Learning more everyday.

Today in the few caches I found I ran into a strange situation. I logged a few caches then I could not find one on the site that I had found. I checked the cord's several times but had not luck. It was in the GPSr and the Nuvi, but not on the site. I fired up GSAK and there it was. I used that to get into the cache page. That's when I discovered it was archived.

I thought it very strange because it had been archived a couple months ago. I update GSAK weekly.

What I discovered was that the owner had not checked to see if the cache was indeed missing and just archived it. I also discovered that the PQ's don't pick up archived caches. So if someone decides to archive a cache for some reason, that's it. It will not update, but also wont be archived. I had not run into that before.

So what I did was clear out the GSAK data base and reload all my recent PQ's. That made about a 120 difference in the number of caches I have left to do.

Just something strange, to find two caches that I couldn't log.

That is correct, GSAK has no way of knowing that a cache is archived. When it loads new PQs, it updates any of the caches already in the database, adds any caches not in the database, and leaves alone any caches in the database which are not in the PQ.

Obviously one way to cure that is to delete all the caches in the entire database and replace them with new PQs.

Another way is to sort your GSAK list by Last Update GPX. Any caches which were updated on any date earlier than your most recent PQs is most likely an archived cache. You can verify this by clicking on the cache in GSAK and selecting Waypoint - Status check from the menu. GSAK will check the cache and update it's status so it matches the current online status. There are also macros and a GSAK filter that will check for archived caches. The filter is under the dates tab.

Archived caches are the toughest part of doing the stats. I have to go through the list one at a time and verify they are archived, update the status, and update the cache to include the archived logs since I use the dates to determine the age. Usually there is only a couple a week unless Maine Publisher goes on a tear and archives 30 caches that cachers fail to maintain. :D

I am guessing there were a lot of archived caches in your database, you were just fortunate to run into a lot of them. You might be able to log those archived caches if you have not already, and if the container is still there a note should be posted to the cache page, hopefully someone can trash them out.

I have found archived caches before and logged them. One had been archived a year or so but for some reason I had it in my GPS.

Now I need to check my GSAK. Thanks for bringing this up.

OK, I went from 5003 caches in Maine that I haven't found to 4725. That's a bunch of archived caches.

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Originally Posted by LaughingTerry

OK, I went from 5003 caches in Maine that I haven't found to 4725. That's a bunch of archived caches.

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I bet! There have been 92+ archived so far this year...

I prefer that the archived caches don't come back in PQ's as you'd have to set the filters to clear out all sorts of events and whatnot. I pull the whole state each week with 12 PQ's I think. If I had to include all the archived caches, I'll bet it would be another PQ.

We can't get archived caches in PQs can we? I'm pretty sure when I do a PQ I do not get any cache that has been archived. The thing is that when they are archived there is no way for GSAK to figure that out yet. So those archived caches just sit in GSAK and don't get updated.

I have my PQs set to get disabled caches now. I didn't do that before.

Correct, you cannot get archived caches via PQ, that is why GSAK does not know the status.

And you can easily hide the disabled caches with GSAK if you want to avoid them on a caching trip, so it makes sense to include them in your PQs. If I go on a caching trip out of state, however, I leave them out of the PQ and run the PQ just before I go, so I have as current data as possible.