Bug: Corrected Coordinates listed on project-gc although not set at all on geocaching.com

Question

I'm having the following problem, currently just noticed once, but have not been searching for further occurences yet.

I'm doing a query on the advanced search panel https://project-gc.com/#AdvancedSearch with a cache name, the cache is found and populated in the dashboard search results table.

However the corrected Lat / Long  coordinates are set as well, although on geocaching.com there are NO corrected coordinates set. The set values are actually the originally listing coordinates.

The corrected coordinates are also in any exported format (GPX, CSV) ... Very strange.
Anybody else experiencing the same issue? Any possible known causes?

(Can provide screenshots (but don't know how to upload from local filesystem (file:// URL does not work)

Answer 1

"The coordinates are corrected" and "the given coordinates are the original posted coordinates" are two statements that do not necessarily contradict each other. I tend to set the corrected coordinates to the posted coordinates for challenges that I qualify for, as an example. By doing this, I get an indication on the cache icon both in Project-GC and in my caching app so that I know that this cache can be logged.

Thus, double-check that you haven't simply set the posted coordinates as the corrected coordinates by accident.

(As far as I know, this forum does not support uploading images. You would have to upload them to some image hosting service and link to them from here.)

Comments

I can confirm, they have not been set accidentally.

Was just discussion this issue with a caching friend, which experiences the same issue.

It seems it stems from the fact that project-gc tries to do some magic guessing from the personal cache notes. If there are coordinates which are not preceded with a caret ^ they might be interpreted and considered and handled as corrected coordinates by pgc.

Is there any feature to turn off that guesswork feature globally?

Seems the logic is:
- if corrected coordinates are set on gc.com - use those
- if corrected coordinates NOT set on gc.com - do magic guessing on the PCN.
If some reasonable coordinate format found which is not preceded by ^ use the first one as corrected coordinates.

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Ah. If you have coordinates in your cache note, then you have in effect set the corrected coordinates, as far as Project-GC is concerned.

And, as you say, the way to turn this off is to put a ^ directly in front of the coordinates. There is no global off switch.

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From my perspective, p-gc's (and other tools') treatment of what is known as corrected coordinates is ill behaved. Corrected coordinates is a precise property of a geocache object as it is returned by GC's Live API. For each and every geocache object it is without any doubts clear, what the value of this property is. It is either set or it is not set.

By no means whatsoever, any tooling such as project-gc should go ahead and parse human readable data from the personal cache notes field and arbitrarily make an assumption that the first pattern that matches a coordinate is interpreted as "corrected coordinates".

I learned this the hard way myself quite a while ago. The answer that was given to me back then was: Please prefix the coordinates with a "^" (caret) to avoid havinf it parsed and interpreted in any way.

I can live with the "^", as a circumvention (as opposed to a solution), except that it makes my documentation, which I keep in the personal cache notes, very ugly for the human eye because of those carets all over the place.