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Release Notes (Website: Road Trip '15 landing page) - June 5, 2015


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Read previous Release Notes

 

Release Notes - June 5, 2015

 

This week’s updates to Geocaching.com will help you plan your summer geocaching adventures!

 

Take a look at the brand new Geocaching Road Trip ‘15 landing page:

 


  •  

  • Keep track of upcoming souvenir opportunities.
  • Check out the Official Road Trip playlist.
  • Read what geocachers around the world are saying using #Geocaching15.

Also new: See which geocaches belong to a GeoTour with the new geocache search. You can click through from the search results to learn more about the GeoTour.

 

aa1079ba-5480-49f5-a4b6-7cb436a2e873.jpg

 

3496e62a-4e38-40a2-8c69-9d6cba47d45d.jpg

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Really? So Geocaching is now a social media activity? That's an update to the website? How about deleting the the crappy message center as a useful update to the website. How about making the search engine more intuitive as a useful update to the website. How about doing more to educate new cachers about the hobby as a useful update to the website. How about getting rid of the 'shades of gray' and replacing with black text in various places of the website as a useful update to the website.

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I'll add my +1 to what the folks above me have said.

 

Please, stop trying to turn this game into InstaTwitFace and start trying to improve it as a game. The world has more than enough social networks as it is. :angry:

 

Kill the message centre (or at least make it transparently usable via email), and fix the broken search UI, for my top two priority suggestions.

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I, for one, am very disappointed in the disturbing direction Groundspeak has taken geocaching and the website over the last couple of years, to the point that I can no longer muster much interest in the product.

 

Eleven years and, sadly, barely hanging on to what little remnants remain of the geocaching hobby I once loved. The current vision of Jeremy and company has diverged too far from the basic core of the hobby.

Edited by cheech gang
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I notice that the search is still using that bizarre definition of "Near". Imagine living in Seattle and using one of the featured searches for caches near you. Imagine that the caches displayed include some from Boise, Idaho; some from Billings, Montana; some from Carson City, Nevada and some from Sacramento, California. But none from Vancouver.

 

All of those places are nearer to Seattle than the furthest caches displayed when I do a featured search for caches near me. I get them from over 1,000Km away but more than 2000 caches about 130Km away are missing because they are in the ACT, not NSW.

 

The first event listed, when I search for events near me, is over 600Km away.

 

Absolutely bizarre!

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+1 to the five posts above!

 

This is not the Geocaching I enjoyed eleven years ago. SmackFaceTwitter? Not my game. Give everything to the app users, and take away what us old-timers enjoyed. Why???

agreed, not the game I've played for 13 years.

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I notice that the search is still using that bizarre definition of "Near". Imagine living in Seattle and using one of the featured searches for caches near you. Imagine that the caches displayed include some from Boise, Idaho; some from Billings, Montana; some from Carson City, Nevada and some from Sacramento, California. But none from Vancouver.

 

All of those places are nearer to Seattle than the furthest caches displayed when I do a featured search for caches near me. I get them from over 1,000Km away but more than 2000 caches about 130Km away are missing because they are in the ACT, not NSW.

 

The first event listed, when I search for events near me, is over 600Km away.

 

Absolutely bizarre!

Absolutely wrong. I live near Seattle and when I use the featured searches all my results are from around Vancouver, Washington or really closer to Hood Canal, OR. Isn't IP based searching just wonderful? The featured searches are, in my opinion, a useless waste of compute time. Sure would be nice if there was an option to use home coordinates for the featured searches.

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Please read my comment again.

 

I asked you to imagine that "near Seattle" included caches that far away. Because that is what happens to me. If you got caches returned that far away I'm sure you would think it rediculous.

 

I know that "near Seattle" doesn't include them because Washington State is minute compared with NSW. It has nothing to do with ISP based location it is entirely due to the fact that NSW is bigger than Texas and these are state based searches. Even if I could use home coordinates I would still get the same result.

 

When I searched today for events near me the first one on the list was over 600Km away. That isn't near by any rational definition of the word.

Edited by Gill & Tony
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Why did you have to ruined the WEBSIGHT in the last couple of months, I have only been Caching since July 2014 with 392 caches found but I really believe if this WEBSITE was this messed up when I started I would have never gave this great hobby a try. I like looking at the SITE nearly every night but it now take me 20 to 30 minutes to locate what I am looking for and then I have know idea how I got to it, if it was not for being able to run PQ for my Garmin I would just use my phone and never open this SITE again..

HOW MANY COMPLAINTS WILL IT TAKE TO GET THE WEBSITE BACK WE HAD A COUPLE MONTHS AGO???

 

POOL1967

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The good thing is:

As long as there are powerful tools such as GSAK there is almost no need to use the website; I really hope that the API will remain stable and useful to be able to focus on geocaching itself, and not struggling with the so called "improvements" to the website.

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The good thing is:

As long as there are powerful tools such as GSAK there is almost no need to use the website; I really hope that the API will remain stable and useful to be able to focus on geocaching itself, and not struggling with the so called "improvements" to the website.

...And I, personally, hope that I don't have to rely on a 3rd party site or program to use the website with the same functionality I'd hope and expect to find.

 

Please let us opt in/out of message center. OR, please find a way to toggle message center so that it goes to our personal email INSTEAD OF only to the message center. I'd like to be able to respond to people, sort, and archive to/ from the email account I've used since 2001 to talk to people about stash hunting and geocaching. :anibad:

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i LOVE SEEING THE NEW PROMOTIONS AND THE AVAILABILITY OF FREE TRACKABLES - HOWEVER i TEND TO THINK THE SAME PEOPLE ALWAYS GET THE TAGS. aT LEAST IN MY AREA. i WISH THERE WAS A SYSTEM IN PLACE THAT WOULD DISALLOW SOMEONE FROM GETTING A FREEBEE TOO OFTEN, SO OTHERS COULD GET A CHANCE. BY THE TIME I GET HOMW FROM WORK AND SEE A PROMOTION EVERYTHING IS GONE ALREADY. IT MAKES ME FEEL UNIMPORTANT TO THE COMMUNITY.

 

Read previous Release Notes

 

Release Notes - June 5, 2015

 

This week’s updates to Geocaching.com will help you plan your summer geocaching adventures!

 

Take a look at the brand new Geocaching Road Trip ‘15 landing page:

 


  •  
  • Keep track of upcoming souvenir opportunities.
  • Check out the Official Road Trip playlist.
  • Read what geocachers around the world are saying using #Geocaching15.

Also new: See which geocaches belong to a GeoTour with the new geocache search. You can click through from the search results to learn more about the GeoTour.

 

aa1079ba-5480-49f5-a4b6-7cb436a2e873.jpg

 

3496e62a-4e38-40a2-8c69-9d6cba47d45d.jpg

Link to comment

i LOVE SEEING THE NEW PROMOTIONS AND THE AVAILABILITY OF FREE TRACKABLES - HOWEVER i TEND TO THINK THE SAME PEOPLE ALWAYS GET THE TAGS. aT LEAST IN MY AREA. i WISH THERE WAS A SYSTEM IN PLACE THAT WOULD DISALLOW SOMEONE FROM GETTING A FREEBEE TOO OFTEN, SO OTHERS COULD GET A CHANCE. BY THE TIME I GET HOMW FROM WORK AND SEE A PROMOTION EVERYTHING IS GONE ALREADY. IT MAKES ME FEEL UNIMPORTANT TO THE COMMUNITY.

 

 

Darn, I missed a free trackable? where did you see that? That makes me mad, it's just like a FTF, I always have to tear out the first page of the logbook so I can log a FTF.

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Do you all realize we are on a website and it is the year 2015? Every company with a web presence promotes itself through social media. Like past summer events like "31 Days of Caching" and "7 Souvenirs of August", the "Road Trip '15" thing is a way to encourage people to get out and cache - and this promotion encourages more than just Traditionals no less! Every company/organization tries to find new customers/members and encourage existing ones to be more active/involved. Any company/organization that does not do this will go kaput as its existing customers/members die off, get bored, get busy, or otherwise leave. Now the goal is to do this without pissing off the existing customers/members and I agree that Groundspeak should really work on improving some features like the new Search and Message Center, but many of the complainers here strike me as having a very poor attitude that is disconnected from the realities of running a company/organization, especially in the modern world.

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Do you all realize we are on a website and it is the year 2015? Every company with a web presence promotes itself through social media. Like past summer events like "31 Days of Caching" and "7 Souvenirs of August", the "Road Trip '15" thing is a way to encourage people to get out and cache - and this promotion encourages more than just Traditionals no less! Every company/organization tries to find new customers/members and encourage existing ones to be more active/involved. Any company/organization that does not do this will go kaput as its existing customers/members die off, get bored, get busy, or otherwise leave. Now the goal is to do this without pissing off the existing customers/members and I agree that Groundspeak should really work on improving some features like the new Search and Message Center, but many of the complainers here strike me as having a very poor attitude that is disconnected from the realities of running a company/organization, especially in the modern world.

 

What you say is true, at least partially.

 

True, every modern company uses social media to try to increase their customer base. However, doing that at the expense of making it harder for their existing customer base to use traditional methods is a losing proposition. A company needs to gain 10 new customers to replace one who is disgruntled, leaves and bad-mouths it.

 

Groundspeak's current approach seems to be generating a lot of new customers. That's good. However, from the outside, it seems that a lot of these new folk aren't staying for the long term, don't get properly educated in how to play the game and end up damaging caches and the community's reputation. That's bad.

 

Every operating system has a default browser. A company should ensure that its web pages work on all default browsers. The message centre doesn't work on my android browser. For that reason I request that people not contact me via the MC. Sure, I could download and install another browser, but it is not my responsibility to ensure that I can use MC, it is their responsibility to make it work.

 

I choose not to be on Facebook, twitter, linkedin or similar sites. I choose to use a GPS rather than a mobile phone for caching. I choose to use e-mail as my preferred communication method. If Groundspeak forces me to change my ways they will lose me.

 

They probably don't care if one $30 per year ceases, but I suspect I won't be the only one. I don't really think it will come to that, but making it harder for me to play the game the way I want to play it, is definitely nudging me in that direction. I'm currently in my longest caching slump for three years and have no plans to go out caching in the foreseeable future.

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The good thing is:

As long as there are powerful tools such as GSAK there is almost no need to use the website; I really hope that the API will remain stable and useful to be able to focus on geocaching itself, and not struggling with the so called "improvements" to the website.

...And I, personally, hope that I don't have to rely on a 3rd party site or program to use the website with the same functionality I'd hope and expect to find.

 

Please let us opt in/out of message center. OR, please find a way to toggle message center so that it goes to our personal email INSTEAD OF only to the message center. I'd like to be able to respond to people, sort, and archive to/ from the email account I've used since 2001 to talk to people about stash hunting and geocaching. :anibad:

...And I, personally, hope that I don't have to rely on a 3rd party site or program to use the website with the same functionality I'd hope and expect to find. :blink:

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Thanks for all your work, the new 'Geocaching Road Trip'15' site looks great! I'll look for a 10+ geocache today (it's good to have a search for that, so it's just a click to see which caches are in).

 

Well, to each their own. I rather would like to have a Greasemonkey script that removes the links to the Road Trip page from all gc.com pages. The photo can easily eliminated by an add blocker, but that did not work for the text.

Does anyone have such a script?

 

I'm surprised that the search for caches with 10+ FPs (which by the way only works for PMs) plays a role for a cacher like you. In your area (and mine as well) we frequently encounter caches with 10+ FPs.

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Well, to each their own. I rather would like to have a Greasemonkey script that removes the links to the Road Trip page from all gc.com pages. The photo can easily eliminated by an add blocker, but that did not work for the text.

Does anyone have such a script?

 

I'm surprised that the search for caches with 10+ FPs (which by the way only works for PMs) plays a role for a cacher like you. In your area (and mine as well) we frequently encounter caches with 10+ FPs.

C'mon cezanne! It's the most beautiful time of the year, so just enjoy it!

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C'mon cezanne! It's the most beautiful time of the year, so just enjoy it!

 

Apart from the fact that I prefer other seasons, I do not understand the connection between the season/weather and the fact that

I do not appreciate that meanwhile on my laptop I have to scroll on the search result page to even see the first (!) line with search results. If a Greasemonkey script were available, I would use it to remove the links to things I do not need to see more than once (if at all).

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If there isn't a Greasemonkey script, then perhaps you could use Adblock Plus (or some similar ad-blocking software) to hide the bits of the page that you don't want to see.

 

I've used adblock as mentioned above but only managed to get rid of the photo, but not of the text. The same applies to other parts in this section of the page. So the needed space stayed the same.

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BUG

 

So I'm looking at one of my Pocket Queries and looking for the best favorites (sort by favorite) in the Query, so I can go find one with at least 10.

 

Yeah, good luck with that. It's got caches over a hundred miles outside the boundaries of my query showing up.

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Set a radius for the pq so it returns less than the maximum number of caches. Than you can sort the results by favorite points. Otherwise sorting by fps changes the criteria to caches with the most favorite points.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

The change of criteria is still a bug and should be addressed, all I'm doing is sorting an already known dataset.

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The change of criteria is still a bug and should be addressed, all I'm doing is sorting an already known dataset.
Yes and no. My understanding is that the truncation to the first 1000 caches happens at the very end of the PQ process. So if you have criteria that would return 50k caches up to 500 miles away, then the default view is the nearest 1000 caches of those 50k. But if you change the criteria (to the ones with the most Favorites points, or the highest difficulty, or the lowest terrain, or whatever), then that filter is applied to the entire 50k, and the first 1000 caches of that list is presented.

 

Reducing the search radius reduces that 50k caches to the 1000 or so caches that are displayed in the default view, so changing the criteria manipulates that 1000 or so caches, rather than the entire 50k caches.

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