Overseas GCA caches et al

[EuDes]

Apologies if this has been asked before but is there a query option that returns only GCA caches that aren't located in Australia? I know there's not a lot of overseas GCA caches but there are a few scattered throughout Europe, Asia and the Pacific Islands including NZ. For anyone doing a 'Grand Tour' of Europe via Singapore or even a South Pacific cruise, it could be a handy query to have.

I have an 'every GCA cache that I haven't found' query but given that it totals 18,901 at present , running it eventually gives the error 'Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes) in /var/www/site/gca/include/gca_formatting.php on line 2187'. (Maybe I need to do a few more to get that number down. )

Another handy query would be multiple Australian states (/territories) in the one query. The most obvious candidate for such a query would be NSW and the ACT combined.

[caughtatwork]

We don't think getting every cache in our system is reasonable so we don't allocate endless memory. We let it fail because we can't catch when it runs out of memory. We have a limit on the amount of data we can send out each month as well, so if you were to pull every cache, every day we would reach that limit within days and the site would stop running. We can't afford endless infrastructure resources so we have limits and you're running into them.

As we don't have any restrictions at all on the number of MyQueries you can have and run, you can set up a query for every state. I would ask why you need every cache in every state? You couldn't possibly get them all, so having that much data is not (in our mind) reasonable. If you're building statistics, let us know and we can help.

If you want to know where GCA caches are in other countries, e.g. in Europe, then https://geocaching.com.au/caches/available/gca.gmap will centre on Australia. Move to Europe. Zoom in a little, be patient, see the results.

This is a list of countries:

Code: Select all

country	name						count(country)
AE		United Arab Emirates		2
CA		Canada					9
CC		Cocos (Keeling) Islands		1
CN		China					14
DE		Germany					2
DK		Denmark					1
ES		Spain					1
FI		Finland					1
FJ		Fiji						2
FR		France					1
GB		United Kingdom				16
ID		Indonesia					4
IE		Ireland					18
IM		Isle of Man				1
IT		Italy					2
MY		Malaysia					2
NC		New Caledonia				4
NF		Norfolk Island				1
RU		Russia					1
SB		Solomon Islands			1
SG		Singapore					21
TH		Thailand					1
UK		United Kingdom				3
US		United States				18
VA		Vatican City State			1
VU		Vanuatu					2
ZW		Zimbabwe					1

The use case for multiple states is very small. If you have a location in mind then run a radius query without a state. Then you can cover ACT and NSW or NSW and VIC or SA and NSW and VIC if you're near Mildura.

If someone gave us a few thousand every year we could provide more, but we don't change money, we sell trinkets and hope that we can provide enough information for your caching needs.

[EuDes]

Many thanks for that, it all makes perfect sense (after all, Groundspeak only allow up to 10 times one thousand caches in a single HQ day and you need to be a Premium Member for that). I just thought there might have been something I missed where someone would say 'you silly duffer, you just select this here, click that there and Bob's your uncle'.

I agree that the call for multiple state (/territory) queries would be pretty low and would generally only involve two, maybe 3, S/Ts on, say, a road trip from Melbourne to Canberra or tripping around the far NW of Victoria near the tri-state border. In this day and age of WiFi just about everywhere and a laptop in the backpack, downloading single S/T GCA caches isn't that onerous if one forgets to do so before heading off.

As far as the international ones go, another method I've tinkered with is setting the coordinates at the antipodes, which is somewhere in the Atlantic, and doing a distance search from there to exclude caches on the Australian continent. It's a bit clunky but it works reasonably well for anything I'd need it for.

Once again, many thanks for all the work you guys put into this great website. And thanks for the answer to my question.