Top County Finders - How ranked?

Question

https://project-gc.com/Statistics/TopCountyFinders

When looking at the page sorted with location = Belgium

You can see 5 users who has found cache's in all 589 communites.

How is this ranked?

It is not alphabetically and not the date you completed the challenge.

Does anyone know how?

The ranking with completed date should be

1 My Dying Bride 2 new.neo 3 SAILtm 4 Gentse Haviken 5 De Wacko

Comments

Thanks for answering!

I'm looking further ...

It 's not the date the user joined geocaching and it 's not the user number, ...

yymmdd usernr name
121219 6718817 De Wacko
080518 1635406 My Dying Bride
120606 5943025 new.neo
130711 7653857 Gentse Haviken
080407 1559987 SAILtm

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I left Profile name blank and only chose Belgium but my query showed a different result: 1. Tipsy, 2. k+gw+a, 3. buisset, 4. My Dying Bride, 5. Smell the Roses

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I believe what SAILtm did is select Belgium in both fields.
So only people from Belgium and only caches from Belgium.

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I only filled in the location field with Belgium, I have left the other fields blank.

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@AxelFox - OK, but that yields an even different result: 1. De Wacko, 2: My Dying Bride, 3. Gentse Haviken, 4. SAILtm, 5. the 4 bees

Crazy!

Answer 1

Hi fellow Belgian,

The page itself says "Top list showing who has found the most counties within a country. Note that there is no second sorting due to technical limitations."

Since there is no second level / tie break sorting, it's probably just the order in which the users appear in the database ... so probably the oldest/first registered user first.

Wkr,
AxelFox.

Comments

If I understand databases, each record has a system generated ID.  Perhaps the data is ordered using that when it is downloaded by PGC.  Then, PGC queries based on certain parameters.

OK, not being an IT expert, please don't laugh too hard regarding my response.  Thanks.

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Yes, if there is no 2nd level sorting, then the order displayed is just the order the database responds to the query. And that will depend on how the query is built (how it joins and filters tables) and how the database engine itself searches in and traverses the tables. So I guess the order is unpredictable and may even change over time.

Answer 2

There is no secondary sort at all, in fact.

Comments

I Think it is sorted who fulfilled this statistiscs at first.

Saw these sortinf/ranking at some other statistics and so I think this is useed at every statistic.

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The ranking with first completed date should be

1 My Dying Bride 2 new.neo 3 SAILtm 4 Gentse Haviken 5 De Wacko