Distinct Caches

July 12, 2010

So I run the stats through Mygeocachingprofile.com and it says that we have 3040(3039 Distinct) caches. I know that we haven't double logged on any caches.

We did find a cahe in Oregon at Geowoodstock 5 called Keep It Moving? Sand tahts the only caches we can think of since it doesn't show up in our stats.

When I look at other cachers who have double logged it says on their profile page 727 but when I click on the Geocache Finds it says 724. So I know there are double logs somewhere. When we do it to ours it says 3040 and it stays 3040.

Could Keep It Moving? (A Movable Cache) be our Distinct cache that could through the numbers out of wack. You can take a look at our profile if you like.

2.2k · July 12, 2010

Do you have any finds in other countries? We have one find in Canada, so when I last uploaded my stats on My Geocaching Profile it says 1099 distinct US caches, but it uploaded 1100, which I took to mean, the one canadian cache didn't count as a distinct US cache.

Hope that made sense, that's the only thing I can think of!

9.2k · July 12, 2010

GSAK will allow you to filter for caches with 2 logs...

Maybe it's the fact that the co-ords change on Keep it Moving, that throws out the stats?

14k · July 12, 2010

Do you have any finds in other countries? We have one find in Canada, so when I last uploaded my stats on My Geocaching Profile it says 1099 distinct US caches, but it uploaded 1100, which I took to mean, the one canadian cache didn't count as a distinct US cache.

Hope that made sense, that's the only thing I can think of!

I've found caches in 10 different countries and my total finds and distinct finds have always matched. As someone else pointed out it's usually a matter of inadvertently logging a cache twice.

2.2k · July 13, 2010

Do you have any finds in other countries? We have one find in Canada, so when I last uploaded my stats on My Geocaching Profile it says 1099 distinct US caches, but it uploaded 1100, which I took to mean, the one canadian cache didn't count as a distinct US cache.

Hope that made sense, that's the only thing I can think of!

I've found caches in 10 different countries and my total finds and distinct finds have always matched. As someone else pointed out it's usually a matter of inadvertently logging a cache twice.

Must be then... when I think about it, my total finds always come out matching what I've actually logged, even with the one non-US cache.

July 27, 2010

I had the same issue and emailed them. This what Cameron sent back.

Geocaching.com lets you log multiple "found its" for a single cache (and then counts them towards your total!). So you could have found one single distinct cache, but logged it five times and geocaching.com would say that you have found five caches. Our site would show that you've found five caches, but only one distinct cache. Make sense? So, if your total finds is higher than your distinct cache count, it probably means that you double-logged a cache by accident. We're going to add a feature that shows you which ones were double logged, but it's not quite in place yet.

And sure enough, I had a doubled entry. That is probably the issue.

It was easy to find when you go into you geocaching details and filter your entries as just "Found it"

Muterinlaw

April 2, 2012

This has been driving us crazy as well... We have 692 finds to date, and our profile says 692 (689 distinct caches). We are very careful when logging and as a perfectionist, this kinda drives me crazy... I went through our list, and did not find any duplicates, but DID find three archived caches... Maybe since they technically no longer exist, they don't count as "distinct caches"? I dunno. Thoughts? I wish there was some way to correct this!

7.3k · April 2, 2012

This has been driving us crazy as well... We have 692 finds to date, and our profile says 692 (689 distinct caches). We are very careful when logging and as a perfectionist, this kinda drives me crazy... I went through our list, and did not find any duplicates, but DID find three archived caches... Maybe since they technically no longer exist, they don't count as "distinct caches"? I dunno. Thoughts? I wish there was some way to correct this!

Archived caches would affect the distinct finds count if you posted more than one "found it" log for them.

Do a forum search for "distinct finds" and you'll see that this has come up many times previously.

You can either go through all of your finds, cache by cache, or do a GSAK search for them. There's also been suggestions on how to export the finds into an Excel file, but I've forgotten how that works.

B.

3.7k · April 2, 2012

This has been driving us crazy as well... We have 692 finds to date, and our profile says 692 (689 distinct caches). We are very careful when logging and as a perfectionist, this kinda drives me crazy... I went through our list, and did not find any duplicates, but DID find three archived caches... Maybe since they technically no longer exist, they don't count as "distinct caches"? I dunno. Thoughts? I wish there was some way to correct this!

Archived caches are still counted in your total; otherwise, your finds would go down occasionally, instead of up.

Any difference in finds vs. distinct caches is always duplicate finds on the same GC listing. Some possibilities:

Relogging a cache you forgot you'd found previously (I did that once).
Logging multiple Attendeds on an event.
Logging a moving cache in different locations (still the same GC listing).
Logging a recurring event (say, a monthly meeting) where the owner simply updates the same page rather than publishing a new listing. Same GC number for multiple events = duplicate finds (attended).
Cache owner reusing a listing for subsequent cache rather than archiving and publishing a new one. Same GC number for multiple caches = multiple finds on the same listing.

Edited April 2, 2012 by hydnsek