Thursday, August 14, 2008

GSAK geek alert: how do you prune archived caches?

As far as I can tell, there is no automatic way for pocket queries from geocaching.com to tell GSAK which caches have been archived.

I have pocket queries set up to pull all caches from the state of Minnesota throughout the week. When I go out caching, I load my GPSr from GSAK, usually after running one PQ in the area where I'll be caching, to catch all the late-breaking developments not caught by my weekly PQs. I have started to notice that archived caches appear as active in my database and hence in my GPSr. It was really an issue yesterday over in Grayhook-land in Minneapolis, where lots of caches have been recently archived.

I sorted all the caches in my database by "Last GPX update", figuring that if a cache hasn't been updated in a while, then it must have been archived. (I also get one PQ per week containing temporarily disabled caches.) I started to check each cache page by hand to see if it had been archived, but that got old fast. Yes, yes, yes, yes... I changed my plan of attack and just deleted every cache that had not been updated in a month. About 900 caches, roughly 10% of my default database.

I see two problems with this immediately. First, it leaves some archived caches in there -- the caches that were archived between one week and one month ago. Second, I may have deleted caches that are not archived -- for example, out-of-state caches that I have found but whose GPX files have not been updated since the last time I ran the My Finds query.

Hey, GSAK geeks, how do you deal with this issue?

[Edit: Thanks, Bill, for pointing out this thread started by sir_zman on the MnGCA forums. In that thread, zman links to this thread on the gc.com forums.]

3 comments:

speedysk1 said...

I used the Archive Options macro. It's not perfect, but it does what I need it to and when it doesn't, I just tweak it. Be sure to edit it to set your user name in the macro properly.

http://gsak.net/board/index.php?s=e46074808a321f492838f9f932f91931&showtopic=5120&st=0&#entry29245

Speedy

Anonymous said...

I just download all my PQs into a directory on my C drive, then I have GSAK setup to delete all caches from my databae, and reimport everything from that directory (including the My Finds PQ). This way I have an up-to-date set of data in GSAK. If the cache is Archived, I don't want to it in my GSAK database, (unless I've found it)

Unknown said...

Filter out the ones that haven't been updated in 7 days (it's a filter option).