Project-GC Q&A - Recent questions tagged trackable

Have a "What happend to the TB I dropped" feature (Temporary auto-watching)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:07:55 +0000

Since years I am missing a comfort function for geocaching.com and I hoped, that maybe project-gc.com could close that gap.

Use case / Background:
Whenever I carry a trackable I take much care to drop it of at a suitable location based on the owners wish and the goal for this trackable. After dropping it I would very much like to know if it continued its journey by being picked up by the next cacher or it got lost or something else.

Desired solution / feature:
Have PGC automatically detect, that I dropped a TB from my inventory. Follow the TB acivity automatically from there on and send mails with its activities (e.g. discoveries) to me until and including the next retrieval log. End the following automatically then.
If several TBs are auto-followed with such a feature PGC could send a daily summary mail for all of them.
IMHO this could be a interesting feature to attract more (paying) members.

Current workaround:
Once I dropped the TB I put it on the gc.com watchlist to see what happens. Once I see in my mails, that it got retrieved I have to manually remove it from the watchlist. Quite a hazzle involving several manual steps (which I sometimes forget and its difficult to sort out).

To be precise:
I do not request a copy of the gc.com watchlist feature, but a service which starts to follow on "Drop" and ends on next "Retrieve" for any trackables from my inventory.

I got the Signal The Frog popup yesterday, but my message didn't get logged.

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 11:02:02 +0000

I got the Signal The Frog popup yesterday. I entered a message and completed the form, but the trackable wasn't logged. Did I do something wrong ? Is this a bug in the website ? Did anyone else experience this ?

Map of your trackables

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 19:40:18 +0000

Hello. I would like to have a map where all my trackables currently are. The map shows of each tb the location of the last visit, drop, retrieve and tags the name of the tb (and maybe also a link to the tb) to that location. I have a lot of tbs travelling around and it is difficult to see where all my tbs are currently in the world. That would be a great feature! Best wishes, tarant75

In search of trackable tracking tool returning locations visited for a group of trackables since a specific date

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 13:38:38 +0000

We have a project that tracks the spread of the zombie plague as if the vector were geocaching http://www.finditlogitspreadit.info. This is accomplished by tracking the geolocations visited by zombie travel bugs (ZTB) that we release. Currently, the update process is manual:

1 - Log onto Groundspeak and look at our trackables

2- Sort the resulting list by "last log"

3 - Move "backward in time" page by page to the date of the last update we did

4 - Starting there, visit every ZTBs page and hand count the places it has been since the last time we updated

5 - Work this process forward until we have counted every ZTB that has moved since the last update

6 - Manually add up all the counts.

As you might imagine, this is a time consuming and laborious process, as we currently have 280 ZTBs released. We would like to be able to automate the process with a tool that queries Groundspeak's site for the applicable ZTBs, and returns a list/count/report that shows all locations visited (ideally down to the state, or first governmental division level), and the number of visits in each of those locations, since a specifically determined date. Also, the number of total locations visited, and total number of ZTBs that moved. We do not have access to Groundspeak's API, so we are hoping that a tool implemented through Project-GC, which does have access to the API might be possible. It seems like Project-GC already has the ability to sort caches by location/country/governmewt administrative divisions, so if one has the data for a trackable, the same process should be possible.

We would welcome any thoughts that anyone has that would help to automate our process.