Jeremy

To clarify, it isn't going to be a cache listing at all, so posting a new cache listing as a placeholder for a virtual would have no point to it.

Bad news. Not really. It gets broken out on your public profile. I like the result.

In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process). To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward. Some points: It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point. Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though. It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc. We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices. For the comments that we should involve the community more, we do. We don't have a public discussion about it, instead working with a smaller sampling of geocachers. When you complete a Challenge (the new virtual) it will now be included in your overall "find" count. That's the only change to my original comment. I was resisting but was worn down by my fellow lackeys.

Bickering over the rules of a cache "find" was never the intent of Geocaching.com. There's no prize, no leaderboard, and no trophy, so there's no reason to get your knickers in a twist about anyone else's definition of a find.

Correct. But if you think about it, the name is exactly what suggests that some concepts of challenge caches might get integrated into the new challenges. Or they might just as well not be (in which case it's just a poor choice of naming), we don't know. Pure speculation. I think "Challenge Caches" is a poor choice in naming (or maybe a poor concept), so I don't really care if there is some initial confusion about the difference between the replacement for virtuals, called "Challenges," and the "challenge cache." The use of "challenge" is appropriate in the context of the replacement for virtuals, so that's what it is. It is my belief that the large majority of geocachers don't even know what a challenge cache is. I also agree that the "challenge cache" is an abused form of the former ALR, or "additional logging requirements." It makes very little sense to restrict a cache find in this way, especially since a geocacher can accomplish many of the tasks on the opposite side of the world but could never find this particular cache. This needs to be dealt with, but shouldn't be in the context of this new activity, and it won't be restricted at the same time this new activity is launched, or because this new activity is launched.

Definitely come to the Block Party. We'll have some cool ones to share here.

I think it is precisely the place where we should be experimenting, so we'll have to disagree on this point. As for Waymarking and Wherigo, I am equally (if not more) frustrated with the lack of evolution in these areas. However, as priorities go internally, the core geocaching experience is and has been the focus, so the "bringing back of virtuals" is a higher priority than the Waymarking and Wherigo projects at this time.

No. Is Geocaching "done?"

In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process). To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward. Some points: It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point. Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though. It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc. We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices. For the comments that we should involve the community more, we do. We don't have a public discussion about it, instead working with a smaller sampling of geocachers.

Admittedly we haven't focused on Wherigo in some time, due to our current focus on the core Geocaching experience, but it is something we really want to work on. Unfortunately the current implementation on Garmin devices won't change, regardless of whether we continue to develop the player for that device or not. Fortunately there is a lot you can do with the current framework and people are still creating Wherigo cartridges. They're just using alternative builder applications like Earwigo to make them.

We'd be more than happy to allow Garmin to use Wherigo on their new devices, for free, as we have in the past. Unfortunately they have pretty much stopped all communications with us since they launched their own geocaching competitor. If there's a rift it is one-sided.

Power Trail = Series. Series != Power Trail. There seems to be two opinions as to why Power Trail should be an attribute. 1. I want to know a power trail so I can find them all / download them to a PQ 2. Power trails suck, and the attribute lets me filter them out of a pocket query / search result. For #1, You can use a Bookmark List of this series. For #2, Caches should be rated on their own individual merits instead of its inclusion in a series We largely create attributes as ways to filter in caches instead of filtering them out, and since the only real benefit of this attribute is to filter out caches, it is unlikely that we would add this attribute. Instead we'd rather find ways for people to create quality caches and support the ability to filter those quality caches *in* instead of finding ways to filter them out. (Don't argue ticks, poison plants, etc. The intent of those attributes are to inform, not filter) We also don't want to create the attribute as it encourages these types of hides. If anything we want to discourage them. With the recent issues of power trail placements (and archival) We're trying to see the benefit of supporting this kind of activity moving forward anyway. So we may have to make some hard decisions in the near future about the issue of cache saturation by one user. We are adding the “Series” attribute to inform people that the cache is part of a series of different caches. As with any attribute, the cache owners will have to decide whether this attribute fits their cache.

Based on a recent survey, the average geocacher age is 38 and a large percentage have children between 6-12 years old. 34 is the median number of finds, based on a recent database query. I also used "active geocacher" statistics, so only those who logged a cache in the 3 months were counted (I think. It was some "reasonable" timeframe to get a helpful result). It is hard to define an "active cacher" so we have to make some reasonable definition. It will be interesting to do the same query at the end of August to see if that number changed, since this will be the end of the Summer peak. The other stats requested are interesting, but we haven't done any queries like these. If I do a query I'll be happy to share the information. There isn't anything proprietary in the answers. Jeremy

Thanks for the feedback, but please post bugs as separate issues on our feedback site so the developers can see it. Thanks!

We appreciate feedback which is why there is a Feedback tab on every page of the website and a link at the top if these forums. Individual suggestions are preferred, since broad complaints are difficult to address. Thanks.

Happy Birthday! (art from Patrick Owsley)

We're playing with this idea too - at least as an alternate method for sorting/scoring. The data is there which is the important part. The ratio will work better once more people rate their favorites, though even now it can be useful.

Well, in the old forums... You had to sign out, then sign back in using the 'Register' link. Not sure if it's the same with the new forums. You just need to log out here and back in now to see the changes. We separated the link between the site and the forums so there were less hoops to go through

I re-added the original IPBoard skin, so if you don't like the default Geocaching one you can switch to the older version. It is located at the bottom of the page next to the language dropdown that says "English (USA)"

The site is designed to be variable width, so you can change the width to whatever you like. If this isn't happening, let us know what browser you are using. Thanks!

Quotes updated (for example)

There are some issues with the style sheet. We'll clean it up over the next couple of days.

Geocaching.com has always had reviewers.

The wireless beacon attribute has been added to the system.