Corrected coordinates for Unknown caches.

Question

I am from Souh Africa, Eastern Cape.  When I look at the maps the Unknown caches from my home region appear at N 00 00.000 E 000 00.000.  All stacked on top of each other.  Irrespective if I have corrected the coordinates and added it to my notes, or if I had not made any changes.  The rest of South Africa seems to work fine.  Problem two seems that the system have not been picking up the corrected coordinates that I have made for weeks now.  I do add the corrected coordinates to my notes, and it have worked well in the past.  Thanks.

Comments

Sounds like two issues. For the first one, we would need to know where you see this behaviour, full link could be useful. Also, an example gc-code or cache link.

For number two, again, a gc-code would help us investigate. Also know when you added a personal cache note for that geocache if you know it.

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http://project-gc.com/Tools/MapCompare?profile_name=Spesbona&country=South+Africa&region=Eastern+Cape&county=Nelson+Mandela+Bay&nonefound=on&ownfound=on&type%5B%5D=Unknown+Cache&showdisabled=on&submit=Filter

This filter brings up 5 caches.  GC5B1BF  and  GC5B1BQ  have corrected coordinates as well as in the personal note and the other three is untouched.  With all of them there icon on the map appear at N 00 00.000 E 000 00.000.

If I use the green tick to toggle between corrected coordinates, the icons will appear where they should as before the coordinates where changed.

As already stated the fault only seems to be for the Eastern Cape region.

It also affect multi's that have corrected coordinates.

The same also happens if I use the Solved Mysteries map.

I would say the problem started a couple of weeks ago.  Not exactly sure of the date.  If you need any more information please let me know.

The caches outside my home region with corrected coordinates are now up to date and work correctly.  Thanks.

Answer 1

Thank you for the additional information. I can not with 100% certainty tell the root cause of the problem, but I have seen the problem and corrected it.

Project-GC uses both the corrected coordinates field and the personal cache note field when determining corrected coordinates. Most of the time, Project-GC doesn't find the corrected coordinates though, therefore the personal cache note is the most commonly used field. This is due the design of Groundspeaks API.

When coordinates exists in them both, the coordinates in the corrected coordinates field is used.

In this case, you had coordinates in both according to Project-GC. Those in the personal cache note seemed correct when I viewed them (not posting the public here). Those in the corrected coordinates field was N0 S0. Since the corrected has higher weight in our system, those were used.

Why they were 0,0 I do not know. Either, you have had those in the field for a while, or it's a bug in Groundspeaks API, or it's a bug in our side. Out of all (37.3 million) corrected coordinates known to Project-GC I notice that 326 of them are at 0,0. We will look into that.

Anyway. I have corrected the error you are having by refreshing your corrected coordinates. I understand that it wouldn't be easy for you to understand the issue, but I will write what you could have done anyway. Maybe this thread will by found by someone else in the future.

With our new self-support system, you could have asked the system to refresh the data for the specific geocaches. The self-support system can be found by clicking one of our orange support buttons, then self-support, then adding the gc-codes in the last input field, and submit.

Alternatively you could have refreshed all your finds in the self-support system as well.

You could also have added them into a Virtual GPS and built a GPX file with "refresh corrected" checked.

 

We are sorry for the inconvience caused and hope that it will not happen again.

UPDATE: I found that an additional 273 of your geocaches has 0,0 as corrected coordinates. I will tell the system to update the data on those since it is likely to be incorrect. It might take an hour or so.

Comments

Thanks for the quick response and fixing.  Great to have the additional information for future use.

Thanks again.