Charter Member Checker

Question

We have two challenges locally that require determining the number of finds of caches that were placed by different Charter Members. Is this the type of challenge that a checker on this site can address?  Thanks.

Answer 1

Checkers can identify who placed a cache, but not if who is a charter member. I am not sure it can even identify if they are a permium member.

We could write a checker to do this, but you would have to supply a list of names.

Comments

The following Google Doc contains a list of charter members.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XgVQQQQVHx4W2cRZFuO6ZxHl1lZtuUYSRhRxre-zh54/edit?usp=sharing

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Now that you have given me a list of charter members, this is pretty easy. Post the  two GC numbers here and I should have something for you in a few days.

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This is excellent! The two caches in northern Virginia are GC55AHK and GC55PYV. There is a note in one of the CO's comments that similar caches are now in Pennsylvania and northern and southern California. The two in Virginia require unique charter cachers, not just their caches. Thanks very much for doing this and thanks to derektiffany for sharing the list.

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Not so excellent. The spreadsheet you sent me had about 40 names on it. C55AHK mentions about 500 charter members. Many of these are no longer active, and their caches have been adopted by others. GC55AHK allows the claim of these adopted caches. Adopted caches may now be owned by members that are NOT charter members, and so those caches would not be accepted by a challenge checker. And it looks like there are quite a lot like that. That means a challenge checker would be unreliable. Also, although Project-GC might one day export the "is a charter member" status, that also would not solve this adopted problem.

Best method would be to work from the Charter Members Caches bookmark list, but at the moment Project-GC does not collect this information either.

Sorry, schwandt, we have no easy solution here. You are stuck with doing it the hard way.

Tom

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Oh! I take it back! There is already a checker that works of bookmarks! Watch this space!!

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Nope. Bigcall says his bookmark list is incomplete. This won't work either.  [:(]

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I show 430 unique member IDs in the referenced.  Then again, yes, as the data will change from time to time and this is not "live" off the database not exactly an optimal solution unless 1) list is regularly updated and 2) it is combined with a rather significant amount of historical data (to get to who owned the cache when it was found).

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I appreciate the continued attempts. I imagine this is something to try to get ahead of and start checking the cache placer status.

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Received a note from the Seagnoid that a checker was developed! It relies on the spreadsheet information to assess your finds. Thanks to the Seagnoid for that work!

Answer 2

Currently it's not possible since Project-GC doesn't expose that information in the API. However, the API could be adjusted so that the information exists, and then it wouldn't be very hard to fix such checker.