ChileHead

I'd support raising the rates in this way: Charge $5 (or whatever) for each challenge cache submitted, regardless of whether it was published or not. Don't raise rates so the players who are not interested in challenges have to pay more. They did. It's been figured out, and the final details are being worked. The first announcement here makes it clear they are coming back very very soon. If they weren't coming back, the announcement would have been quite a bit shorter.

Why would you care? If somebody bothers you to add an attribute or something, feel free to ignore them. I can't imagine the number of people emailing cache owners to add something to their cache page will be significant.

The more ridiculous a challenge, the more likely somebody is going to come up with a cache that fulfills somebody's need for some obscure combination of cache-name/attribute/diff/terrain/whatever. A challenge's primary purpose should be to set a goal that a cacher aspires to meet, not to provide power for an over controlling cache owner to yield over another.

I think that for future challenge caches the requirements have to be specified exactly - e.g. 15 caches with the flashlight attribute or with the flashlight attribute and some other set of additional attributes etc. The drawback of this is approach certainly that it allows for much less flexibility and the fact that the set of attributes is somehow quite arbitrary and for many aspects no attributes exist is a further inconvenience. So far for example people argued that the >10km attribute suffices as it is enough for filtering out caches and that further information can be provided in the description. The argument does not any longer hold when it comes to automatic challenge checkers. That will make the review process much easier and demonstrable, and will make proving to the cache owner that you completed it much easier. The example of night caches ... how else can you determine it's really a night cache other than by an attribute? How does the CO decide it qualifies? The attribute makes it a lot clearer.

Search "Wow factor, virtuals".

OK, now that one is a good example of a cache where I'd wish there was a Geochecker. It's listed as a low difficulty, yet I have no clue how to "solve" it. My first step is to try the coords I have available to be sure they are not in fact GZ. Nope, there's no Geochecker. Now I'm stuck. If I'm super-excited about having the answer, I'll contact some sources (CO, whatever). If I guess the bridge in the photo is not off-limits*, I may poke around there when I'm in the area. Otherwise, to the bottom of the pile it goes. *I'm very bad at guessing whether a place is off-limits. Most around here probably understand how my puzzles reveal themselves, usually more on the tech side. Click the image and "explore"

I concede checkers sometimes aren't needed, but I find them convenient to confirm I've copied the coordinates from wherever they were displayed into text. Instead of just typing the answer into my database, I can copy what the checker echoed, thus ensuring there were no mistakes. A checker can also alert me that I've followed a red herring, imagined or designed, that led me to a plausible answer that, nevertheless, wasn't actually the puzzle's solution. I've also noticed some COs will provide the checker just to avoid telegraphing that the answer will come in a form that doesn't need confirmation. Here's an easy one to solve: http://coord.info/GC5BXMY How would a coordinate checker possibly help, when the coords are clear when you find it?

Many of my puzzles are the type that when solved, the solution tells you the coordinates. A coordinate checker would be worthless.

Did you sign it? If not, I'd say no. That is a basic rule of geocaching, that your name has to be in the logbook. I have spotted caches from the ground that are high up that I don't claim because my name isn't in the book. However, I have claimed finds on caches where a monkey friend retrieves the logbook and I sign in before the logbook is returned (which is lame I admit.)

I have no idea what the concern is with the cache. What bothers you?

Agreed 100% Hans Yes please! I don't see myself using it at all without that option, as the next step would be to make a PQ.

I've put out a lot of caches, with a variety of D/T ratings. It used to be that there was a considerable investment of time and money to start geocaching. You had to find out about it, decide if you wanted to invest $200 or more into a hand held GPS, figure out the technological bits about loading GPSs into the device, etc ... Placing caches was done for other people who had the time and money to get into this hobby. There were almost no people of the sort "I think I'll try geocaching this afternoon". The barrier to entry was too high. Smart phones have made this a thing of the past. This is a good thing. It's also a bad thing, as too many people who haven't bothered to read what geocaching is about will find a cache and not replace it, not replace it properly, take a TB and not know what to do with it, or will just find a few caches near their house and trash them. I, as a cache owner, appreciate having different tools at my disposal that I can use to limit who can see my cache. I try to avoid making caches PMO in general. I will if, as happens every couple years, a cache thief blows through the area. Most times we believe it's a young kid who discovered the geocaching app and just wants to be a jerk. Besides making caches PMO, I have the option of bumping up my D/T when appropriate, or only hiding caches that are a bit harder, so that my caches don't become training grounds for new cachers. I think it's a good thing to limit what caches can be seen through the app based on membership level. Other options could be time based as well. Open up higher D/T after they have been members more than {TBD} weeks or months, or after they have found more than {TBD} caches. This lets the newbie cachers find the easy caches near their home to get started, and once they have become more committed via time & effort, more caches open up.

To save space (and time), the group that I sometimes cache with after breakfast at Durfs usually signs in "Durfs 9" (or however many people we have.) So far nobody has given us any problem for doing so. If the cache page requested individual log entries, changes are we wouldn't have read that anyway, depending on the cache type. So iffy on whether I'd bother honoring their request.

Is there a way of making lists available for offline use, like you can in the old app? Maybe I'm overlooking where this is?

I set my time zone to London, looked at your profile, and now it shows it as 3/01. I bet you have your time zone set incorrectly.

Go here: https://www.geocaching.com/account/settings/preferences What do you see for your Time Zone? I wonder if you have it set to England, or something like that, that is ahead, and all the date/time is being formatted for your preferred time zone.

Serious question - why does it matter? I can see wanting the souvenir, but how is the date relevant at all? I'm also seeing 2/29 as your date.

The game of "reviewer battleship" happens so much I even made a cache poking fun at it, where you have to play an actual game of battleship in order to find the cache: http://coord.info/GC2XBTG

The search page is nice, but until it can generate PQs I don't find it useful. I played with it when it was first release, but haven't used it since. Everything, and I mean everything, I do is based around pocket queries. My new landing page is search, but I probably wouldn't have noticed it without these release notes as I usually go to geocaching.com/my as my default.

As far as I know, I haven't used any html/bbcode in any of my old logs, so I won't be going back to check them. But it would be nice if there was some way for the system to notify me if any of my old logs have unintentional markdown syntax, just so that I could go back and verify/fix them when needed. Or better yet just have the flag requested so that old logs are rendered as plain text. But I won't be losing any sleep over any old logs that might have wonky unintended formatting.

I was in England, France, Germany and Italy this summer with a pitiful bit of German and French, also native English speakers. Because geocaching was not the primary reason for trip, I only loaded up my GPS with traditional caches. In most cases, I didn't need the cache description in English (though many had it anyway.) If I needed a hint, I could try and translate the hint while out, but usually didn't bother.

Their implementation is likely some sort of .NET implementation. The 3rd parties out there likely use a combination of java, php, node.js, C#/.NET. There is no implementation that would work with everybody, and their implementation probably has geocaching.com specific ties into back end services that they wouldn't want to expose. The nice thing about markdown is that it degrades nicely. On a device (such as a GPS), I'd much rather see "I'm so great, I was *FTF* on the cache" than "I'm so great, I was <i>FTF</i> on the cache". So getting the "raw" logs is the best way of handling this, as the 3rd party software stack is likely to be completely different than geocaching.com's.

I can understand being concerned about existing logs using legacy markup and how they render. A switch to render the old way if last modification date was older than yesterday. But I don't understand your comment about plain/dull logs. Why would the removal of html/bbcode impact your ability to write longer logs?

Actually no, they don't have to understand markdown. The intent with Markdown is that it degrades nicely. That is, it displays in a readable format on web pages, mobile, and hand held devices. They don't need to understand markdown. If they do understand markdown, then it's a bonus and you get the extra formatting.