Adventure Lab finds not appearing in “needed found dates” tool

Question

My adventure lab finds are correctly appearing in my geocaching.com stats and ProjectGC stats (finds by found date) but do not appear in the “Needed Found dates” tool.

Examples from my stats are the 8th Feb and 28th Feb. The 8th Feb is correctly shown as 14 finds in my geocaching.com stats but incorrectly shown as 9 finds in the Needed Found Dates tool.

The 28th Feb is also incorrect. My finds =12 but are incorrectly shown in Needed Found Dates as 7.

I found other references to issues with adventure lab dates due to the timing of logs, but my issue is that the information is correct at source (geocaching.com stats) and also in one Project GC stat (finds by found date) but wrong in another ProjectGC stat (Needed Found Dates).

Comments

While it is possible that they could be "converted" into caches for the sake of getting PGC statistics to be sensible, eg by force defaulting them to T1/D1 (or maybe T0/D0?) that only solves part of the problem. Although lab caches have coordinates and an owner these are not currently exported. PGC cannot even determine the country they are in. What we need for PGC to integrate lab caches into stats better, is to at least get Groundspeak to export all the lab cache data (ie name, owner, coordinates, date published?). This is a question to raise on the Groundspeak forums.

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Good points. It will be an interesting debate to resolve this

Answer 1

Lab caches are part of statistics only. The are not available in other tools as already described by others in previous questions:

https://project-gc.com/qa/?qa=23846/find-stats-top-finders-does-not-include-caches-can-they-added&show=23846#q23846

Comments

Thanks for this, I now understand that this is a conscious decision and not a bug. I can’t see a reason for this decision in the referenced answer?

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Lab cache finds really do not have that much information to be usable in the other tools. The lab caches were added to stats because geocaching started counting them in stats and many people asked (and groundpeak finally published this information through API). But since they are not real caches, adding them to all the separate tools would be a lot of work (IMHO) for no big gain. Maybe adding them to "needed found dates" might make sense, but with all the issues they have with logged date/time (different timezone, sometimes log going into different day, ...), it would be still pain for not much gain.

The closest authoritative information is in the FAQ:
https://project-gc.com/Home/FAQ#3120430870

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Thanks for your detailed response. It’s a pity that the information isn’t available in the API.

There was a similar debate about virtual caches in the first few years of caching; some folks felt that caching should be about physical containers. Personally I always loved them and am beginning to feel the same way about Adventures because it’s an interesting variation on the game.

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The mayor gain I see is allowing to provide the users with consistent data.
Therefore at least adding an option to allow users getting the "Needed found dates" based on the same data as shown in the "Profile stats" would allow users to get consistent data if they chose to do so.

Answer 2

Could you change that to a feature request.

As LabCaches are already counted within stats we now have a Badge. And we have AddOns to the Lab Adventure Badge like 366 days.

So it is useful to add Lab Adventures to the "needed found date" feature.

Comments

Or at the very least, if they're not going to be included, a note explaining why they're not included.

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I agree with the request - I was about to write a bug report as the 366 matrix in the statistics and in the needed found dates tool does not match and it looks like old data are used for the tool. With the lab caches becoming more abundant, the tool becomes useless. Without lab caches I have 33 open dates for the next two loops. Taking lab caches into account this number drops top, so by almost 30 %.