Hirogens

I've been trying to figure out why the cache page loads quickly enough but, I was unable to scroll down to the log entries for 3 or 4 seconds. Finally figured it out. There is an advertising widget in an iframe which pulls an ad from banman5.Groundspeak.com. This is what bogs down the page load and since it is an iframe, it keeps one from moving around until it finishes loading. To make matters even worse, occassionally the banman5 advertisement has a problem and the browser stops responding. After waiting a few minutes, I give up and restart the browser session. I've gone so far as to edit my hosts file so that banman5.Groundspeak.com point to 127.0.0.1. Fast page load now and can scroll around immediately. That came with a price however, when I hit the back button now, it attempts to load the iframe for banman5 again instead of going back to my previous page. I just have to hit it twice as a workaround to that problem. Serious work needs to be done on the advertising. I hate advertising in general and feel we are all way beyond inundated with advertising from every medium of communication we use but, this post won't change that. I don't mind an advert on the cache page I guess so long as it doesn't interfere with my use of the page or cause my browser to hang.

I've noticed that when I display my local map and select the option to hide caches I have found, those hidden caches remain as part of the original 500 records returned. While hiding the smileys helps declutter the screen some, it doesn't help if I want to zoom out another notch since they are still part of the 500. Recommend that selecting to hide caches you found executes a refresh of the map and a new result set is retrieved which does not contain the hidden caches. As an extreme example, if I set out to do all of the caches in my county (appx 2000 caches or so), I would want to zoom out and view the entire county with all of the caches shown that I have yet to find. That would be impossible to do with the way this option is implemented now. But, that is an extreme example like I said.

I was searching the forum to see if this had already been mentioned so I am glad I found it. My belief is that a lot of people DNF caches but, do not bother to log it as a DNF. They may choose to not log it for a variety of reasons (lazy, embarrased, whatever) which is fine. However, when someone does take the time to log a DNF and then later finds that cache, it should be removed from their DNF list. No data needs to be changed to accomplish this so there would be no impact to the cache log history or anything like that. A simple query to retrieve records the user has DNFed which they have also not found is all that is required. I think that people tend to get away from logging the DNF because their list of DNFs becomes unmanageable in trying to figure out exactly which ones are a real DNF vice a cache that was later found.

How do you compare them textually? I've wanted the map compare as well so I hope you idea gets the attention it deserves. Would not be that difficult to implement.

I understand what you are saying. However, in the case of a hint from the owner, the gecocacher must make a decision that he/she wants to see the hint. It is just a link to decrypt the hint so it is very easy but still a conscious decision for the searcher. In the case of geotagged photos, it is still a conscious decision but is much harder to retrieve information from. I think the best alternative (and most easily executed) is for the owner to request that no pictures be posted. Most geocachers would probably respect that request and abide by it. Another alternative would be to allow the cache owner the opportunity to remove photos from the gallery associated with his/her cache. I think the first alternative is the best. Even if the owner could delete a photo which gave away the final cache, the gecocacher could still post links and such to a gallery on dgrin, smugmug, pbase, flickr that the cache owner could do nothing about. Seems the best thing is to simply ask people to not do it. Removing EXIF data doesn't appear to be an option as that data is sometimes part of the puzzle so I'm trying to think up alternate ideas is all.

I fail to see the problem with including EXIF data. There are free 3rd party programs (I've used imagemagick with great success) that will strip EXIF data and embedded thumbnails and such from images but I did that for a multimedia gallery for KSC to improve throughput since we hosted tens of thousands of images. Anyway, the EXIF data is something you have to go and look for. The GC gallery is not displaying any EXIF data by default so, just like an encrypted hint, you have to do something to retrieve the information. For the images on GC, I would have to download the image to my system and then run some kind of tool on it such as thumber, or photoshop to see the embedded data. The way I see it, if someone goes to the trouble of digging out the EXIF data for the purpose of finding a cache, it is no different than decrypting a hint or asking the last finder for a hint.

I had the same problem until I figured out what the deal was. In every web-based application I've developed and in almost every one I've used, the username is always case insensitive. For the Groundspeak forums, it appears to be case sensitive. So, I cannot log in using 'hirogens' but must enter it exactly the way I did when I created my account and that was 'Hirogens'. The capital H made the difference for me. HTH