Thursday, March 17, 2016

Geocaching: Geocaching.com Statistics

I have recently mentioned generating geocaching statistics at My Geocaching Profile and Project-GC. The former requires you to generate a new stats file to upload -- which you can do at most every three days. The latter updates automatically, but only once a week. So what's to do if you have a new milestone to blog about, and you can't get either of these updated?

Well, I recently discovered that Geocaching.com has its own stats section of the profile for premium members. It's updated automatically when you find new caches. So, I recently found a cache with a difficulty rating of 1.0 and a terrain rating of 2.5. Here it is on my chart:

Actually, the best of the three for difficulty/terrain charts is Project-GC:


I particularly like the "Way to 81" part, which not only identifies the first cache found with a particular combo, but also tells you how many days you've gone between adding a new combination. But! I won't have combo #18 listed until this weekend. That's because I haven't felt like paying them the $23/year for Project-GC membership. Given my caching rate, I don't think that'd be money well-spent. What is my caching rate, Geocaching.com?

OK. 0.0324 caches/day. Weekly checking deemed not necessary.

The Geocaching.com stats page is fairly basic -- no county-by-county breakdowns, for example. I think that's not surprising -- the main purpose of the site is geocaching itself, not the side games enabled by statistics. I am a little bit surprised, however, that some of the formatting seems off.

Here, for example, the words on the left don't quite align with the bars in the middle. I understand the HTML gremlins that cause this, but I'd think Geocaching.com could make it look a little more professional. Still. It's my best option for up-to-date stats. Most of the time, however, I'm happy to wait for prettier ones.

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