Dealing with archived caches

[rediguana]

I discovered this weekend, because I haven't been regularly feeding PQs into GSAK, that some caches still show as active even though they have been archived. Whilst I could go through and fix this one-by-one, is there an easy way to change all the ones that should be archived to actually being archived?

Thanks in advance

[Sallies]

The only way I know is to trawl through my GSAK database and check all the caches that haven't come down in the last GPX file. I manage to mess up on this every trip and we are constantly searching for caches that are not there. Even though it a relief when we get home to find that we haven't really missed finding a cache, it does take up valuable caching time looking for non- existent caches. I always hope that I will be more organised but it never seems to be foolproof. If anyone has a better solution then I would also love to hear it!

[YuGeo4]

Yep, just run the weekly "MY FINDS" PQ from GC.COM and import that into your database. All the archived caches should then be updated.

Cheers

[rediguana]

Yep, just run the weekly "MY FINDS" PQ from GC.COM and import that into your database. All the archived caches should then be updated.

As the Sallies suggest - this won't work for the caches you haven't found yet. These are the ones I'm trying to fix.

[YuGeo4]

Sorry, misread the thread.

There is an easy manual way to get your unfound archived caches. I run PQ for all unfound caches in NZ, and add these to my unfound database.
It is then just a matter of performing a sort by GPX import date, comparing the dates of the last GPX update. Anything without the latest GPX import date is automatically an archived cache, as the PQ doesn"t pick these up.

Cheers

[rediguana]

Good point YoGeo4 - works quite well, still manual, but does allow easy identification of the caches no longer receiving updates. In may case, I could probably set a filter showing all caches with "Last GPX" of eight or more days.

Update: Found about 60 caches using that method, checked them all, and all but one was archived.

Thanks for the pointer

[rediguana]

Had a couple of questions about this, so thought I would drag this thread back up with an update.

The Core Issue
Firstly, the reason archived caches are not updated in GSAK is because your pocket queries don't contain archived caches, hence GSAK is never able to change the Status from Active or Temporarily Disabled to Archived.

The Best Fix
There is a request on feedback.gc.com to allow the download of archived caches - I'd encourage GSAK+PQ users to add some votes (3 ideally ) to this request.
Pocket Query for Archived Caches

The Temporary Solution
The nice thing about GSAK is that it has a lot of filtering options, and we can actually use these to archive caches. Basically, when a cache is archived, our GSAK database doesn't receive any further GPX updates to the cache. Conveniently, GSAK also records when the last GPX update was made to a cache. This means that we end up with two very useful features of the Last Update GPX/Last GPX field. You'll find this under Search > Filter (Ctrl-F), on the Dates tab, and its called Last update GPX.

How does this work in practice? Well, I know that all my PQs are run at least as frequently as once a week, and any active cache should have had at least _one_ GPX update in the last seven days. Likewise, archived caches won't have received an update. So, I have a filter and a little automated script that does the following.

1. A filter (called GTArchiveCaches) that selects all caches that have not had a GPX update in the last 9 days (a couple of days of error in case I haven't ingested GPX for a while).
Last update GPX - Not During - The last 9 days. This is called ArchiveCaches.

2. A little script that then selects this filter, and then steps through every cache that hasn't had a GPX update in the last 9 days, and marks it as archived.

Code: Select all

# Archive Caches that haven't been updated for 9 days
# This variable stores the name of my Archive filter
$ArchiveCaches="GTArchiveCaches"
# The filter command runs the filter
FILTER Name="$ArchiveCaches"
# If there are one or more caches that haven't been updated in the last 9 days...
# ... then the following lines step through and mark them all as archived.
IF $_FilterCount > 0
  GOTO Position=Top
  WHILE not($_EoL)
    $d_Status = "X"
    GOTO Position=Next
  EndWhile
ENDIF

So, once you've created a filter and saved it, you can then run this macro to archive caches that haven't been 'heard of' for a while. The best time to run this? After you've imported a batch of GPX of course. Alternatively, if like me you have a script to build your GPX files, then the archive script is the very first thing run as part of this build process.

[Kiwi Nomad]

Was just downloading my latest PQs from GC and was thinking about how much easier it is to identify archived caches now with the new GSAK version.

With the update option now I can filter down to the area which I want to download caches for a days caching and before dumping them all on my GPS I do a quick update of the cache information for every one in the filter and that shows up any that have been archived or disabled.

Run the filter again to get rid of the archived and disabled ones and I'm all set to dump them all onto the GPS and go out hunting.

I'm sure someone will be able to do this with a script but I'm happy with doing it manually.