Duplicate & blank logs, and missing countries

[rediguana]

Duplicate & blank logs
Just checking my stats and logs, and it appears that I have a pile of duplicate entries (around 100). In checking a few of these cases, there is one with the text, and one with no text. I assume the rest are the same. E.g.

http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gck8ed

I've trying uploading a My Found GPX but this didn't remove the blank ones. I notice that there are some other Kiwi's with blank logs. I wonder if these blank logs need to be purged to avoid problems in future? E.g.

http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gca1b1
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gchn4x
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gchbkp

I see I can go through and delete these manually (and just did this with one), but given that other Kiwi's also have these blank logs - perhaps it might be wise for logs with no text to be deleted by an admin?

This also results in my incorrect star tally, which currently should only be 2100+.

Missing Countries
Also, I've got some other countries caches appearing that don't appear to be registered properly - they all have unknown for state and/or country. E.g.

Iceland
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gck8ed
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gc7f51
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gcf726
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gcjzqb
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gck7k5

Denmark
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gchv1z

Canada
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gcj9gn

Hawaii, Unknown Country
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gca4d4
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gcgb2p
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gc3e4e
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/gcg4md

Is there any way we can override 'unknown' if we know the country of the cache? E.g. I have some from Hawaii, that haven't got the country set as United States, and since they are archived, there isn't much point in trying to correct that. What might be nice is if you could show all the caches in your list that have unknown state and/or country, and allow you to manually override them. This would then reflect the updated info for other users as well. E.g. there are some NZ caches (particularly older ones that don't have NI or SI set as the state on gc.com).

Hope you don't mind the comments - only trying to make it better

Cheers Gav

[caughtatwork]

Hi Gav.

Blank logs are an artefact of the early days of importing. I'll see if they can be safely removed.

On the country / state, I'll have a quick look and see if I can code up a fix to allow a country to be updated.

Back to you shortly.

[rediguana]

Blank logs are an artefact of the early days of importing. I'll see if they can be safely removed.

That's what I thought. I think you'd be fairly safe to remove the New Zealand ones.

On the country / state, I'll have a quick look and see if I can code up a fix to allow a country to be updated. Back to you shortly.

Wow - you don't have to do it straight away... they are after all mostly non-Australasian caches

[caughtatwork]

A few moment between the activity at work and I think I've got you covered.

Your 101 NULL text logs are gone.
I haven't done this across the board yet as there's a possibility that we don't have the same situation for every cacher. I'll look into this though.

Your count of finds at GC and GCA are very, very close now. Check out your duplicates. I think there's still one there that you might want to have a look at.

If you are still out by one or two, post back and we'll work out a way for you to check which ones are causing the grief.

If you can also retry your "my finds" load using the import function, it 'should' update the country (and a few other ancilliaries).

[rediguana]

Looks pretty good. The difference sounds about right now as there are a couple of cache that I have logged twice (e.g. a locationless in the far distant past that required two different finds for different people, and a cache where two difference containers were found and one cache that is no longer accessible after gc.com made it disappear but the find still counts. I don't need to go any further tidying that up.

Just importing MyFinds now...

Woohoo! That worked beautifully! A big long page of updating states and countries and it all looks good.

That raises another question now.

Have you thought of combining the finds by State and Country? Right now all the states are mixed up, e.g US, Australian and NZ.

1,258 (SI)
338 (NI)
267 (SA)
121 (Vic)
35 (DC)
20 (UT)
17 (ACT)
13 (NV)
12 (Qld)
11 (CA)
8 (PA)
7 (NSW)
5 (HI)
4 (AZ)
4 (NY)
2 (VT)
1 (MD)
1 (CO)
1 (VA)

and

1,596 (New Zealand)
425 (Australia)
106 (United States)
5 (Iceland)
3 (United Kingdom)
3 (Locationless)
2 (Singapore)
1 (Canada)
1 (Denmark)
1 (Sri Lanka)

Would it make more sense to combine States/Countries so that it lists the Countries in descending order, and then within each country orders the States in descending order?

1,596 (New Zealand)
---- 1,258 (SI)
---- 338 (NI)
425 (Australia)
---- 267 (SA)
---- 121 (Vic)
---- 17 (ACT)
---- 12 (Qld)
---- 7 (NSW)
106 (United States)
---- 35 (DC)
---- 20 (UT)
---- etc

Hope I'm not making too much work for you?!

[caughtatwork]

http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statist ... uana/finds

Yes? No? Suggestions?

[nomad_penguin]

... which currently should only be 2100+.

[Rogue]

I like the new:
countries
-- states
layout

I have a few international caches which have no country (GCG05A) and (GC10FVX); and a bunch which are marked as archived, even though they are not (GC56DD), (GC2824). I have tried reloading the MyFinds PQ, and even an individual GPX for the GCG05A cache, and even though it updated some things, the country, and status (active, disabled, archived) didn't update.

No biggie, just thought I would mention it since we are on the topic...

[caughtatwork]

I like the new:
countries
-- states
layout

I have a few international caches which have no country (GCG05A) and (GC10FVX); and a bunch which are marked as archived, even though they are not (GC56DD), (GC2824). I have tried reloading the MyFinds PQ, and even an individual GPX for the GCG05A cache, and even though it updated some things, the country, and status (active, disabled, archived) didn't update.

No biggie, just thought I would mention it since we are on the topic...

The status never gets updated through a manual file import.

An additional change to update both Unknown country and NULL country has been implemented. I've imported the caches you mention and they are both now correct with Thailand.

Country and state should now be correct for the other caches that you imported.
Thanks for doing that by the way, it helps to keep the data cleansed which will be important when I get around to a map of the world and which countrie you have cached in.

The reasoning:
If the cache is archived, someone loads a file from before the cache was archived it changes back to active. Then 10 days later, after not getting any details via the daily faerie feeds, it goes back to archived.

That also explains why some are marked as archived.
When a cache is archived at another listing site (not always GC by the way), we don't get an "archived" log or cache description any more. i.e. It drops off the list of caches that come through on a regulr basis. After a period of 10 days if we haven't had a log or cache description come through we assume that it's no longer being fed to us because it's archived, so we archive it as part of the daily archive process.

The caches you mention are OS caches, so we don't any regular feeds for them at all. So 10 days after you loaded the cache and logs it would have being auto-archived at GCA.

It's annoying, but the best approach that we have. Thanks for being understanding as it's not a perfect world we code in

[rediguana]

http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statist ... uana/finds

Yes? No? Suggestions?

Thanks - I think it is a big improvement

[caughtatwork]

http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statist ... uana/finds

Yes? No? Suggestions?

Thanks - I think it is a big improvement

I agree. Thanks for the suggestion and the feedback.

[Richary]

I just want to say that even though I haven't had this problem, thanks to all the people like caughtatwork who put all effort into this website to give it all this functionality. It is truly outstanding work, and if I had ever got around to learning programming I would be volunteering as well.

[Damo.]

Totally agree. Great work caughtawork and craigrat and the other developers. Your hard work is much appreciated.

[Rogue]

caughtatwork wrote:

I've imported the caches you mention and they are both now correct with Thailand.

Thanks <BR><BR><BR>

caughtatwork wrote:

The caches you mention are OS caches, so we don't any regular feeds for them at all. So 10 days after you loaded the cache and logs it would have being auto-archived at GCA.

So, would this mean that all OS caches should show up as archived? However, in my logs only a handful of the OS caches I did in Feb 07 and Nov 07 are shown as archived. <BR>
It seems to be the ones that other people had already imported before I added my finds to them are the ones that show as archived?

[caughtatwork]

I have to admit that you are exactly correct.

What 'should' happen is that when we don't get any details for a cache for 10 days it gets archived.

In some circumstance, when a cache is imported the 'source' of that import it not always set correctly and so doesn't always meet the criteria for auto archiving.

It's a behavioural anomoly from many moons ago so I'm not sure how easy it will be to fix the data.

If it's not causing you too mch distress, can we leave it for the time being and I'll check into what can be fixed at some point in the not too distant future.