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How Many Cachers?


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According to the www.geocaching.com site, "In the last 7 days, there have been 72901 new logs written by 14213 account holders."

 

Of course, over 14,000 accounts doesn't come close to an exact number...

 

1. Many accounts may be families/teams.

 

2. Some have stopped caching.

 

3. Although the majority go to the geocaching.com site, some cachers may have accounts elsewhere or nowhere.

 

I don't know if a true estimate can be made.

 

Edit: Obviously, as Bassoon Pilot noted, the number 14,000 indicates only active cachers this past week on geocaching.com, not at large.

Edited by Teach2Learn
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I did a quick check, and 14,213 accounts logged a cache in the past week. As of July 1st, approximately 250,000 accounts had been opened on geocaching.com.

 

Also, of those 250,000 accounts, approximately 33,800 have registered to use these forums, but 2/3 of them have not posted even once. That's lots and lots of lurkers!

Edited by BassoonPilot
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Please don't start a count off on this page. I don't think that was the intention by the original poster. I would not even want to see that in Abject Silliness to be honest.

 

I did a quick check, and 14,213 accounts logged a cache in the past week.  As of July 1st, approximately 250,000 accounts had been opened on geocaching.com.

 

Also, of those 250,000 accounts, approximately 33,800 have registered to use these forums, but 2/3 of them have not posted even once.  That's lots and lots of lurkers!

 

Actually, the forums count on the main page of the forums gets stuck on a number and changes every few months or so. If you click "members" at the top right on any forum page and go to the list you will see there are 4,429 pages of members with 10 per page. If you go to the last pages, the last two pages are blank for some reason. That leaves 44,270 registered forum users.

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Actually, the forums count on the main page of the forums gets stuck on a number and changes every few months or so.

Thank you; I was unaware of that problem. So I went and dug a little further, and found that approximately 17,270 accounts have posted to the forums at least once. That's approximately 40% of the accounts registered to use the forums, and approximately 7% of all geocaching.com accounts.

 

And for trivia buffs, the 250,000th geocaching.com account was opened July 5th, 2004.

Edited by BassoonPilot
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Wow--a quarter of a million accounts!

 

Even if it only averaged two people per account, guessing conservatively that every solo cacher's account was offset by a family or team of three, that would be over half a million cachers.

 

If many haven't even opened accounts or go elsewhere, perhaps a million cachers is a believable number, espcially when you include larger families/teams. :blink:

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If you click on "Members" (up in the right corner), there are 4,438 PAGES of registered forum users...who knows how many are actually still around, or how many registered geocachers are in here, or on other sites? I doubt it would be possible to find out. :blink:

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If you click on "Members" (up in the right corner), there are 4,438 PAGES of registered forum users...who knows how many are actually still around, or how many registered geocachers are in here, or on other sites? I doubt it would be possible to find out. :(

I think you're right about only being able to "guesstimate," but the forum members don't make up the majority of cachers if (as Bassoon Pilot noted above) the 250,000th geocaching.com account was opened this month. Even with some sock puppets, duplicate accounts, and cachers who've quit, I'm guessing at least half would be semi-active and represent more than one cacher. Does that seem accurate?

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Don't forget that a lot of people sign into the site and then after finding one or 2 caches they either stop caching or get addicted. A while back someone posted a way to manually figure out the total numbers of current users.... I can't remember exactly how it works but it goes along the lines of: Start at user Id #1 and work your way up, looking for active users (arbitrary definition- lets use it as someone who has logged in during the last year).

I randomly surveyed logons created around the time I started caching, going 10 forward and 9 back. At that time, of the 9 logons before and 10 after my caching name, only 3 were active at the time I surveyed. Figuring that if 2 out of every 10 is an active cacher, we then have about 50,000 active cacher logons if we have 250,000 members. To me that sounds like a much better #, and I would probably add half again to that number to account for multiple person logons (teams, families, etc). That gives me 75,000 active cachers.

I bet my math is screwed up somewhere in there though, and I've got to get back to work now so good luck figuring this one out! Go ahead and do a fresh survey, I'd love to see the numbers now that there are a lot more cachers and caches in the world for folks to find. It took us a year to get into caching after I created our login as there weren't enough caches nearby to make it worthwhile at the time.

-Jennifer

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I wonder what numbering that is in. Could it actually be decimal? :( now that would be fun to work out the current highest and what all the missing ones are, etc.

Oh, and I really was just kidding when I started a count off, but it Was funny. :(

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