[GeoStL] A sneak-peak behind the curtains

From: Paul Konopacki <konopapw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 20:25:38 -0500
http://www.GeoStL.com/SLAGACron/cgi-bin/CronLogReport.pl

I'll let you all in on a secret.  Click on this
link to see a log of the status of all the cron
jobs that run on geostl.com.  Most recently
completed jobs at the top.

I created the log and wrote the page to
keep track of what was going on in the
background.  With all the problems we've
had with our web host and geocaching.com
timeouts, I figured you all were entitled to
see how things operated.

I only keep the most recent 150 statuses
in our database.

A status of -1 means something went wrong
with the job. 0 means no error.  Elapsed time
is how long the job ran.  The comment column
probably means the most.  It describes the
results of what the process did.

'Cron_GetRecentLogs.pl' is what you are probably
most interested in.  This is the job that runs that
gets data for our Recent Logs page.  'Retries'
means that the job didn't get the data the first
time it tried.  I have it tried up to 6 times before
calling it an error.  If this job can't get to the
page, neither can you (it gets to the page the
same way you do).

RGS recently posted some entries from a
new discussion thread in the groundspeak
forum that talk about the type of thing that we
are doing for our site ('screen scraping', 'data
mining', page slurping', etc.).  This is how we
get our data for the Recent Logs and Member
Stats page.

However, the people who work for groundspeak
consider us thieves of 'their' data.  They treat our
efforts to provided additional content for our
members with disgust and disdain.  Rather than
work with us and talk to us directly, they see
us as a threat and tell everyone they will eliminate
our data mining activity in the future.  They blame
us for the performance problems that geocaching.com
is currently experiencing.

I have discussed this issue with others who also
provide additional content to their geocaching
members on their web site, or in other forms.
We make suggestions to groundspeak
on how to allow us to continue what we are doing
and how to do it without denying service to the
majority of users who access their site through
a browser.  It falls on deaf ears.  Jeremy leads
his merry band to squelch against anyone using
'his' data.

In the end, we're providing more advertisement
for geocaching.com because we have hundreds
of links to them on geostl.com.  But that's not
anything they will recognize.  We are stealing
their thunder - how dare we.


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[GeoStL] A sneak-peak behind the curtains

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