged fewer than 55 caches. That would include over 223,000 people who registered at any time from "day one" until today. If you don't think that tends to suggest a high rate of attrition, then all you need to do to prove it to yourself is take a look at a random selection of user profile pages from 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years ago. Someone else suggested in this thread that 6 months of not having logged onto the website indicates an "inactive" cacher. (For newer accounts, I think 1/2 the length of time since registration would be reasonable.) I would call the results "irrefutable proof." Fewer than 13,000 accounts logged caching activity last week. That is less than 5% of the total registered users. They averaged almost 4.6 logs (not necessarily "finds") each for the week. Interesting. I, for one, will be watching those numbers very closely. Edited May 8, 2004 by Bassoon Pilot Link to comment
+sea lion Posted May 9, 2004 Share Posted May 9, 2004 At what point do TPTB consider these people to be no longer active? I would think 6 months of having not logged into the site would earmark an account as inactive. I hope that 6 months of no finds is not picked as the cutoff. I enjoy geocaching when I can, but sometimes it is months before I can find the time to get out and hunt. I'd like my account to stay active in the meantime... Thanks, -Sea Lion Link to comment
geojed Posted May 9, 2004 Share Posted May 9, 2004 #1 Bug catcher is TH&G. Feathers has over 800 tb finds how many does Tb&g have? Link to comment
geojed Posted May 9, 2004 Share Posted May 9, 2004 Jeremy on the about geocaching page it says there are 97759 active useres whats your definition of an active user Link to comment
geojed Posted May 9, 2004 Share Posted May 9, 2004 both fake finds, and hides, apparantly just to have another hide. I've seen people instead of putting a note on geocache pages they post finds and as a result they get three finds for one cache Link to comment
Find Now, Log Later? Posted May 9, 2004 Share Posted May 9, 2004 Jeremy on the about geocaching page it says there are 97759 active useres I think the number you are referring to is the number of active CACHES. I enjoy geocaching when I can, but sometimes it is months before I can find the time to get out and hunt. I'd like my account to stay active in the meantime... It should be pointed out that "inactive" is not synonymous with "terminated." Link to comment
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