PQ Splitter seems to be omitting a whole lot of caches this time around

Question

I have a slate of PQs to cover an area in North Carolina where we visit once or twice a year.

When I attempted to re-run the splitter, it came out with thousands fewer caches than was typical. When I plugged the dates in to update the actual PQ, it over-ran the 1000 limit.

In the case of the first one, where the splitter was saying to span from 9/30/2000 - 12/27/2007, I actually had to pull the end date back to 2/19/2006 to make it fit.

So it seems obvious that the splitter and the PQ generator are working with different parameters, but I've looked and looked, and I can't find the mismatch.

I actually went through and optimized all 15 of the PQs in the set, and the result gave 6946 more caches that what the splitter was putting out.

I'm hesitant to report it as a bug, because I know that 9 out of 9.5 times, I'm the one making a mistake.

If it's of any help, here is a link to the results page: https://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit?multi_countryregion%5B%5D=United+States%7CNorth+Carolina&type%5B%5D=Cache+In+Trash+Out+Event&type%5B%5D=Earthcache&type%5B%5D=Event+Cache&type%5B%5D=Giga-Event+Cache&type%5B%5D=Groundspeak+HQ&type%5B%5D=Letterbox+Hybrid&type%5B%5D=Mega-Event+Cache&type%5B%5D=Multi-cache&type%5B%5D=Project+APE+Cache&type%5B%5D=Traditional+Cache&type%5B%5D=Unknown+Cache&type%5B%5D=Virtual+Cache&type%5B%5D=Webcam+Cache&hidefound=on&hideowned=on&location=N+36+12.670+W+81+40.244&max_distance=100&submit=Filter

Appreciate any help here.

Answer 1

Here's what I'm noticing:

First of all your link only does North Carolina. That's 8 PQs with 7521 caches for somebody with zero finds in the area like me (after I adjusted to miles since my settings is kilometers). You've also excluded Community Celebration Events (formerly known as lost and found events) and wherigos, I'm not sure if that's intentionally or not but I only get 7548 with all cache types so not really a big difference there. The first PQ for this search stretches from 9/30/2000 to 12/17/2007 like you mentioned.

Second. Removing NC out of the settings and doing US as the country-setting and all cache types I get 15 PQs with a total of 14671 geocaches, the first one is actually split at 9/30/2000 to 1/21/2006 for me but that difference I assume is due to you've found a couple of the older caches and your PQ might have had more than 990 caches in it. This gives a difference to the previous search of 7123 caches for somebody with zero finds so I am going to assume you have found and/or own 177 of the active caches in the area, at least that makes the numbers match. ;-)

So my conclusion here is that it's likely that the mismatch is that you did your search on the PQ splitter for North Carolina only and then you did your PQs without the limitation of any states and just the distance from the coordinates giving you lots of caches in Tennessee and Virginia that messed up the breaking points suggested by the PQ splitter.

Comments

Excellent observations!
Never thought about that state line limitation.
Looking at the overlay of the circle on the map, I can see that would clip off roughly half the area of the circle!
I don't own any caches in the search area, but I do have 182 finds; pretty close to your calculation of 177, however 55 of my finds are archived.

Also have to thank you for the heads-up regarding the Lost and Found events; didn't realize that CCEs were going under that heading. As far as I knew Lost and Found was an obsolete cache type, so that's why I didn't bother including it.
As for Wherigos, I'm generally not interested in them, and they won't run on my Garmin anyhow, so that's why I don't include them.
Many thanks for making such quick work of my problem!
Happy Caching!

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@gettinlate No problem!

I realized the difference between the numbers might be because I used 160km and 100 miles is actually 160.93km so that rounding is probably enough to cover those five caches. Doesn't really matter of course, but since mismatching numbers are annoying. :-)