caderoux
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Posts posted by caderoux
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What if they only stored the geocache name, would that still violate the "thing"
Anyway, I think it is great!
You won't get an actual legal opinion posted here on the forum from Groundspeak or anyone else's lawyer.
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Would it be possible to add a feature for Event Caches giving the cache owner (and ONLY the cache owner) the ability to send an e-mail to all those who previously logged a "will attend"?
I would suggest that the ideal method would be to provide an option on the "Post a new log" screen that would be something like "Broadcast to attendees". This would also then be displayed as a log entry among the cache logs so that anyone logging after that point can also see it.
I have 120 folks heading my way for an event and I need to contact them about some of the circumstances. Only about 15 geocachers have the event on their watchlist.
Previously suggested and rejected:
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If you selected 5 No attributes it would return any cache that has ANY of the No attributes. It doesn't need ALL the No attributes
From what I can tell:
I select dogs and money and I get caches with dogs OR money
I select dogs and no money and I get caches with dogs AND no money
I select no dogs and money and I get caches with no dogs AND money
I select no dogs and no money and I get caches with no dogs OR no money
So it looks like all the positives go into one part ORed together and the negatives go into another ORed together.
And if you find a regular user who thinks that way, I'd love to meet them.
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You've got some major cache density there! Man - I have to go out 25 miles to get more than two dozen unfound caches - we've only just passed 500 in our state.
I can only go out 21 miles from that zip code to get 500 caches. 22 miles and it maxes out. No other criteria.
Turn on NoScuba attribute and I get no results at all.
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Think about other event caches you've been to and what you liked about them and what you didn't.
If you have a local website or association, get involved there- those are mainly the people who are going to come - although you'll sometimes get some visitors.
If you feel nervous about getting a good turnout, try emailing the big players in your area and get them on board - our local #1 hider/finder has lots of goodies he gives away and is kind of a celebrity in his own way (everyone wants to beat him up for hints on his diabolical ones.)
If you do any organized activities which take significant time - especially caches - think about how it's going to work very carefully. At a small event, if everyone goes off at different times to do the caches and they take a while, it can be kind of disruptive. When there's a lot of people, it doesn't seem to matter. We must have had over 40 people at our last event, but the trail takes 2 hours to hike. I kayaked along the trail to do the hydro (also about 2 hours) and planned to also do the CLOO game before the event officially started. I had to skip 6 permanent caches which had just been placed, as the event was underway when I finished my paddling. There were people I never saw at the event, because they left to do caches before I got back. Everybody had fun, and with such a large group it really doesn't matter. But you can see that with a small group, the event part could fall apart.
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Might be quirky. Maybe you are running into some PQ limit issues - I know that if you aren't doing a proximity style search, there is (or at least used to be) no explicit ordering in the PQ and so you can get different results depending on how the SQL Server optimizes the execution plan. If your criteria were so broad that more than 500 (or whatever) were returned, some could appear and disappear - but they still need to match the attribute criteria so I wouldn't think that's anything to do with it. Without knowing the exact criteria, I couldn't tell you much more.
In my tests with the $ for example, it was reliable. Regularly my little test query returns 4 caches (watchlist caches I have found - I watch caches I have found until someone else finds them or there is something special about them).
Turning on $ returns no caches. Turning on No$ returns no caches.
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And the wording on the page "Attributes (click to include/exclude certain attributes)" doesn't help, because you can't actually exclude attributes, you can only include negative attributes, which is different.
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I've just started to set up a couple of pocket queries and I'm not getting what I expect.
It's working as designed.
I have a few attributes denied such as "boat", "scuba gear", etc. and that seems to be the problem. If I don't select any attributes to exclude (the icon with the slash through it) I get what I would expect.
All the attributes you select are actually positively required. When you select "No Scuba Required" it is only looking for caches with the "No Scuba Required" attribute. This is subtly different than caches without the "Scuba Required" attribute, which there is no actually way to search for, because leaving it unselected is the same as ignoring that attribute. Because users aren't all using the attributes and because of the limit of 10 attributes, not all caches where scuba is not required are going to be marked the way you would need them to be marked for the system to answer your question the way it is currently designed.
Perhaps I am using the icons/attributes incorrectly? If I don't want to see a chache that, for instance, requires scuba gear I select the scuba gear icon twice so that it shows with a red box with a slash through it, right?
I don't know if there are plans to add a way to invert the search criteria as you want to do. The way it works right now doesn't appear to be intuitive to the average user because you cannot search for the absence of an attribute, although the first impression from the interface is that you can.
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After you run it the first time, why would you ever need to run it again? The caches that you found are already in your GSAK database. You merely have to mark them as 'found'.
Because some of us GSAK users forget to update our finds, especially since I run it at home and work.
Running in both places, you should just backup and restore, but you can simply use a dedicated gmail account for your PQs and have both GSAKs pull them down.
TO ensure you're getting them in your PQs, just bring in an old-style my finds PQ for all states with activity in last 7 days twice a week. If you have more than 500 finds, partition it using the date hidden partition workaround.
If you happen to have had a find on a cache archived after you found it and before your PQ runs, you're out of luck, since TPTB don't want you to have those, but you can just trigger the new style my finds PQ and you've got them.
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After you run it the first time, why would you ever need to run it again? The caches that you found are already in your GSAK database. You merely have to mark them as 'found'.
I don't keep a database, I have no need to. It's all online.
Except when it's not online ;-)
But everyone keeps a database - in your GPS, on paper or a PDA. The question is how you are managing that data.
In addition, there are features which the site doesn't offer which either have to be done manually on paper or with offline tools:
Caches along a route
Intersections and unions
Advanced filters on dates and logs
These are generally facilitated by combining more than one PQ and processing them to produce the desired result.
Whether the intermediate data is thrown away or not (i.e. whatever this maintaining a database thing means), the fact remains that these features like the "my finds" PQ are necessary for people to carry out these processes in a more automated fashion so they can spend time having fun caching instead of laboriously going through each other's list of caches to determine which ones to attempt and which ones are on this route etc.
Unfortunately, a lot of people simply want to have 15,000 caches on their GPS, which is silly. They are asking the wrong question.
One of the questions they should be asking (and the site should be facilitating) is:
How can I load the caches I will have the most fun doing on this adventure in to my GPSr?
It's not a simple question and it doesn't have simple answer, but loading your PQs into GSAK and using its tools with Google Earth does goes a long way towards solving it.
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I also like to find out how many of my finds are now archived or disabled.
The status of all your finds (even archived) are included in the special "my finds" PQ.
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I think there's a greasemonkey which does this.
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Since you have less than 500 finds, you can use regular pocket queries quite effectively (only archived caches are excluded).
Even when you reach more than 500 finds, you can use pocket queries and the date partition workaround.
With regular PQs, you can have them scheduled and not even have to visit the PQ page.
I would advise using GSAK, pulling in all your full queries first and then setting your queries to only activity in last 7 days, which will result in much more efficient PQs after your first load.
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Pig me too.
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This seemed to be happening a lot last week, too.
If it doesn't show up on the page of the cache, then you'll have to re-drop it with another log.
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2 is my limit now, been burned too many times by missing links,
it's not worth the bother
That's why I made all my stages but the final one virtual and made it into a puzzle.
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Superb local multi - http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...0b-7b244e716b39 - each stage is very original - entire cache can be done in about a half-mile circuit from parking - only 6 finders in about a year.
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However, Groundspeak is sending me caches that I don't need. I don't know I don't need them until I get them, but Groundspeak does and they send them anyway.
Not very effecient.
I must be missing something. I have all my PQs set with the 'is active' flag and I 'never' see anything that I don't want to see.
Only objection I have in the effective/efficient arena is that in my opinion it's too many mouse clicks to add something to my ignore list. The feature works fine though once I add something to it.
Yet, the caches you receive over and over again aren't changing very often. This results in waste in server processing, bandwidth, etc. If you only received changes, it would be more efficient for everyone in the global scheme of things, but if you throw away old data over and over again, you can't receive PQs of just changes.
Right now, people who throw away their PQs can't help conserve these resources, while people who maintain databases can help conserve the resources.
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I admire your tenacity, CR, but for some reason, everyone wants to keep getting huge PQs and stressing out the servers.
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what are these little tiny black magnet containers used for other than geo caching??.. and where can i get them without paying an arm and leg for them...
When you buy them, they aren't really empty containers...
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I'm not sure, but I think some of those might violate some TOU rules...
You're probably right. The GPX files have Groundspeak tags in them.
I can't get to the TOU right now because of the server issues.
Can someone Markwell me any update to this old post/thread regarding the TOU and data versus format?: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...5entry1083345
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I can't even get the home page to come up. Everything shows a busy error. Those servers must be getting slammed from somewhere. DDOS maybe?
It's called "Friday". People are checking on caches to do over the weekend.
Exactly as they are told to do. Wouldn't want 'em goin' out with stale data, would we?
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There are containers that are quite popular with us here in Pennsylvania. They are called "Mr.Magnetos" You can find them for anywhere between 1-3 dollars. But if you know the secret you can actually get them for much cheaper, about 45 cents.
So . . . are you going to share the secret or are you just teasing . . . ?
JohnTee
google search: magnetic blinky
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It's not just about numbers. All the stages should still be interesting in some way, right? If they are sufficiently interesting, then they should merit a traditional cache anyway (unless it's a .1 proximity issue).
A benefit of individual caches, is that if it eventually degrades and stages are lost, there are still the individual traditional hunting experiences on each remaining cache.
Also, since many people (especially visitors) will do traditionals and avoid multis and puzzles, you will get a lot more frequent activity on your stages so you'll know better the problems when they arise with a particular stage as opposed to a single multi which is less-frequently attempted.
Event Cache Feature
in Website
Posted
You can make an open evite URL which anyone can go to without having to have their email on the guest list. They will have to sign up with evite in order to get any emails, though.