Project-GC is probably mostly known for two things. The Challenge checkers and the Profile statistics. The last two weeks we have focused quite a lot on improving and adding content to the Profile stats.

Profile stats itself is the go to place to find most of your personal statistics. A way to show the history of your geocaching, your achievements, and to give you future goals. It's thousands of numbers, all in one place. But also maps showing where you have traveled.

Here is a sum up of what we have added or changed this month.

• Calendars: Added type/size selectors.
  Click the Type: - or Size: - to toggle the rendered view.
  
• D/T charts: Added a size selector.
  A type selector already existed in one of the D/T charts.
• The Milestones tab now has a First cache by region in home country module.
• The FTF tab now has a FTFs by month module.
• The FTF tab now has a FTFs by weekday module.
  
• The FTF tab now has its own calendar.
  This information was available as bold dates in the calendar under the Finds tab before. We have removed that function from the Finds calendar to improve readability.
  
• The FTF tab now has its own maps.
  A bit simpler than those for general finds though (not as many maps).
• The Challenges logged module now links to the list of signed challenges, and tells you a summary.
  ​Example: Plus an additional 178 signed challenges, whereof 0 are now fulfilled.

Some of the above mentioned changes are available to users with a paid subscription only.

Earlier this month we also added the Various FTF numbers module to the FTF tab. Two of the items has been moved from the Find tab's Some numbers.

Note that these changes were released on 23rd of April 2024. The changes will take effect on the next rendering of your Profile stats after the release itself. If the header in Profile stats says Data from 2024-04-24 or later you should have the changes available to you. Except if you aren't a paid member and it's a paid feature.

FP Notifications

Project-GC can create and send email reports showing you the changes in favorite points for geocaches that you own. This, like other notification services we provide, is a paid service (included in the paid membership). If you wish for it to be enabled it can be found in User settings.

These reports have shown added and removed favorite points per geocache, and by who. We have recently added so that a total for the geocaches is shown as well. This is an obvious feature that should have been there from the start. A thank you to those who have suggested the feature via our support systems.

New pages

To complement the already existing Geocaches per area page we have added two new pages. Geocache types per area and Geocache sizes per Area. These pages have also been implemented upon popular request. They are available to our paying members. If you are, feel free to play around with them.

Share VGPS

We have mentioned the Virtual GPS system several times before. Last time was in the last newsletter. We'll try to not repeat ourselves too much, but think about it as a shopping cart for geocaches. Wherever you are on Project-GC you can add geocaches into your Virtual GPS, it's the perfect way to plan your geocaching trips. These Virtual GPS lists can also be shared with others. Formerly this had to be done by the owner where they needed to add the names into a form on the website. Now they can also be shared via a link. This will make it easier to share in an existing group chat for example.

Signed challenges

According to official guidelines a challenge cache can be physically signed before the challenge itself is met. Later when the geocacher fulfills the requirements the challenge can also be logged online, but not before. For this reason Profile stats have included a a section that shows all challenges with notes (but no Found log) on them, together with the current known status from the challenge checkers.

Since these aren't really statistics they will now be moved out of Profile stats and added as their own page instead.

The whole Challenges tab in Profile stats is for paying members only, and so is the new page.

Profile stats performance

We have also made some changes in the Profile stats rendering process so that it will start showing content much faster than before. Since the changes are related to the maps, users with finds in many different countries/areas will see the biggest improvement.

Virtual GPS and GPX files

Our Virtual GPS system is a way to handpick specific geocaches when planning a geocaching tour. We like to compare it to a shopping cart. Basically the Virtual GPS is a list of geocaches. This list can later on be used and exported in various ways. We have now fixed a long lasting bug where the additional waypoints in the GPX file didn't import properly in the geocaching apps that our users use.

The Virtual GPS system is a part of our paid features program.

Edited logs

Project-GC has various email notifiers that can be configured if you are paying user of the site. On of them is the Edited logs notifiers. Once per day Project-GC will look through the geocaches that you own and see if any of the logs has been edited. If the text has changed, it will send you an email informing you about the change.

Historically these emails have included the new log text, but nothing about what the log text was before the change. This month we have made a rehaul of this system. There are two major changes:

1. Better handling of users who have opted out from sharing data with third parties (like Project-GC).
2. The email now includes buttons that links to Project-GC where one can see the actual difference between the different versions of the log text.

Example from the web:

Milestones

Our Profile stats includes a Milestones tab. It shows which geocache you have logged as your first, tenth, hundredth and such. Due to various reasons our list doesn't always match the one at Geocaching.com. One of the reasons can be that the milestones at Geocaching.com have been modified since they support that feature.

Another reason could be related to Lab caches. First off we only include Lab caches in our Profile stats for our paying members. But even for them the sorting might have been off a bit. For technical reasons we have always sorted the Lab caches last on each day. But this has now changed.

Our milestones should from now on be much more consistent with Geocaching.com. We have changed our sorting algorithms and they are now sorted primarily on the log date that was chosen for the log, and secondly on the timestamp of when the log was created.

There is some more detailed information on our related wiki page.

Leap day

February the 29th will be leap day, a day that occurs approximately every fourth year. We therefore would like to highlight that BadgeGen has specific Leapday addons that can only be achieved by geocaching on leap day itself. Some of them are quite easy to achieve, some of them nearly impossible, or at least requires several years of geocaching.

Since a few weeks back there exists a community created tool to show you your progress for these particular addons. The tool has been created by Hügh and is built as a tool in the challenge checker system. Note that it doesn't have anything to do with challenge caches and that challenges based on leap day aren't allowed to be published nowadays.

So make sure to call your friends and add that date as a geocaching day in your calendar.

Disclaimer: Since the tool has been created by the community we have not verified that it's 100% correct in it's interpretation of the BadgeGen rules.

Geocache metadata changes

Sometimes cache owners change metadata on the geocaches that they own. Project-GC tries to keep track of some of these changes. Several years ago we created a tool that could show you the difficulty/terrain history of a geocache.

In September last year (2023) we made some improvements to this tool, and also added tools to show you the history of cache type changes and cache size changes.

The dates shown in the tools doesn't necessary reflect the date of the change itself, the date represents when Project-GC detected the change. There is also no guarantee that all changes will be catched.

Discord

In the last newsletter we promoted a community Facebook group related to Project-GC. This time we would like to mentioned that we also have a Discord server. There isn't much activity as it is today, but if you are a Discord user it might be of interest to you. You can use this link to be invited.

Top FP h-index

Earlier this year we received a suggestion from a user to implement a top list for geocache hiders based on h-index. To be honest, we loved the idea. For a long time, we have wanted a top list that shows "the best geocache owners", but we didn't want quantity to punish them. H-index seemed like a good solution for this.

Back in May we made our first release using this, our Top FP h-index page. We also announced it in our Facebook group, to get some attention to it and get feedback in case there were issues. Sadly there were issues. It wasn't as easy to implement as we had expected. We found corner case after corner case. Therefore we never got around to make a real announcement for it. But now we feel confident enough about it, the last found issue was in September after all. We also really feel that the list manages to list good cache owners, in the same way as Top Favorite Caches (Lower bound of Wilson score) manages to show the best geocaches.

As a concept h-index is fairly simple. You get as many points as you have geocaches with a certain amount of favorite points. For example, if you have 10 geocaches with 10 favorite points you get 10 points. Any geocaches with less than 10 favorite points are irrelevant. Geocaches with more than 10 favorite points are irrelevant if you don't have as many hides with that amount of favorite points.

Besides the top list we have also added your personal h-index under the Hides tab in Profile stats.

You can read more about the FP h-index on our Wiki page.

Geocache elevations

Back in October we made major improvements to the elevation levels for most geocaches for several countries. This still isn't an exact science and we have to rely on the data that exists. But the service provider we use made some great improvements and therefore we started to update our data.

Primarily these areas were improved: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Mexico, Norway, United Kingdom, New Zealand, USA, Canada and Spain.

Facebook

We often use our Facebook page to communicate issues we are having with the site. Generally we don't provide much support through that channel though. Primarily because the flow on Facebook isn't very good at it.

There are several other community groups related to Geocaching and Project-GC created on Facebook though. The biggest one related to Project-GC is Project-GC 101. At least it's the biggest we know of. The group was created back in year 2015, but since the owner of it had lost interest in managing the group herself she handed over the ownership to Project-GC.

While we don't normally provide support there ourselves either, we would like to inform you that it is a group full of knowledge and it's a good group to follow to learn more. You can of course ask your own questions there as well.

If you are a Facebook user, we strongly suggest that you follow both of these groups.

Replaced database cluster

For 3-4 years we have had repeated issues with the software we have been using on one of our database clusters. It has crashed and stopped serving data from time to time, most of the time needing manual recovery. Sometimes we even had to uninstall the software, install it, and import the data again. Besides preventing the site from serving data meanwhile, and taking up our time it wasn't any danger in itself. The database servers only had copies of other data and there was never any worry about data losses.

During autumn 2023 we have found a solution that seems to work much better. We have upgraded the software to much more recent versions, but also had to rethink the way we were using it due to license changes. Using it like we used it before would have added enormous costs, which wasn't feasible. We are very happy with the end result though. It does still happen that a database server drops out, but nowadays the rest of them keeps serving data and it shouldn't be noticable for end users.

The database cluster is based on four dual cpu servers, with 24 hardware threads and 128 GB RAM each. Their job is to provide almost all the data served in top lists for example. But also some other data warehousing.

Maintenance

Lately we have been doing a lot of maintenance work. It has caused a few instabilities and also downtimes. One of the days we expected a one hour downtime. Sadly it ended up being nine hours. All this is under the hood changes which shouldn't change anything visually, yet. But we are doing it for a good reason and the plan is that this will help us make some bigger changes long-term.

Besides hours and hours of data processing while restructuring data we have also made changes to 8000-9000 lines of code, which is a lot.

As a compensation for the downtime we did add three days of extra membership time to all our paying users after the last maintenance window.

Log images notifications - Adding log types

Since 2015, Project-GC has been able to send you notifications via email whenever someone uploads an image with one of their logs on a geocache that you own. However, this has only worked for Found it logs (or equivalents). It hasn't worked for Note or Did not find for example.

This week we will make a release that changes this, so that all log types can be monitored. When enabling this new feature there will be an extra email sent out that will include a full history of all images attached to logs that aren't of the type Found it (or Attended/Photo taken). This new release will also fix the issue where some of the images are too large.

The log images notifications is one of the many paid features of Project-GC and requires a paid membership. The notifications can be enabled by checking the relevant checkbox in your settings.

New tool - Log compare

We would also like to announce the release of Log compare. It was released back in August and this far it has only been mentioned on Facebook. The reason that we sometimes announce things on Facebook first is to get some direct feedback, both regarding bugs and what we can change to make it better.

The idea behind the tool is to create a simple but intuitive report that shows how your logs differs from someone else's over a set of days. Typical usecase is when you go on a geocaching trip with others, to see that everyone in the group actually logged the same geocaches, and that you didn't forget one.

The tool tries its best to highlight the rows it thinks might be an issue (warning) and rows that it's more certain of actually being wrong (error). It also takes ownership, old logs and challenges into consideration when doing its analyzes. The tool can be run on a period of up to one month.

As most other new tools this is also a paid membership feature. But if you do not have a paid membership and wish to try it out, don't miss that you can enable a 10 day zero cost trial membership on the membership page. No credit card information needed.

Example screenshot

10 years!

Believe it or not, but Project-GC is turning 10 years old this month, on Monday the 9th to be more exact.

It has been a blast creating and building the site. There has been many obstacles on the way, but also a lot of new experiences. We just love that Project-GC is something that most experienced Geocachers know of today, and use.

The path getting here has been a long one. It started out as a small hobby project creating statistics in our geographical region, by web scraping. Then it expanded with more and more data. Soon enough the Geocaching LIVE api was launched and we got access to that. The site was extended with various tools and many other things. Since a few years back we also have our own private APIs which we have had HQ develop for us, to smoothen the process in both ends. Today we also are the number one stop for Challenge checkers. It all started with an old workstation, and today we have a rack half full of servers.

We still have endless of plans and the goal is to bring you much more in the future. Not the least, we would like to make everything that we have a much smoother experience than it is today.

Membership campaign

To celebrate that Project-GC is turning ten years old we will activate a membership campaign. There will be a ~10% discount on memberships starting today. The campaign will end at Wednesday the 11th of May, at 12:00 UTC.

There will also be a unique opportunity to buy a ten year membership with this campaign. Normally the longest option is five years, but during this period we'll make a ten year option available.

Post campaign

When the campaign ends there will be some changes to our prices. In general it will be a lowering of prices, but that's not the whole truth either. We would like to take this opportunity to be as transparent as we can be, that's why we'll tell you the prices of both before and after now, before the change.

Today we have prices in three currencies, this won't change. They are all hard numbers that don't change automatically. This causes some issues when the value of the currencies fluctuate too much. The new implementation will only have set prices in EUR which is our base currency. We will then calculate the USD and SEK prices based on the current exchange rates to give you an accurate price regardless of which currency you choose to use.

In conjunction with this we will also do an overhaul of our prices, in EUR. In general, the shorter memberships will be more expensive and the longer ones cheaper. The difference isn't very big, but we still wanted to tell you about it beforehand. Buying a membership during the current campaign will be cheaper regardless.

There are mainly two reasons behind our changes. First off it's much better for both us, and our customers, if we follow the exchange rates and not use fixed numbers. Secondly we prefer to sell larger sums at once, since it reduces our cost from transaction fees. We hope the later change will cover some of the inflation costs we have had the last 1-2 years. Electricity cost alone has more than doubled over the last year as an example, but also most third party services that we use have been increasing their costs.

In EUR the prices will change like this:

• 1 year, from 22 EUR to 24 EUR (~9% more expensive)
• 2 years, from 40 EUR to 42 EUR (5% more expensive)
• 3 years, from 54 EUR to 54 EUR (unchanged)
• 5 years, from 88 EUR to 82 EUR (~7% cheaper)

Both USD and SEK are cheaper already with a 3 year membership payment, with today's exchange rates. USD even has an unchanged cost already with a 2 year membership.

Then and now

Project-GC has historically used multiple sources of data for rendering static maps and assigning regions and counties to geocaches. The last year we have been working on improving this workflow, the data, and the rendered end results. This has finally come together to a state where it's ready for release.

From now on OpenStreetMap will form the basis for all region and county assignments to geocaches, with one single exception, Canada. Canada will be using a mix between OpenStreetMap and third party census data. This was the only country where we couldn't find a reasonable solution using OpenStreetMap data only.

Compatibility

All countries that have region support at Geocaching.com will use the same names in Project-GC, to keep compatibility. For other countries we have been more free to try our best to align the data with the latest demographics and OpenStreetMap data. For county data we do not have any dependency on Geocaching.com since the data doesn't exist there.

There has been a lot of new region and county data added to Project-GC, while a small number (not too geocaching active) countries have lost their data. In many cases the polygon data has been improved to be more accurate, both in terms of border definitions and names.

The added data will add further possibilities to filtering at Project-GC, while the name changes will affect a lot of Challenge caches (and Challenge checkers). See topic Challenge caches below.

With updated demographics in various ways, the Country badges in BadgeGen might also be affected for some countries. In some cases they will be easier to accomplish, in others they will be harder. The Country badges levels depends on the number of regions in their respective country.

Also since almost all border definitions, and many names, have been updated, a lot of geocaches may now have a new region and/or county assigned to them. This can be either because our old data was bad, the new is worse, demographics in the country has changed, or because the borders actually have changed. In general the changes will be an improvement, and not a deterioration.

Primary goals with the update

The main objectives with this task have been to improve the maps in Profile stats, a lot, but also to make our tool chain more effective during upgrade of polygon definitions, faster code, more data, and making the data more up to date. This has required us to rewrite a lot of code in Project-GC, but the end result is something that really feels a lot better and more thought through.

Regarding adding more data. Formerly Project-GC had region support for 138 countries, and county support for 88 of them. With this releases this has increased to 235 and 149 respective.

Profile stats maps

Besides the fact that the maps now will be a lot more detailed, and in that way look better, the map projection has changed to a projection that will feel more familiar to most users, making the countries feel more properly sized. With the new improved data we also have the option to render maps in higher resolution, that still looks great.

Another thing that will be very noticable is that we have introduced coloring based on the number of finds in an area. Besides the color for having zero finds there are five levels to achieve in each area in a country, where the first color requires a single find. The colors are based on having either a fixed number of finds, or having more finds than a percentage of the currently active geocaches.

Challenge caches

As mentioned, a lot of Challenge caches will be affected by this, for example those of the type "Find X amount of geocaches in county Y". We have tried our best to adjust all existing challenge checkers to the new data using scripts. There is a small chance that some challenge checkers have been updated in the wrong way, though we don't think so.

In some cases we have been forced to disable challenge checkers because the cache owner needs to make a decision. For example if the cache owner requires 100 finds in county X, but county X have now merged with county Y and have ten times as many geocaches available. The cache owner then needs to contact the challenge checker developers to find a solution. Two suggested solutions are:

1. Keep the amount required, but allow county Y as well (technically the new merged county).
   
2. Create a user-defined area matching the old county. User-defined areas aren't normally allowed, but since the Challenge is already published it should be seen as a grandfathered one, where it's just a technical solution to external circumstances.

The following days

The new maps will be applied to users gradually. Paying members first, and the rest after that. Expect up to ~1 week for most users to have the latest maps in the statistics.

During the closest days after this release it's likely that it will be hard to load the new maps in Profile stats. Rendering millions of new maps will require more hardware resources than we can make available. All rendered maps are however cached locally and with time things will start running more smoothly. In short, map images not always loading the first 1-2 weeks is expected.

We have also tried our best to make all geocaches have their region and county up-to-date within the hour after this release. But there are a few corner cases that wasn't realistic for us to cover. There will be a few days where some geocaches might have the wrong region/county data and their update to the correct location is a bit delayed. We expect everything to be back to normal on that matter within a day or two. This may affect for example Challenge checkers and rendered maps in Profile stats.

Special thanks

Speclal thanks to:

• vogelbird for helping with the initial work, matching data between the Geocaching world and OpenStreetMap.
• clappy for creating the color theme for the maps in Profile stats.
• Pleu for making an enourmous work with creating polygons definitions. And after that, helping out preparing data so that most of the Challenge checkers could be fixed preemptive. She has done a tremendous work, and spent a lot of hours researching various countries, it has been a very thorough task.

In case there is anything you dislike with the changes, please do not contact the above contributors/volunteers directly, they do not hold the responsibility. Contact Project-GC's support instead.

Summary

• New and improved maps in Profile stats.
• New region/county data for most countries.
• Some Challenge caches are affected, in most cases the challenge checkers are already fixed.
• Some Country badges might be affected as well.
• Expect issues loading the map images in Profile stats the following week.

Documenting the site using wiki

Almost a year ago we added a wiki engine to the site. This was done in connection with updating BadgeGen to version 4. We really needed somewhere to document the badges and we felt that this was a much better solution than static HTML. As a bonus it opened up a lot of other possibilites like having a living general documentation of the site.

Every user of Project-GC is allowed to edit the wiki pages, and we really encourage that you do if you have something to add, or just found a spelling/grammar error. There is no account registration needed, just click the Login-button and your Project-GC authentication will be shared to the Wiki-engine. After an hour of idle you are automatically logged out again. You can read more about editing the pages on the Welcome page.

Keep in mind that it is okay to create a page without perfect formatting. The whole point with the wiki-engine is to collaborate and if someone adds great information, someone else can help with the grammar and a third person with headers, links and other formatting.

Updating the wiki pages is an ongoing work that will never be finished, it's meant to be a living documentation where more and more pages and information will be added with time. BadgeGen is fairly thoroughly documented, though there are a lot of details to add for those who wish to dig deeper into it. There is a short description written for most pages at Project-GC and even some technical background processes described. Currently there are around 300 pages created by approximately 15 users. A special thank you to Pleu and Optimist on the run who have done a tremendous job with filling the wiki with content.

There are also pages that are regularly automatically updated with data meant for analyses. Currently there are two such pages, one related to BadgeGen and one to Challenges.

The wiki texts are written in English only.

BadgeGen

In February we released a new version of BadgeGen. There have been a few minor tweaks and other updates during the year. Two things we find really worth mentioning are these:

1. For The All Around Cacher-badge there wasn't any tool when it was released. It wasn't easy at all to progress, or to see the current distribution of the finds. A tool was however promised and in Mars it was released. First in a few preview versions for users with paid memberships only, then to all users of Project-GC. The tool itself can be found in the Tools menu, named 360 from home.
2. When BadgeGen v4 was released there was an inconsistency in the design between the "standard" badges and the Country Badges. In May the country badges were updated as well.