I spent a good amount of time this morning working out a method for clearing out archived caches from our GSAK database. It’s a known issue, stemming from the fact that pocket queries never include archived caches, which means that they have to be manually updated and removed from the database. We ran into the problem on the peninsula. Phillip spotted a geocache, close to the cabin, on the TomTom screen. It wasn’t in the Magellan. We stopped into a coffee shop and tried to look up the cache online. We were told the geocache doesn’t exist. It used to be that geocaching.com had an option on its maps to include archived caches, but that feature no longer exists. If you try to search for the name of an archived cache, you are told that nothing matches that name (or you get a list of other caches with the same name). The only way to see information about an archived geocache (or to confirm that it’s been archived) is to either look at the list of caches hidden by the cache owner (if you know who the cache owner was), or the list of Finds for someone who’s Found it (if you know that). That’s the problem of clearing out archived caches – you just have to know they’ve been archived.
I think I worked out a pretty good method, however. I looked at areas that have recently been updated with pocket queries and then sorted by “Last GPX”. I then investigated any caches older than a few months. I actually found four caches in our relative neighborhood that had been archived but were still in our GSAK database. I suspect that a macro exists, or could be written, for this.
