CacherCounter

Unfortunately, since September 15, 2020, the CacherCounter can no longer be included in listings on Geocaching.com (other sites like OpenCaching continue to work). Code that has already been integrated remains and continues to work. Here is the corresponding info and thread directly from/at Geocaching.com. Hier is also a list of currently whitelisted external domains.
Of course, I contacted Geocaching.com and asked to add my domain to this list. Here’s the answer:

Hello Martin-
Thank you for contacting Geocaching HQ.
Yes, images not hosted on approved domains or Geocaching.com will be blocked to protect other players from advertising and other browser cookies.
This list is subject to change, however we are not currently looking to add any more domains at this time.
Best regards,

This hole story in general and especially the impersonal, unconstructive and completely negative answer is extremely unsatisfactory and I am very angry about it. Because the reasons mentioned for avoiding advertising and browser cookies do not apply to the CacherCounter. But it seems that at the moment there is no way to use the CacherCounter in new listings or to enter it in existing listings. So I started a petition at change.org to show Geocaching.com that the CacherCounter is not only important to me. This is the petition (unfortunately, you cannot create petitions in multiple languages), I ask for your signature and support!

I am a statistics freak. ;-) So I’m also interested in how many visitors watch my cache listings. For many years, I used the CacherCounter by grafzahl84. Unfortunately, his website and thus the counter is offline now, for 2 years (as of 20.06.2017). Since I liked the design and still like it, I have recreated the counter. I think that there is no hope that the grafzahl84 website or counter will be online again. This is how “my” counter looks in the three available variants:

Here’s an example of a listing at Geocaching.com and a listing at Opencaching, both including the counter. I think I got pretty close to the original. :-)

I would like to make the counter available to other geocachers for their listings. Of course, as the original, without advertising or other frippery…

Here is a short guide on how you can install the counter in your cache listing:

Enable the checkbox “The descriptions below are in HTML” or enable HTML view in your cache listing at Geocaching.com or Opencaching.de, then copy-n-paste from this page, insert the corresponding GC code (instead of GCXXXXX, codes starting with “GC”, “TB”, “PR” and “OC” are allowed) into the counter code. Done!

This will show the counter centered in your listing. If you also want to show the date since you started counting, the code looks like this:

And in German language with German spelling of the date like this:

For French and Italian with German spelling of the date please just use fr or it instead of en or de.

If the date is to be displayed in ISO notation (YYYY-MM-DD), regardless of the language, add &iso=y, the code for example looks like this:

One request: Please leave the link to this page in the counter code. This gives other geocachers the opportunity to use the counter without much research. Many Thanks!

Notes:

• The line with the date can be hidden, see above. The GC code and of course the counter status are always displayed.
• The script only accepts GC codes that begin with “GC” (for Geocaching.com listings), “TB” (for Geocaching.com trackables), “PR” (for Geocaching.com users, for the profile page, see here at the bottom, you can get your own PR code this way) and “OC” (OpenCaching) and are alphanumeric.
• If a GC code exists in the database, the counter is incremented by 1 with each hit.
• If a GC code does not yet exist, it will be created automatically with the first hit and will be started with the count of 1 with the next hit.
• If you want to move from another counter to this one here, you might want to use your previous values (hits and start date). In that case you do the following: You create the new counter with https://www.sebald.com/cachercounter/?gc=GCXXXXX&start=xxx&startdate=YYYY-MM-DD. The parameter start must be numeric, the parameter startdate must be a valid date using the schema YYYY-MM-DD (year-month-day). Both parameters are used only once when the new counter is created and are otherwise ignored. You can also use only one of both parameters when creating a new counter.
• It will only be counted if the new visitor has a different IP address than the last visitor. This prevents the counter value being easily raised by constantly reloading the page.
• Privacy: Nearly nothing is recorded in the database: GC code, counter value, creation date, last referer (to see where the hits originate from, if needed), IP of the last visitor, time of the last visitor

Thanks!

Of course, to grafzahl84, whose idea I just picked up without many changes. But also to JR849, because I were able to still get all the information and the graphics of the old counter there.

Ideas? Suggestions? Bugs?

Always welcome! The best shot is leaving a comment on this page. But am also available through the contact form.

PS: There are 1535 GC/TB/PR/OC in the database and together they have created a total of 1389299 hits. :-)