What is going on with my top hiders' list?

Question

So I recently noticed that for some odd reason the person at the top of my "Top Hiders" list has suddenly been split into two different spots on my list, both with the same name.  And what's even stranger is that each day when my stats update, the numbers change.  Seems like they're moving from one version of the name to the other.  At first I thought maybe it had something to do with caches he's adopted, but I did a manual check, and of the 301 caches of his that I've found, 261 were his original hides, and 40 were caches hidden by somebody else that he later adopted, so that isn't it.  Screenshots of the progression:

Comments

Already discussed here: https://project-gc.com/qa/?qa=19088/counts-on-finders-is-wrong-and-listing-in-two-places
Sounds like some internal change that takes time to update all the caches. I would give it some more days.

---

Thanks... lol, I hadn't noticed that other thread.  I posted this to my local FB group too, so I guess it got pulled from there.  I'm figuring it will eventually fix itself, so I'm not overly worried... was more just curious if anybody could explain why it's happening, because it's just such a strange glitch.

Answer 1

May be it's about people leaving geocaching.com (the right to be completely forgot due to new European rule GDPR) if they chose to be removed, they are replaced by a generic name and their data are slowly removed. This happens on find, favorite points, hidden cache. All disappear slowly

Comments

Yes, this is correct.

---

Reasonable guess, but I personally know this particular CO and he is still a very active cacher and has not left geocaching or changed his name.  He's just as puzzled about this as I am.

---

This also wouldn't really explain why his name has been duplicated or why the duplicate name is seeing an increase in find counts.  The duplicate name isn't a generic name - it's exactly the same as his original name.

---

This isn't about leaving geocaching. It's about changing a setting on geocaching.com that disallows third-party applications (like Project-GC) from accessing that cacher's information.

---

Hmm... that seems more reasonable.  I’ll ask him if he changed any settings.  But that only seeks to explain the reduction part... if this is what’s happening, why would it also duplicate his name and shift all the finds to a different version of the exact same user name?

---

Just asked him and he said he hasn't made any changes to his settings, so that doesn't seem to be it either.

---

Just to be clear, the setting is "sharing public data with third party applications", found on https://www.geocaching.com/account/settings/authorizations. If it isn't set to allow, Project-GC will not work properly in regard to data for that user.

---

Thanks for clarifying that.  I'm still not sure that's the explanation here though, as that doesn't seem to explain why it would have created a second version of the exact same user name and started moving my finds from one iteration of his name to a second, identical iteration of his name.