Intro

We think that it's about time that we send out a newsletter to inform you about some of the highlights of what we have been working on the few last months. In all honesty it has been quite a lot. In retrospect, we should have documented it better, and made a newsletter about it at least two months ago. But here is a recap. We expect to be able to get back to you with some detailed information on some of them in the near future, and also some other new stuff, and potentially upcoming changes as well.

Profile stats

We have rewritten the engine behind Profile stats. It has been a huge project which has been ongoing for several months. While this is mostly behind-the-scenes changes, it opens up for us to do some improvements that we have intended to implement for years. We will definitely come back to this topic in upcoming newsletters.

Besides rewriting the core system, there have been plenty of minor changes to the modules, but also several new ones. You can look through it and see if you recognize them. We call the current version "2.0". Version 2.0.1, 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 are already planned; there are more improvements coming! We will get back to this topic as well in a later newsletter.

Never heard of Profile stats? It's one of our most used products. In simple terms it shows you personal statistics on almost every angle that you can imagine. You can read more about it on our wiki pages.

Extremes

We have implemented something that we call Extremes on the website. Basically, it's about finding one or several "extremes" in an area. An extreme could be the most northern geocache, the geocache with the most favorite points, the oldest geocache or just the geocache with the most logs.

This is still under development, and while it is partly available already, it should be seen as a preview version only. There are currently nine types of extremes on the production site; a tenth will be released soon. You will find which Extremes you have logged in your Profile stats under the Finds tab. There is even a tool in the Tools menu that can help you find out which geocaches are extremes in different areas (paid members only). Maybe this is something you would like to aim for and collect the next time you travel? Not planning to travel anytime soon? You should definitely make sure you have logged the extremes in your vicinity!

We will get back to this topic as well when we feel that it has been finalized. If you are curious about it, you can check out the wiki article.

Geocheck.org

In early August 2025, we acquired Geocheck.org. We have been hosting it for over 10 years, and since it was fairly abandoned, both the former owner and we felt it was better for the Geocaching community that we took over the ownership. A while after acquiring it, we spent six weeks on rewriting almost all of the code, making the code behind it more modern and more secure. The look of the site has been kept, at least for now.

Geocheck.org is the checker system that's linked on the most mystery caches from an international perspective. We want to bring it back to being the number one choice. What does the future hold for the site then? We hope to bring many improvements - we do have plenty of ideas. But for now we'll just make sure that it works, is maintained, and supported.

Auto-challenge-checkers

We have more than doubled the amount of processing time spent on running Challenge checkers in the background. This should be very noticeable for those who rely on Project-GC to automatically detect if you have fulfilled the requirements of a challenge cache or not.

But what are these Auto-challenge-checkers? It's one of our paid features. Project-GC will run challenge checkers in the background for our users. Whenever you see a checker on a geocache page it might already show you if you have fulfilled the challenge or not, assuming you are logged into Project-GC. There is also the Signed challenges tool which will show you every challenge cache you have left a note on (pre-signed?) and the status of your fulfillment. Note that there is no guarantee that a checker has run on all of them recently though.

Customer support software

We have switched out our old deprecated software for handling support tickets from our users to a new modern system. The existing tickets have been migrated to the new system.

Polygon data

During 2025, we have updated our polygon data for Finland, China, Croatia and Switzerland. Due to changes in 2026, we'll update Switzerland soon again.

General maintenance work

As always, there are many minor changes that hardly get noticed, like updating country flag icons, bug fixes and other minor improvements.

Before the release

It was almost 3 months ago we started to work on these changes for real, but now we are finally there. Three weeks ago we anncounced our new beta site. With the help from some dedicated users we could identify and fix several issues before the actual release.

The actual release

On Tuesday the 5th of August we made the biggest release of Project-GC in years. While it might not be revolutionary change from a user's perspective, it is without a doubt a huge update from our perspective. The amount of changes are uncountable from our point of view.  The release itself went fine, we did have several issues, but it was also expected. Of course we got a few surprises, but some things were also easier to fix than we dared to expect.

After the release

All in all we have been working more or less 24/7 (thanks to timezones) with fixing (mostly) minor issues that have shown after the release. Almost all of them resolved within 24 hours. We have been bouncing ourselves between tasks that were planned to do post release, bug fixing, and also developing the next major release. We actually already have the next step ready and in pipeline, but due to the massive workload and risk for new complications we have been holding it back for a while.

What actually changed?

• Upgrade UI framework. More modern, keeping it easier to maintain the code. In the long-run this wasn't even optional.
• The filter system has been rewritten from scratch. This was our primary goal. You will find that most pages looks a bit different. The actual change means that more complex filters can be used, plus that there has been new filters added. Some of them are:
  • Attribute filter - Works both for postitive and negative filters.
  • Publication date filter - Filter geocaches based on the publication date.
  • Elevation filter - Filter geocaches based on their elevation above sea level.
  • Past events - Include/exclude events in the past or not.
  • Improved date filters - Now using web browser's calendar input, and allowing filtering on year+month or year only.
  • Corrected coordinates - Filter geocaches based on if they have corrected coordinates set or not.
  • But most of all, our new pre/post-filter system.
• Upgraded platform. We have moved from quite a lot of virtual machines plus bare metal servers into a docker stack. Even the bare metal servers now use docker as a base. This makes the environment easier to reinstall, upgrade and maintain. There are still a few virtual machines to decommission, but the core structure is in place now.
• We are in the middle of upgrading some of the database servers. Specifically those serving top lists and similar with data. It's four identical servers with the same purpose. Today they have 128 GB memory and SSD storage. After the upgrade they will be equipped with 512 GB ram and NVME directly on the pci-e bus.
• PHP has been upgraded from the quite outdated PHP 7.3 to version 8.3.  We'll probably have to upgrade to 8.4 in the relative near future, which should be a much smaller task.
• Upgraded several libraries and external dependencies. Many of them causing extra work along the way.
• Patched various external softwares so that they work with more modern PHP versions and our stack in general.
• Rewrote many of the data harvesting database queries to make it more modern and efficient.

The sum up

This newsletter might be overly technical for many. To summarize, we have in all honestly done a lot of work. Work that should have been more spread out during the last years, but we haven't had the time and resources. We are slowly moving towards making the site much better and easier to work with.

To our knowledge all known issues should be fixed by now. If you know something that became worse after the upgrade, please contact our support. We also want it to be clear that there has been no intentional downgrades of free usage. If something worked for free before, it has been our goal to make it work now as well.

What's next?

The Staging (beta) site now holds the next step in development. Basically the code behind top lists themselves have been rewritten. This is step one towards making it possible to retrieve data from much larger selections where the retrieval of data takes longer time. Feel free to try it out, from a user perspective there should be no difference.

New filter system

Over the past few months we have been doing some fundamental under-the-hood changes to Project-GC. Basically we have written a new Filter system, it's the code that handles most of the input fields. Particularly the various parameters that can be used for top lists and various tools.

There are several reasons behind this decision. One is code cleanup, it was needed. It will also make it easier for us to add new filters in the future. Some have already been added, primarily to those with a paid membership. But the new filter system is now also more advanced. In some of the tools you will be able to do things that wasn't technically possible before. Internally we call it two pass filtering or pre/post filters.

Upgraded Bootstrap

We have also taken the time to upgrade Bootstrap from a very old version to the latest. Bootstrap is the UI framework we are using for basic elements on the web. This handles the base level of how forms, buttons, tables and so on looks and works.

This will help us keep the site more modern and also easier to maintain in the future. For users it's only supposed to mean very minor visual changes so far.

Beta site

The changes we have made, in particular, the new filter system, are a significant change to the Project-GC website. Basically thousands and thousands of lines of code has been added, removed or updated. With this comes a high risk factor of new bugs. Due to this fact we have launched an alternative site which is temporarily available as an open beta site. You can find it at https://staging.project-gc.com/. It uses the new code, but the same database servers as the production site, and should therefore show the same data/results.

If you are interested and curious, you are most welcome to test the Staging (beta) site. You should expect to be able to do the same things as you can do with the Production site. If you can't, please file a bug report. A good bug report would include a link to the production site showing what you expect the staging site to provide you, which you can't. Also, if you would find a case where the result data is different between Staging and Production, that would be of high interest.

If you find a bug, and can, it's easiest for us if you report the bugs on Discord. Otherwise please use our support system. It's harder for us to keep track of the discussions on Facebook, due to how Facebook works.

We already announced the Staging site on Discord and Facebook (Project-GC 101) a while back, so hopefully most issues have already been found. Everything reported to us so far has been fixed. Unless we're overwhelmed with bug reports we will either release this to the production site later this week, or in the beginning of next week.

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