[Az-Geocaching] Stat problems

[Art]

Brian,

I am new to caching, but a long time perl coder.  Have you asked
geocaching.com about the possibility of a nightly XML dump, or a .net/SOAP
interface?

Also, if you need help screen scraping, I can probably help, I have
(sadly) a lot of experience in this area.

-Art-

> 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
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