sTeamTraen

Oh. There it is. Well, it wasn't there earlier.

The title says it all: the dropdown list of cache types on the advanced search page does not include a "Wherigo cache" option. I was trying to get an idea of the growth of Wherigo caches, and this would have been a relatively straightforward way to do it.

By the way, the best place to ask about Earwigo issues is in the dedicated Google Group --- you can find the joining instructions for this in the original e-mail that I sent you when you signed up.

I'm still here - just been a bit busy (see here for some of what I've been doing instead of writing stuff in the Groundspeak forums!). In fact I collected the data for an update in October 2012, then apparently forgot to post it. Today I've made another one. So you can see the growth from October 2012 from today immediately, or play with the formulas to get the growth since 2011, or any previous date (see the hidden columns). The spreadsheet link, as always, is here.

Standard use of that word (appears legit but actually bogus) would seem to indicate your preference for the return of the number, which in the rest of the text, appears not to be the case. How about those who just want to ascertain whether their regular logging procedure (especially when using 3rd party software and macros and all of that) isn't creating any incorrect results? Especially if the divergence between found/unique is growing or jumps quickly, it's a red flag for a process issue. Correct. Add one more semi-puritan to the list here. Whenever I see my unique and total count diverge, I know I've done something wrong, and look to see what I have to do to put it right. Since I started logging my finds from Field Notes, these kinds of problems have become rarer, but they can be a acute smart in the lumbar region to locate six months later with several thousand finds in total.

I would be fairly amazed if that's the case. Charlenni is a long-standing Earwigo fan and one of the elements of Earwigo that he promotes is the ability to do accented characters. Earwigo has a few users in Japan now; I don't know if anyone's made a Japanese-language cartridge, but it ought to work without any problems. A nice challenge for the robustness of the builder/compiler/player.

I still have Windows XP (like quite a few people). On IE8 (the last IE version compatible with XP), trackable maps open centred on Seattle, regardless of there the TB has been. On Firefox on the same PC, the map opens correctly. Not a major problem, but perhaps the code can be made more bullet-proof.

Yes, all 9 of them are. Thanks!

In my statistics, the numbers for several countries don't match the numbers in the "My Finds" pocket query. This is after correcting for locationless caches. I have: France: Stats=3204, MFPQ=3205 (difference = 1) Germany: Stats=2747, MFPQ=2755 (difference = 6) United States: Stats=329, MFPQ=330 (difference = 1) Sweden: Stats=4, MFPQ=5 (difference = 1) The total in the My Finds Pocket Query is my correct total of finds, so the error would appear to be in the Statistics. When I add up the Statistics per-country totals (7635) and then add in the Locationless caches I've found (74), I come up with a total of 7709, which is 9 less than my current total. Are there known bugs with specific types of caches or logs that might be causing this?

Premium membership has always been $30/year. Of late there have been variants on this price as Groundspeak tries to find the best way to market something which is internally priced in dollars, but the base US price has been $30 since 2001/2. So I'm not sure how you managed to pay only £10 - maybe you only bought a 3-month trial, or you got a discount code - but any increases in the Sterling price are due to VAT, exchange rates, fluctuating bank/credit card charges, and the whole "what should we charge for this in market X" question which all companies that operate internationally have to go through. (Compare the US and UK price of any high-tech gadget!)

My IP address is xx.yy.zz.2. When I send a message to another player, and the site warns me that my address is being logged, it says "Your IP address (xx.yy.zz.2%1) will be logged." I'm guessing that this might be a formatting problem caused by the 1-digit last number of the address, but don't have immediate access to an IP address that ends with a 2- or 3-digit number to compare.

We're still there. You can re-apply with the link from your Earwigo welcome e-mail if you have lost access (or send mean e-mail via my profile).

If I make a payment in US$ with my card my bank charges me 4%, with a minimum of 1 Euro. So the "discrimination" against me, currently 7% (see below), is reduced to 3%. (Paypal doesn't charge an explicit commission; it just gives me a lousy exchange rate.) Also note that in many European countries, especially Germans, a lot of people do not have credit cards, or debit cards other than the (internationally useless) Maestro. Spain charges 21% VAT (and I doubt if an independent Catalonia would charge much less). So if the Euro drops below $1.21 you'd be paying less (to Groundspeak, before tax) than Americans do. With the Euro currently at $1.30 that means you're apparently going to give up the benefits of a PM because you're currently paying €2.20 a year more than a bunch of other people whom you've never met. It's up to you, I guess... Here's a little experiment. Go into C&A, or H&M, or another Europe-wide clothes store. Look at the price label in any item. You'll probably find it has different prices for 6 or 7 different countries, including many in the Euro zone. Do you walk out of the store when you see that, because someone in France might be able to buy the same T-shirt for 2 Euros less? Or do you walk round naked in protest at how these evil companies are discriminating against you?

So you're saying that you believe that the company's director of finance, a qualified attorney, came in here and told lies in a public forum in a way that could be used against him in a criminal prosecution for VAT fraud? Would you perhaps like to consider for the briefest moment the remote possibility that you might not know everything that's going on in this situation? Groundspeak hasn't asked or told me to write anything. (But of course, you can decide that I'm lying about that too if you want.) You may have noticed that one of the company owners has already explained the situation, in considerable detail, earlier in this thread. You can either imply that he's lying, or accept that this is probably a complex situation for a US company to be in for the first time and that they might not understand everything. As far as I know Bryan has pretty much a 100% record of telling the truth when he posts in these forums, so I know which of those two alternatives I'm assuming to be correct right now. HMRC is presumably fully aware of Groundspeak's VAT situation, since Groundspeak has just registered for VAT in the UK with HMRC, and is probably discussing the ins and outs of details like publishing the VAT number with them right now. And asking any other country's tax agency will result in them saying "Well, in what country is this US company registered for VAT? The UK? Well, talk to HMRC then".

You'll have to point me at the press release where Groundspeak announce their intention to "play with the big boys". I just see a small, family-owned, cash-based company that has a nice near-monopoly on something that people apparently find it hard to do without. If people choose to project that onto some fictitious cigar-smoking evil capitalist with a shiny top hat, that's really their problem.

Must have taken a while to type all that - oh the irony Yes, I was aware of that. But compared to the time it took to read the thread, it was peanuts. I would call the first three points "typical Groundspeak"; they've been every bit "as good" (cough) at communicating this as they are with every other major change they make, as Bryan acknowledged. I think your last point is a little unfair because I don't see what they could have to add, and the purpose of the forums isn't for Groundspeak to discuss all their internal details anyway. As the "experts" who flung mud for the first 3 or 4 pages of this forum have been finding out, understanding how VAT works in cases like this isn't just a case of reading and quoting a couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia. Personally I would like to believe that this move heralds an actual Groundspeak marketing presence on the ground in Europe, hopefully with some input to Seattle to say "Guys, we don't do it like this over here". Groundspeak really still is basically a Mom-and-Pop place, with some very good professional help in many places but with a lot still to learn. "Proper" start-ups with $20 million of vulture capital funding buy themselves worldwide marketing experience early on (and usually end up firing the founders shortly after the IPO); this is a completely different business model.

Geocaching attracts a lot of people to whom details are important. Unfortunately, Groundspeak's rather pragmatic approach to countries (I could go on for hours about the possible interpretations of the various French overseas territories) does not perfectly solve all possible issues, such as the Ireland problem (incidentally, someone noted that FIFA recognises Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland for soccer, but all Ireland competes as one at Rugby Union), the Palestine problem, the question of whether Kosovo is a state or a rebel province of Serbia, or just stuff like the name of the country that the US calls Macedonia and others call "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (including the quote marks, and alphabetised under "T" for "The"). I don't know whether it's reassuring or not to know that the United Nations hasn't managed to sort most of those out yet either. This site is about a hobby, not trying to focus every single problem of the existence of 7 billion people into a couple of dropdown lists. Not caring about these issues in general is probably not a good thing, but not caring about them when geocaching is what makes geocaching such a great way to unwind.

I never cease to be amazed by the degree to which people on here are prepared to spend hours of their valuable leisure time arguing about utterly trivial matters. I see people who probably hand over thousands of dollars or Euros or pounds a year in tax, over which they have essentially no control, moaning and whinging about a $3 difference between people in two countries as some form of discrimination, as if Groundspeak has just publicly announced their support for Apartheid or something. Even if this difference were not perfectly explicable by the fact that Groundspeak is assuming the entire exchange rate risk, all this means is that some people in one country are paying a couple of dollars more for their premium membership than those in another. Even supposing that Groundspeak were doing this following long and extensive market research, with Jeremy and Bryan cackling away like C. Montgomery Burns about their findings that European customers are so stupid and gullible that they can't spot that $1 + VAT is a little bit less than one Euro - even if that were the case (which I don't believe it is, for a moment), what's actually wrong with that? Have you looked at Apple's pricing for smartphones, or Samsung's? Do they take the totally arbitrary, ends-in-99.99 dollar retail price from the US market and convert it to Euros and every other country in the world to 5 decimal places, every day? Of course not. Do any of you ever go to a supermarket? Have you not noticed that the price of everything is changed almost every day, because barcode technology means they only have to change one label on the shelf and one label in the computer? Or, have you put anything into your Amazon wishlist and watched the price go up and down on a weekly basis? Compared to almost everything else you buy, anywhere, Groundspeak's pricing is a model of transparency. Oh, and they didn't put up the price anywhere for 10 or more years. And the VAT they should have been charging you for the past 10 years? Looks like they took the hit on that, too. Seriously, I don't know what it must be like having to live with a lot of the people here in a customer support role, but I'm really glad that I don't have to take your complaints when you find that a Big Mac costs 10c more in your country than the one next door. It seems to me that whenever Groundspeak changes anything, there are two possible explanations: 1. OH MY GOD Groundspeak ARE EVIL AND STUPID !!11!!!!, YES BOTH AT THE SAME TIME !!11!eleventy!!, REALLY REALLY EVIL AND MONEY-GRABBING AND THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR CUSTOMERS AND THEY ARE EVEN MORE STUPID BECAUSE THEY'RE AMERICAN SO THEY'RE PROBABLY ALSO REALLY BIG AND FAT AND THINK THAT THE WHOLE WORLD SPEAKS ENGLISH AND USES DOLLARS !!111!1!! AND THEY WANT TO CLOSE DOWN GEOCACHING AND THEY'RE SO STUPID AND ANYONE CAN SEE THAT AND I KNOW ALL OF THE LAWS BECAUSE I JUST LOOKED ON WIKIPEDIA AND THEY ARE IN VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THEY ARE STUPID AND EVIL AND VERY CLEVER AND CUNNING BUT ALSO STUPID !!11! WAKE UP SHEEPLE I'M CANCELLING MY PM AND GOING TO ANOTHER SITE JUST LIKE I SAID I WOULD DO IN 2008 AND 2009 AND 2010 AND 2011 AND 2012 BUT I REALLY REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME THEY'LL BE SORRY WHEN I MOVE ALL 15 OF MY CACHES WAAAAAAH WAAAAAAH or 2. There may be some things that we haven't been told, due to a combination of reasonable business-related caution and the fact that Groundspeak does not, in fact, employ Niccolò Machiavelli in their communication department.

No (that is, it says "0", and there are no logs). Yes, it's from a PQ. Hope that helps.

A very long time ago, I logged a couch potato find on this cache. Some time after that, I saw the light and deleted the find. Today, I was looking at the map, as I plan to visit the area in the next couple of weeks, and I see that this cache shows up as "Found". Here's a screenshot. Apparently the "deleted" status of my Found log isn't being taken into account (you can see from my statistics that I have no finds in the Czech Republic). (Of course, one of my aims when I visit is to actually log a legitimate find on this virtual. )

Same here for three days now. Getting a bit tricky since there is a certain day I want this to be published... Please continue to use the workaround (which isn't a huge amount of extra effort). I've asked Groundspeak to investigate why the compilation Web service isn't working.

There are two common ways to react when a reviewer declines to publish your cache: /1/ Write a nice polite note to appeals@geocaching.com, explaining where you think the reviewer may not have fully understood all of the circumstances, and asking nicely if your cache can be published. /2/ Come to the forums and give everyone one side of the story, and expect them to get their torches and pitchforks and march round to the reviewer's house. Both of these are quite common things to do. Guess which one results in more caches getting published?

Wherigo is a very small project, so I'd be surprised if there was an unannounced package that just happens to be lying around. Some people use Earwigo just as a place to organise the media, and then write all the code in the Author Script window, which has some syntax checking support.

I know of one case where a software person who only had an Etrex hacked Earwigo's emulator protection. He found out what the compiled Lua code for the protection source code looked like and patched it in binary. The way in which Earwigo protects against the emulator is right there in the Lua source code of your cartridge that Earwigo generates. So it's no great secret. There are two ways round it: - Patch the binary, as above - Use a different emulator. (For example, DesktopWiG is not quite an emulator, but can be made to run a bit like one.) Earwigo currently only detects the Groundspeak emulator. Otherwise, consider using Ranger Fox's suggestion. I have seen a cartridge that did this - if run in the emulator it gave you one of six possible fake finals, all custom-encrypted by the cartridge author (who is also a great programmer). Some of these were 10 miles away, ha ha. The bottom line is that it's not possible to absolutely prevent anyone from cheating if they're prepared to put in a lot of effort. My slightly off-beat suggestion would be to enlist your local expert and get him to show you how to make your cartridge hard to hack. (Google "Frank Abagnale" )

Check this forum a little closer.