This week I’m in Spain to see a spectacular eclipse, among other things. I’ve also done a reasonable amount of geocaching, including on Tuesday finding my 1000th geocache.
Which led me today to ask: how many caches does Geocaching.com think I’ve found? It’s the biggest, but not the only, site I use, and so I didn’t expect it to show the same total as me. A difference is expected.
Well… it turns out how you ask it. In the top-right corner of the page, when I log in, it says that I have… 1,035 finds:
That turns out to be significantly higher than I’d anticipated, which initially made me wonder: did I fail to count some in my tally?
My tally comes from those which have been imported right here onto my blog. I use a computer-assisted but still-manual approach1 to PESOS my geocaching logs from various sites – Geocaching.com, OpenCache.uk2, TerraCaching, etc.3 – onto my blog, and then I count them here. Could my data be wrong?
So I went about checking it. Which turned out to be challenging, because the “foreign key” I use to associate the caching logs on my website is the log ID that appears in the links on Geocaching.com… and those changed format somewhere along the way.4 So first I had to fix all of my metadata spanning about 750 rows. Then I was able to check.
But while I did that, I noticed something strange. When I click on that link that says I have “1,035 finds”, the resulting page has a link to see what they are. And it claims there are… 1,005 finds:
Stranger still, a different link from the same page on Geocaching.com told me that I had 1,006 finds!
Even before I’d corrected all of my metadata and rechecked my totals, I was becoming increasingly convinced that I couldn’t trust any of Geocaching.com’s totals. How many finds is it, exactly: is it 1,035? Or 1,006? Or 1,005?
It doesn’t really matter, of course. I keep my own count, and I’m now even-more confident than ever that it’s accurate. The correct answer to to the question “how many geocaches have I found?” is 1,019.
And for some reason, Geocaching.com can’t count even the ones that are logged on their site three times and get the same number twice. 🤣
Footnotes
1 This helps me sidestep Geocaching.com’s draconian rules on scraping and API access.
2 I got in trouble once with a Geocaching.com reviewer for hinting at the existence of other geocaching listing sites, once. I don’t understand why: they’re unlikely to be a commercial threat to Geocaching.com’s business, and those other sites typically allow you to talk about Geocaching.com! I guess that they’re mostly afraid that it weakens their trademark on the word “geocaching”, which I’ve never been convinced is legitimate anyway because it was being widely used online to describe the activity it represents before they tried to start centralising and hoovering-up all of the cache listings. It’s just sneaky monopolistic silo behaviour on the part of Geocaching.com, really. I’m not a fan. I can list plenty of examples of this kind of dipshittery on the part of Geocaching.com, but I’ll spare you for now.
3 I do a similar thing with my geohashing logs, although without the same anti-anti-scraping mitigations because geohashing.site’s site owner is a much more-chill dude.
4 Many of my old logs used a GUID, but newer ones use a GL-ID. It’s a whole thing.
