Distance calculation error in new cache notification email?

Question

I know the new cache notification emails are still in beta mode, but I'm seeing something odd.

I hadn't paid attention to the distance and direction from home section until today.  I would expect this would reflect the distance and direction from my home, which it does not appear to do.

We live in coastal Virginia, USA, at roughly N 37° 9' W 76° 34', and in our project-gc profile, home location is manually overridden, so it should not change.

The emails we have gotten have been way off in terms of how far these caches are from our home location, and it doesn't appear to make sense how the distance and direction are calculated.

GC7B9Q4 shows as 383.7 km from home (355° N), when according to geocaching.com, it should be over 5500 km from us, to the northeast.  (A projected waypoint shows that the email thinks we live in the English Channel, along the ferry route from Dublin to Cherbourg.)

GC7B9PG shows as 1273.5 km from home (13° NNE), when it should be over 7000 km from us, to the northeast.  (Projected waypoint from this one is just south of Palermo, Sicily.)

GC7B67Q shows as 3273.5 km from home (319° NW), when it should be 4000 km from us, to the northwest.  (Projected waypoint is somewhere in the Mojave Desert, south of Las Vegas.)

Driving distance for all of these, by the way, is 0 km, 0 minutes.

Answer 1

The distance isn't actually calculated from your home coordinates, even though that is pretty much what it says. It's calculated from the watched location's coordinates, if it has coordinates.

The problem seems to be when it doesn't have coordinates. We are then sometimes leaking an old distance value into another persons email. We'll be releasing a potential untested fix today.

We are aware that the driving distance often is 0. We are asking Google API services for that fact, it could be that we are hitting a rate limit. We have not investigated that part yet.

Comments

"The distance isn't actually calculated from your home coordinates, even though that is pretty much what it says."

I'd say that distance from home is EXACTLY what it says.. so either change the lead text in the mail so it says what it shows, or change the calculation so it will show what it says.

I'm my case I have home coordinates entered, but the mail still says:

"Distance:    0 km from home (23° NNE)"

The direction seems to be calculated correctly though.

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I came here to ask this exact same question. I'll just add my comment to your post and say that I am having the same issue.

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The text should have been fixed now. At least in the development environment, not sure if it's released yet.

The distance issues should also have been resolved, except that we missed dividing by 1000. The current live version says for example 12345 km when it should be 12,3 km. That's fixed in our development environment now.