Moun10Bike

While hacking is always a possibility, it is more likely that an email from Geocaching.com to your email address bounced, causing the system to invalidate your account.

Yep. The goal of this was very basic and straightforward: create a fun little side-diversion and see who participated and how.

Keep in mind that HQ uses a third-party platform (Invision Community) for the forums. As such, we are limited to what features are available, although it's possible what you are asking for might be available with a settings change - I can't speak to that as our IT team generally handles all of that.

Great feedback. I understand your points and can agree with most of them. They are mostly due to the fact that this was a "passion project" created by the Data Team to see if we could encourage engagement among users during winter in the northern hemisphere when that engagement tends to slump. We didn't want to make the game too hard or provide barriers to entering in on the T-shirt drawing, just add a little fun to everyone's week and give people inspiration for places and caches to visit in person once the weather is better. You can be relieved that minimal development resources were tapped to develop and roll out the game!

There were supposed to be 7 clues each week, but an extra one slipped in this week. That's why you see the errant "8 out of 7 clues" message. Just enjoy the extra help this week!

I suspect that this conclusion is based on reduction fallacy. Any chance that the regulars are further away from where the cachers are located, trend higher in D/T ratings, or any number of other factors? I know that I generally prefer regulars to most any other size.

You have spaces to the right of the decimal point in the minutes of both latitude and longitude that you are pasting. What happens when you remove those?

You're alive! I was hoping you might make a surprise appearance in Bremerton!

One of Geocaching's API partners, Project-GC, has functionality that may help you: https://project-gc.com/Tools/Challenges?map

I am still not able to reproduce your issue with download of bookmark lists. Can you point me to the list(s) that is causing this issue for you, along with the steps you are taking that lead to the problem?

Today is Sunday, so that probably explains why you are not seeing your PQs run (if you have them checked for Monday). As for the email issue, it turns out that your primary email had become unvalidated for some reason. I revalidated it and now the email address field is properly populating in the form. I am not able to reproduce the issue of raw HTML in GPX downloaded from a list. I'm wondering if it could possibly be related to the email issue. Do you still see the problem now that that has been corrected?

I already had a cacher reach out to me about this yesterday, and I have a suspicion about what happened. A couple of weeks ago we had to make a change to a third-party component involved in interpretation and cleansing of data on cache pages after penetration testers discovered a vulnerability. The engineers investigated and corrected a lot of issues that change created, but this may be a case that they missed. I have let the team know of this issue with hints, but given that it is Christmas Eve, it might be a while before the problem is investigated and addressed.

I'm not sure what you have been using, but you should be able to use markdown: in this case, [br] for a line break.

Can you post the first line from the newly created file here? It sounds like you may have caches loaded in your device using something other than GC Code.

It sounds like the file got corrupted or contains a log with a character that is breaking the import module. I would start by making a copy of the file on your computer (just to save any data you may want/need from it) and then deleting the file from your GPS. The device will create a new one.

We did some investigation and it turns out there is no need to be concerned. We have a group doing some penetration testing of our sites and one of them strayed outside of the designated test environment. Here's a quick summary of penetration testing: https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/penetration-testing

The link that Max and 99 supplied above is available from the dashboard here:

Were you by chance looking at a cache outside of the US?

You can see how many Favorites you have left in the left-hand panel in the user dashboard at https://www.geocaching.com/account/dashboard When I view your list of Favorites at https://www.geocaching.com/p/default.aspx?u=Triker2&tab=lists#profilepanel, I show that you have given out 86, so it does appear that you are out.

Yep, after all of these years I should know better to respond when in a bad mood; I got defensive and apologize for that. What "triggered" me was yet another over-the-top take about how a tiny element in the app is assuredly to blame for the downfall of civilization as we know it. To better explain my position, as a member of the Data Team at HQ, I know very well the numbers behind these sorts of things. The quantity of people who read those messages and take them to heart is vanishingly small. I can virtually guarantee you that a revamp of the wording on that dialog will have next-to-zero impact in real-world behavior among new players. That said, I agree that the wording could be improved, and will suggest that change our design team.

You're taking a very basic sentence intended to give pointers to a new user and layering WAY too much meaning onto it. It means that if you are stuck, consider these steps that you might not have yet. It's way below the level of "instructions." How one ascribes so much meaning and influence to a simple phrase escapes me.

I can't help it if you want to take the most pessimistic view of this.

Which is completely different from saying DON'T read them UNLESS you are stuck.

This might account for 0.1% of all users, and even then it is likely mostly users who already know the value of the description and are viewing it elsewhere (e.g. on their GPS device). Can you tell me exactly where it is that the app is giving this directive?

It actually takes the median, not the average. So, it looks at all of the completion times for all users, sees the point where half of them take longer and half of them take less, and uses that.