releasethedogs

Yeah because that would solve a lot.... Some how she was INSIDE the truck of the tree.

Just noticed that the Republic of The Gambia is incorrectly listed as simply "Gambia" in the map view in statistics. Please change the name to the offical short version by adding the word "the". In case you are wondering the reason why it is "The Gambia" and not simply "Gambia", the country is named for the Gambian river which flows through the country. Thanks.

Ohhhhhh. So if i can get the entire The Duggar Family to come that would be 21 in the log book but only 1 "attended" log online. I get it now, thanks.

This is a funny and great idea.

I always thought Mega Events were 500+ people but lately I have seen a few mega events with less than 500 "will attend" logs and even less "attended" logs. One cache has about half the needed "attended" logs. I thought that it must have been changed so I looked at the knowledge books and they still say 500+ people is a Mega Event. Are the knowledge books out of date? Was this changed? If not why do these caches have mega event status when they don't qualify?

Well they can take part of the 30 million they are not going to spend on maps and give one or two people a job. Because they have wretched PR and a bad attitude. Does not change the fact that the maps were part of their service and changing it to an inferior product devalues their product as a whole. If they stopped giving you fresh garlic bread at your favorite italian diner and instead started giving you garlic toast made with wounder bread it would devalue their restaurant as a whole. It does not matter if the garlic bread was free or not.

Yeah OC sucks right now but it sucks because no one uses it. If most people cross listed their caches then it would not suck as bad. This is no excuse. If you think you may change your mind about a product/service then you don't announce it. Once you announce it then you are obligated to make the product/service a reality. That is poor business on the part of Groundspeak to announce a project then abandon it. On the same time is very damaging to the credibility of Groundspeak when they have the apathetic, uncaring, antagonistic attitude that they have. They don't even attempt to have some resemblance of Public Relations with their customers. As another user articulated, that they needed to: 1. Say in advance what was coming. 2. Explain the reason for the change. 3. Acknowledge that the transition was going to be very difficult. 4. Apologize for the inconvenience. 5. Assure us that they are working diligently to improve the situation. As for having setbacks and it taking long to implement something, I think It goes with out saying that if they explained the situation their users would understand.

They need to explore other aspects of geocaching that can raise revenue for them and stop wasting money for stuff people don't want. People never wanted souvenirs. They commissioned tons of art that has not even gone live. Waste of money. People did not want challenges, they wanted virtual caches back. Groundspeak goes ahead and makes challenges, wasting money in the progress. Obviously there is a market for virtual caches. People pay money for weapons and swords in video games. Why not charge premium members 10.00 to list a virtual cache. 10 bucks is enough to discourage people from listing only things they care about while still making them a possibility. I know I have a few things Id pay to make a virtual cache. sure you do.

What is nearly unforgivable is GS's total lack of PR. As users above noted they sprung this huge change on us with out warning and pretended like it was no big deal. Then they ignore the problem and their users instead of (at least pretending they are) caring and communicating with their users.

Because we pay you for the service not google. duh. For example pretend you like the tuna sandwich at your local diner. The tuna is very high quality and it is the best in town. Then one day you come in, pay the same price you always had and the tuna sandwich you loved so much is different -- it is still tuna but it is of much less quality. Who would you complain to? The diner? The diner's tuna supplier? Of course you would complain to the diner to do something about it. It is the diner's responsibility to keep offering a quality product (or reduce the price of the inferior product) or the customers will simply move on. Just as it is groundspeaks' responsibility to keep offering the same or better service. For instance... when booking a hotel how many people pay extra for hotels if they have free wifi and free breakfast? Now pretend you are a regular in a hotel for a long time that offered these services, then one day they were gone (or worse quality). You would feel that that experience was cheapened compared to that last time even though these services were free. This is the same for geocaching.com, when you gave us lame maps it cheapens the website as a whole because we get an inferior product at the same cost. What makes the bad nearly unforgivable is that Groundspeak seems content to ignore us instead of having an actual dialog with us. Then, when you do talk to us you blame it on suppler of the service you based your product on. It is not our job to complain to google, YOU should be doing that and/or finding a solution that does not suck. A solution that your customers want. While you are doing this, use your facebook and twitter accounts, that is what they are for.

I think this is pretty much proof they need to bring back real virtual caches.

You have to know the GC code. Once they are archived there is no way to search for them. Best bet is to look at some ones finds who you know has found the cache.

I think it is sad goundspeak sank so much money into making challenges when it was not what were were promised or wanted. Sure wish you had that money now, then maybe we could have some decent maps.

Is their another source? Greasemonkey says it is corrupt.

I hate the new maps but will learn to live with them if they will give us some thing we really want (REAL virtual caches). other than that make maps a premium membership. If you want to cache for free you can, but you don't get to see the caches on a map. If you do pay you can have google maps back. This will lower the amount of hits and make it affordable for GS to offer it. furthermore GS NEEDS to have an actual dialog with its customers, no other company on earth would ignore its paying users if they were so upset yet GS ALWAYS does. Please acknowledge there is a problem and keep us updated on what you are doing to fix it.

Ha! You're an optimist. I think GS is terrible about keeping it's PAID users in the know. He also promised to bring back virtual caches in instead instated faux virtual caches "challenges", some thing NO ONE WANTED. Agree. There are some local Management Areas that have loads of trails that Google doesn't show. A local hiker/biker added many of them to the OSM! Perhaps GC.com can post a Knowledge Book article (or how-to video) on how to add data to OSM. We are all out in the woods, probably storing our tracks as a matter of course. I bet in a couple of weeks us cachers can make significant improvements in the off-road portions of themaps. I was thinking the same thing. In fact, someone could even go out and place a cache, create a track log while out placing it, upload the tracklog to OSM, then submit the cache listing and once it's published finders will have a route to follow all the way to the cache. Of course, the challenge for the CO would be to hide the cache such that even with a route to follow all the way to GZ, it would still be hard to find. To get idea of the potential impact that a small community of people can have on OSM consider the following. On Jan. 12, 2010 there was a devastating 7.0 earthquake that struck Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. This is what the OSM maps looked like prior to the earthquake: A call for assistance from the OSM mapping community was sent out asking help in improving the map data to aid NGS and otehr international agencies respond to the crisis. Within 3 days there were over 800 edits made. Here is what the map looked like on Jan. 15, 2010. Great! All we need is a Global Earthquake and we will be good to go. Furthermore, I don't know why they just don't make the maps a premium feature. Cut out all the people that want to play for free from viewing the maps and it just might get us out of the top .35% that google wants to charge. When you think about it maps are nice, but they are not required anymore then a .GPX file is. They are a premium feature. Make maps (with google) a premium feature and cut out maps for people who want to play for free.

Huh? Re: Midlinda, never been, but it looks like there's a paved road going straight to it from Keflavik. Rent a car and you're there. Of course I can rent a car to get there, i mean by public transport. Well, then. You told me. How dare I try to help. Figure it out on your own, grumpy pants. Do not mean to be grumpy, just specifying what I met because I was obviously unclear about what I needed. No hostility intended.

Huh? Re: Midlinda, never been, but it looks like there's a paved road going straight to it from Keflavik. Rent a car and you're there. Of course I can rent a car to get there, i mean by public transport.

I'll be going to Iceland in late march/early april so i was excited when i saw this thread. Can anyone tell me how to get to MIDLINDA (GC2DK2E) also, if i make an event do you think people will come? I try to make events to meet local cachers when I travel but have not had the greatest luck with it in the past.

Any one in Slovakia who can grab my TB out of cache http://coord.info/GC1V7A2

Yeah i have all cache with in 10 miles, except one. :-)

i think the compass is rubbish. I use the map with two data fields. The fields I use are signal accuracy and distance to next cache.

I flew to Japan from Korea where I live and then took a bus for a few hours for a webcam cache. I needed it for a milestone.

bump

I just manually check my profile against the badges and award it to my self on my profile if i have met the challenge.