bteam.ca

I've been thinking about this project, but I'm still not sure how we can really help to influence the site to make the changes. It occurred to me that this is a problem common to many community oriented sites. I think there are two obstacles: 1) Collecting suggestions from the members Someone needs to keep a list of the suggestions that we can point to as a faq when people want to make a new suggestion. 2) Prioritizing that work based on difficulty and how it fits into an overall vision. At work, I usually like to prioritize work of this type with a cost/benefit formula (aka benefit / effort). In a non-dictatorship like a community site, we (the users) could vote on the benefit for each suggested task, and the developers could vote on the effort. I usually rank both benefit and effort from 1 to 10, rather than getting into anything more fine-grained than that. It would be cool if there was a plug-in for this forum software that let you manage a list of items (suggestions), let a group of users vote on the benefit, let a different group of users vote on the effort, then display all of this in a table with the following columns: - title of project - description of project - avg benefit vote (number of votes) - avg effort vote (number of votes) - ratio of benefit over effort (also default to ordering the table by this value). A polling feature already exists for this forum software, but it would need to be expanded to handle a list of polls and sort them as above. If we had a plug-in that did something like that, then the developers could easily know what they should be working on next any time they have some time to work on customer requested features. Mike

What a great example. That sounds like a search feature that's nearly useless the way it works now, but could be made useful simply by adding an "order by distance" clause (or somesuch) to the query.

Coming at it from a rewrite (or rather re-design) perspective is indeed a common approach to get people thinking outside their current viewpoint and I think that's a great idea. Should we perhaps break this into two parts? 1) What is the low hanging fruit that can be fixed with minimal effort using the existing code? 2) If a re-write were done, what would that look like? Hopefully, ideas from (2) can migrate back to (1) without actually needing an entire re-write. It'd be a shame to require a full re-write of a production system. None of us would have anything to see of the new progress while that was happening. How can we keep track of and consolidate these ideas into two discrete lists everyone can see and respond to? If we've got that, we could keep pointing at the first list and say "please, can we have these minor changes soon?" The re-write list would merely be a resource for us and the programmers/designers for if and when they ever have time to tackle the bigger projects.

Thanks for moving this thread to a more appropriate forum; I didn't realize this one was here. My personal suggestions are broken into 3 categories: - Dealing with the maps (i.e. where to go next from the map). - Printing details about any caches we're going to go searching for. - Updating logs when we get back. For tonight, let me just make some suggestions about the pdf files we'd print out to use while caching. Please note that these are the way WE would use the pdf's, and may not be the same as other people. Firstly, I like to use only one or at most two pages of paper. I don't want to waste any more paper than absolutely necessary. Sometimes we print the html versions instead of the pdf's because we find they have more information on them (albeit sometimes too much). In particular, I'd like to see these changes to the pdf's: - add "last found" date. We find that important to encourage the kids to keep looking (e.g. "it was just found 5 days ago, it must still be here") - date in yyyy-mm-dd format because I can never remember the difference between 2/3/2007 and 3/2/2007. 2007-03-02 seems so much more consistent - render date for the data (in fine print somewhere on the 1st page) - decrypted hints (yes, I know that's cheating, but we're beginners and we're taking kids with less patience). Perhaps make this an option? - don't waste blank lines. I'd like the hints and logs right under the description (i.e. same page). - smaller fonts so most often everything you need fits onto one page. - however many logs fit onto the last piece of paper (i.e. stop rendering logs when a page boundary is reached).

It's nice to see that the powers that be have acknowledged the performance problems and it bothers them plenty as well. In my experience, applications take time to optimize. It's a non-trivial process, especially with a production system that's been built up over the years. Rather than complaining, I offer them my thanks and wish them luck finding optimizations that help solve the problems as quickly as possible. I know we all look forward to reducing the problems to a manageable level and continuing to try to keep them there as geocaching continues to grow in popularity. Are there perhaps any .net optimization specialists who are geocachers and would love a faster site? Perhaps just inviting them to volunteer their expertise would provide some low hanging fruit. Mike

First of all, thank you to everyone who has contributed to building geocaching.com over the years! I certainly don't want to dis anyone. Your efforts are truly appreciated by us all. I'm new to geocaching, but in the first few weeks, I've been frustrated by the number of mouse clicks I need to make on the web site to do very common repetitive tasks. I've also noticed the information is often displayed in slightly inconsistant ways, or too much paper is wasted trying to make sure I get the information printed that I need when searching for a cache. This is not at all surprising for a site that has grown so quickly and become so popular, but perhaps it's time to step back and do a usability review? Is there any existing forum where topics of this sort can be discussed? I'm willing to bet there are a ton of volunteers out there whose day job includes solving these design issues (myself included) and if we merely solicit their input, we can get lots of free (but good) advice, since it would go towards making their own hobby more enjoyable. Should we start a dedicated forum for this topic? Perhaps even insist that posted have previous design experience? Those are my thoughts for today. Happy easter weekend everyone. Mike