Sark country is not assigned to Europe

Question

Hi,

as it happens we found a "new" European country - Sark - on geocaching.com web site. At Project-GC it is included as country in the list for Top Finders. In the Profile stats it is included in the World map (btw w/o flag), but it is missing in Europe map and possibly also in the list of 54 Europe countries. Findings in Sark are not included in the Guernsey ones (what is correct). I tested it on the "spuzva" profile.

Could it be possible to add Sark as 55th European country?

Thanks

Ivan

Comments

Interesting that Sark is now regarded as a separate country, but Alderney, which is larger, is still regarded as part of Guernsey. It means I'll have to update my British Isles PQs to include Sark.

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I raised this on the Geocaching.com forum, and was pointed to this discussion: https://forums.geocaching.com/GC/index.php?/topic/348956-release-notes-website-region-names-july-2-2018/

Answer 1

Interesting with "new" countries. :)

We have added Sark to our list of European countries in our development environment now, expect it to go live during the week. We wouldn't be surprised if there are more countries that we are missing nowadays.

Comments

Hi magma1447, many thanks for so prompt response.

May be it is a stupid idea, I wrote a code 25 years ago ;-) But, an addition of "new" country could be triggered by a log containing country missing in the P-GC list. It could generate a warning for Admin to add it (preferably for verification) or addition could be automatic (possibly).

By comparison of  source code of Pocket Query page on GC website with the Top finders page on P-GC I found the following exotic differences, i.e. missing on P-GC (in brackets is number of caches in the country):

Burundi (3), Central African Republic (8), Cocos (Keeling) Islands (0), Eritrea (1), Guinea (1), Heard Island and McDonald Islands (0), Nauru (0), Netherlands Antilles (0), Solomon Island (5), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (5), Syria (10), Tokelau (2), Tuvalu (2), and Western Sahara (3).

Greetings from Prague
Ivan

Answer 2

The whole issue of Sark is rather rather bizarre. Not that I am complaining to have increased my number of countries by one (compensating for Kosovo, which is still not in the list ...), but I am not aware of any change in the status of the island that would have called for making it a top level administrative unit. Why is Sark now a "country" of its own? Compared to Alderney and e.g. Herm I cannot see any reason for this.

Apart from the missing flag on PGC there are more issues with it: not all caches on Sark have been transferred to the new "country". Sark is also still considered on PGC as one of the three "regions" of Guernsey, and so I have 2 finds on Sark counting for this third region of Guernsey. My original guess was that this is the case for all caches on Sark that had been archived before the introduction of the new "country" Sark on geocaching.com, but according to the forum discussion linked by Optimist on the run this (2.8.2018) took place before the archiving of at least one of them (GC5TZ1Y, archived on 22.9.2018). Still, all those caches still being counted as belonging to Guernsey, are archived ones.

BTW, this confusion is another argument for a suggestion I have made before, namely not only to overrule the CO’s attribution to a region on PGC but also to a country.