ChileHead

Then don't. This has been working for me for about 2 years though (whenever the HTML was first added.) So yes, it will break at some point in the future, but this is the best I have to offer.

I'm going to assume that a custom color preferences for email will never happen, for good reason. Any company wants control of their brand. Brand includes logos, fonts, colors, sizes, etc ... If preferences were allowed to send out arbitrary garish combinations of colors and fonts, that harms the corporate brand. It can be printed or screen snapped or forwarded. Anything coming out in any sort of media format from a company should conform to the brand. Besides brand issues, there is also a potential issue of performance. If every email sent had to go through the user's preferences and create a custom email, I can see that being problematic. However, a text/html option might not be a problem. A company has control over the text format, assuming that they want their brand represented in text (cnn does, apple does, depending on the content being sent.) The system would have to still go through the user's preference for email, but only 1 of 2 formats needs to be generated.

I have a solution that will work for some people. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=336887

I haven't seen any comments from HQ on the change. I've been writing (software engineer) user interfaces for 28 years, working extensively with user experience (UX) engineers the entire time ... I even married one. Many times I'll see what our UX team is asking, and I think it's stupid. It doesn't meet my needs, I think it's less efficient or looks stupid. Or more selfishly, it's hard to implement and maintain. It's non standard. But you know what? Most of the time the UX team is right. They spend countless hours running usability studies with many types of users. They figure out what is the best option for the most people. The devices my company makes have users that are occasional walk up users, to dedicated 40 hour a week users. Some of our devices cost well over $1 million USD, so we take usability seriously. But we are a $19 billion company, and usually have the funds to spend on studies. The UX team has a difficult job figuring out what works for a variety of user types. Nothing is going to be perfect. If you make a system real easy for a casual user, the power users complain because the work flow suffers. If you optimize for the work flow, then a casual walk up user is going to be confused. I'm assuming in this case that the UX team has run tests, have gotten input from focus groups. I don't like the result, but I'm probably in the 1%. As are most people in the forums here - the 1% that have been geocaching for a while, understand the ins and outs, get a ton of geocaching.com email, and are basically power users. For the rest of the 99%, they have few caches and get few logs. For those logs they get, the UX team and senior management have decided (my speculation) that this change is a positive one. All that said, I'd still like an option for html/text for us power users.

That's what I would like, but I don't have input. Most corporate emails such as newsletters, weekly sales, receipts, etc ... are heavily marked up and branded. That makes sense in most cases. Notifications of replies and new topic on most online forums are text, or mostly text. Cnn.com breaking news is also text, at least that's what I get - I can't remember if I set up preferences for it. Personally I consider a log notification on one of my caches to be in this category - it's a notification of change, and for full context I can click the link. I'd rather not have all the formatting and branding in this sort of email. In the weekly geocaching.com email and newsletters and such, that makes perfect sense to have a nicely formatted note with graphics, color, branding, etc ... That's whey I first wrote this little google apps script. I know there are (were) a few people using it when I made it available. It's not a perfect solution as it does require a gmail account, though by having notifications sent to gmail you can forward them onto your real email if you aren't a gmail user. But that's more of a pain, which is why I didn't detail the logic for that.

A number of people would like a way of reformatting geocaching log email to get rid of some of the white space to make it easier to read on mobile. If you use gmail for your email, I have a solution. This ends up using about 1/3 the vertical space. This all runs on google's servers, so the reformatting will work if you read your mail via web, desktop, or mobile. Even if you don't use gmail, you can use this solution with an extra couple steps involving forwarding, but I won't get into that because of the number of variables. The entire set up should take about 5-10 minutes. This effectively gives you a text or html option for your [LOG] emails. Note: this is an unofficial solution of course. It works for me, but I take no responsibility for any deleted mail. I initially created the script 2 years ago or so and have used it off and on. Setting up gmail: Creating the script: The script (copy/paste this as directed above): function process() { var labelName="ToBeStripped"; var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName(labelName); var threads = label.getThreads(); for (var i=0; i<threads.length; i++) { var msgs = threads[i].getMessages(); for (var m=0; m<msgs.length; m++) { var msg = msgs[m]; if (! msg.isInTrash()) { var body = msg.getBody(); var subject = msg.getSubject(); var textBody = ""; var lines = body.split("\n"); for (var l=0; l<lines.length; l++) { var line = lines[l]; if (line.indexOf("Logged by") != -1 || line.indexOf("has a new log") != -1 || line.indexOf("Log Type") != -1 || line.indexOf("Date:") != -1 || line.indexOf("Location:") != -1 || line.indexOf("Name:") != -1 || line.indexOf("Distance:") != -1 || line.indexOf("Created by:") != -1 || line.indexOf("Type:") != -1) textBody = textBody + line; else if (line.indexOf("Log</a>:</strong>") != -1) textBody = textBody + lines[l+1]; } // textBody and htmlBody are the same for now, but both stripped down versions of the original GmailApp.sendEmail('YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS_HERE', subject, textBody, { htmlBody: textBody }); GmailApp.moveMessageToTrash(msg); } } } }; What is all this doing: Results: Before: After:

There are various tools available online to do this, such as: html->markdown http://domchristie.github.io/to-markdown/ bbcode->markdown http://jondum.github.io/BBCode-To-Markdown-Converter/ Might be nice for geocaching.com to host something this on a tools page.

I see new cachers placing caches in areas that they are excited about. Maybe their coordinates are off, maybe the container is not water proof. But I'd much rather find a cache like this from a newbie, than wait until they get corrupted by the bulk of lousy caches out there and decide hiding a lamp post cache is what people want. I hid my first cache a couple weeks after I started, after only having 6 finds or so. 13 years later it's still there (after being maintained a few times), and people enjoy the 3 mile hike to get it. I'm glad there was no such rule when I started.

There have been no plans announced that I've seen to change from using HTML in cache descriptions. That will stay HTML, and I'd be very surprised to see any future plans to move that to markdown. There are plenty of plugins available with firefox and chrome to give you the ability to turn text input fields into WYSIWYG editors. You can do that now without any site changes.

Sorry, I'm not following. How does the ability to add links or formatting relate to TFTC logs? None of the changes with Markdown impact your ability to write a log as unique as possible, conditions, etc ... Sure you can't add rainbow colors to your log as far as I know, but nothing else has really changed.

Only 1 in 20 logs would have any formatting. Most of these have very little use of it. Seeing a few random formatting codes "raw" is unlikely to detract from your reading experience. Maybe I'm in the minority, but when somebody strings together a bunch of their logs via links I'm extremely unlikely follow them. I can see if you were following a friend's adventures and they made links from one log to another it might be interesting. But this is pretty rare.

Yep. That's my objection in a nutshell. Those who only log TFTC (or object to being asked to write even that much) won't care. I try to contribute in the form of logs that people actually enjoy reading. Ugly detracts from that. Edward For logs people wrote last month or last year, barely anybody would ever notice the raw formatting codes. Yeah sure some get read, but the majority of logs read are very likely only the most recent. Very few logs I've seen make any extensive use of formatting, so if I came across a few random bold or red or whatever format tags, it's unlikely to detract from the experience of the reader. Going forward, the markdown syntax gives you pretty much everything you had before, so you can still write elaborate formatted logs if you desire. I don't disagree that a way to keep legacy logs looking the way they do would be preferred, but if that's not in the plan then not much is lost.

Your links will still be there, but they will look like <a href="http://somestatspage/.....">My Stats</a> or [url]http://somestatspage/...[/url] Not pretty, but if the challenge cache owner wants to verify, they will have everything they need, they just can't click the link they have to copy/paste it instead.

I don't use any styling, so I wouldn't want my logs to accidentally go through any transform. The best option, though it would require some additional work, is to add a manual migrate tool to the site. Those small percentage of users that care about formatting, could select the migrate tool and it would identify the logs that have html/BB formatting in them, and then present the logs in their before/after, with an option to just go ahead and approve all. If it messes up logs, it only does so for those that went through the process after a confirmation.

Technically MacOS is a customization of BSD UNIX, not linux. Linux is an independent distribution of a UNIX system. BSD predates linux by about 15-20 years.

I prefer not to bring the bathroom graffiti reading crowd to my caches. Every year I put out an "Ornaments" cache, where I place about 60 home made geocache ornaments (ranging from little wooden ammo cans to light posts and movable lamp skirts.) Because I have a limited supply of ornaments, due to limited time, I want to make sure my friends get a shot at them first. So I list the cache on our "breakfast club" facebook group for a week or so before publishing it for all to see. Others release caches in various ways for various reasons, all personal choice and ethical.

Your local drug dealer? Seriously, I bought mine at amazon. Lots of sizes. And cheap.

You don't need a cell phone. When you go to http://www.geocaching.com/notify/ to set them up, you enter an email address. The email address can be your regular email address, or the email address of your phone (format varies by provider.)

Greedy, really? Yup, the New England Patriots are greedy for continuing to beat everybody else. Darn Brady. They should stop trying so hard so the Buffalo Bills have a shot some year. No, he's a guy that wants to "win" this unofficial competition called FTF. If the FTF hounds didn't try, then there would be very little fun in beating them. How does that take the fun away? I'm pretty sure he's not taking the caches away preventing people from finding them. If you play the side FTF game, then you have to play with the big dogs.

It's all about, in my opinion at least, finding the boundaries of what makes or doesn't make a good challenge. If benchmarks are ok, then so would the Canadian equivalent: http://www.Waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=ebb67127-d531-4798-9d17-c6b77f235c49 There is no way this survey could list the complete exhaustive list of challenges, so it looks like they have categorized the basic types.

Seriously? I think the survey is an attempt to gather information on categories or types of challenges. What applies to states would apply to provinces.

iOS and Android devices have accessibility options built in. On Android, I can triple tap if I have the option to zoom in on the screen by quite a bit, and scroll with a two-finger drag. I tried this with the geocaching app and was able to make the font quite big. I assume that the iOS geocaching app would work in the same way. Basically - it should just work. The OS platform takes care of this already, and apps should behave nicely without any additional work.

I'm more concerned with people going out every day to buy groceries.

I've had a few trackable codes get onto some scumbags list that gets passed around at events, and then they get logged a bunch of times, and then I have to delete. I have no idea what game those people are playing, it's not what I'm playing. Why log something you've never seen? I just don't get it. There's an opportunity for HQ to come up with a selling a trackable tag that can only be logged via their app by using a cheap NFC tag. That would be pretty cool and much harder to cheat at.

I've seen it mean one of two things: - a couple feet of snow won't be a problem when looking for the cache - the area is accessible during winter, meaning the roads aren't closed Best to always read the cache description just to be sure.