[Az-Geocaching] Stat problems

[Brian Cluff]

The stats appear to be back to normal...  get'em while they last... 
It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the changes that 
are put in place on Geocaching.com.  Especially since most of the 
changes are put in to directly stop people from doing exactly what we 
are doing.  I don't think they are out to stop us.... it's just they 
have a lot more abusers of their system than they have people who's 
crawling does them any good.

The next time around, it might be more difficult that it's worth.  It 
will never be impossible... they have to make the web pages available to 
people using a normal browser, and therefore it's possible to get them 
other ways, but it might become so much of a hassle that it's not worth 
it anymore.  For instance, I just put in a solid 12 hours just to get 
the archived caches back into the system, and I still haven't figured 
out how to make it automated again, so they will quickly become out dated.

If anyone wants a difficult problem to try and solve...
via a script, login to Geocaching.com site and pull an archived cache 
page.  If anyone can figure out how to do it.... well, I don't have 
anything to offer you, but you will at least get a standing ovation :)
Scripting a graphical browser, or Microsoft centric scripts don't count. 
  I'm not looking to club the problem to death by scripting an entire 
browser, and the server doesn't even have a graphical display, so it's 
out of the question anyway.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek