Pointless, curious question

[Trekkin and Birdin]

I recently discovered the fun of looking at the WI-related logs when you click on “log rates” from the home page. I notice that some of my friends who I know were logging their finds today later than I did show up there, and ours didn’t.

It’s not important, really. Just curious. I thought maybe because we found a whole 2 today, we didn’t count! 🙄 But…but….I snowshoed to them! (one of the two, anyway).

[cheezehead]

Well, it looks like it updates about every 4 mins or so. So earlier logs would have been posted when you posted…..if that makes sense. But I could be all wrong here too!

[Jeremy]

An adaptive algorithm is used to calculate the harvest rate… how often our server looks at the geocaching.com server. It can be as little as every 2 minutes (can’t be shorter due to gc.com restrictions) or as long as 30 minutes based on the log rate.

Every once in a while we do miss logs because things get too busy or geocaching.com has issues. Based on the logs our harvester keeps, there were a couple data misses yesterday so maybe you just got unlucky and logged during the time when we had a problem keeping up. But if you notice a pattern where none of your recent logs seem to be grabbed, let me know and I’ll look into it.

[-cheeto-]

Btw, I really like the log harvester feature.

[Mathman]

I haven’t had a problem with my logs showing up unless I record out of state finds and then they don’t show up. This has happened everytime I have cached out of state. I wonder why????

[abcdmCachers]

I’m curious, does the WGA have permission to do this? (I seem to remember seeing that the gc.com terms of use agreement forbids “screen scraping”.) I realize once every two minutes doesn’t even register as a blip on their servers, but sometimes when I have to wait several minutes to submit a log on a Sunday afternoon, I think of all the screen scraping sites that must exist out there and that every blip adds up.

[Jeremy]

@Mathman wrote:

I haven’t had a problem with my logs showing up unless I record out of state finds and then they don’t show up. This has happened everytime I have cached out of state. I wonder why????

In order for us to grab out of state logs for you, you must provide the link to your geocaching.com profile in your account settings (Your Account -> Member Info).

Basically this is the only we can definitively pick out the logs of WGA members from the vast sea of logs on the geocaching.com Recent Logs page. (The geocaching.com username could be used, but if only a single character were wrong, it wouldn’t work correctly.)

So add your gc.com profile link and you should be set!

[Jeremy]

@abcdmCachers wrote:

I’m curious, does the WGA have permission to do this? (I seem to remember seeing that the gc.com terms of use agreement forbids “screen scraping”.) I realize once every two minutes doesn’t even register as a blip on their servers, but sometimes when I have to wait several minutes to submit a log on a Sunday afternoon, I think of all the screen scraping sites that must exist out there and that every blip adds up.

The WGA obtained special permission to “scrape” ONLY the recent logs page many years ago. This was back in the days geocaching.com was fighting with Buxley and others about data harvesting issues. For a while the WGA was blocked from harvesting until an agreement was reached. The agreement we have with geocaching.com is informal (just an email) and can be revoked at any time.

Back then the web folks at geocaching.com said the recent logs page is built periodically and cached on the geocaching.com servers, so the overall performance hit associated with the WGA server accessing this page should be incredibly small (probably smaller than looking at a non-cached geocache listing page).

Personally, I wish they had a lower overhead and more robust way for us to collect this data, but what we have seems to be working OK… it is better than having no data at all.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

Thanks Jeremy, that must have been our problem and I fixed it. Course, I’ll have to wait until we have a chance to do more out of state caching, but that shouldn’t be too tough. We’ve cached out our own area, LOL.

I had never bothered to look at that “recent logs” thing, but it’s a whole different picture of what’s going on with everyone and sometimes I just want to avoid chores, so it’s a great distraction!

[Mathman]

@Jeremy wrote:

@Mathman wrote:

I haven’t had a problem with my logs showing up unless I record out of state finds and then they don’t show up. This has happened everytime I have cached out of state. I wonder why????

In order for us to grab out of state logs for you, you must provide the link to your geocaching.com profile in your account settings (Your Account -> Member Info).

Basically this is the only we can definitively pick out the logs of WGA members from the vast sea of logs on the geocaching.com Recent Logs page. (The geocaching.com username could be used, but if only a single character were wrong, it wouldn’t work correctly.)

So add your gc.com profile link and you should be set!

Thank you for the help Jeremy. I have added my profile link and now I will see how it works when I get the opportunity to cache out of state again. Thanks again.

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