stone-cacher

I don't understand my system any longer. For weeks and maybe months it has not worked. Now I wrote the note in this forum all of a sudden it is "repaired". The map shows up as it did before. Of course you will and can say that I must have changed something. The only change I'm aware of is, that I disabled Little GChelper for some minutes to see how it looks like without the helper and to provide more details to you. After reactivating and trying to open the "Nearest map" another time, it worked as expected. The only update was the latest Windows update and another update of Firefox which I remember during the last days. It's Windows, isn't it?

I don't why, but the nearest map feature does not work anymore the the GC little helper activated. It is always going to the page with the home coordinates but does not take it over and display with the map. I must deactivate GC little helper to get the nearest map feature work again. I'm using Firefox 93.0 with Windows 10.

Again a change in the notification mails, again a lot of people complaining (me included), again the request to allow "text notifications" (as I would love to get as well), again suggestens about "good design" and "forcing fonts and sizes", again good ideas from the "customers" (at least as I'm concerned), again a lot of discussion... ... and I'm afraid GS will not explain anything nor change to what I (and others) think is better than what we get as notification now :-( It's a pitty and I'm close to give up giving feedback to GS as I have the feeling it is useless. But I insist: PURE TEXT NOTIFICATION (even without any logo) would be the nicest for me! Maybe a short discussion about the content of the notification would also make sense. But this is another topic and I don't want to open a new stream...

Maybe we just had different preferences, but if I were looking for caches in a series (an actual series, not just common words in titles), the first place I'd look would be people's bookmark lists. I wouldn't do a keyword search over an entire enormous country. If that didn't work, I'd use google with site:geocaching.com intitle:deutschlandtour (for example) and see what I could find. There's no search method that you can guarantee finding everything you're looking for If you're trying to do a search that vague, I'd suggest getting used to and practicing a number of different ways to search the geocache database. You'll get more results that way I don't understand why I should use other tools than GC to find GC-Caches. Maybe Google searches work as you write, but will they find premium member caches as well? Yes I agree that a bookmark list can be a solution - but only if created and maintained done by somebody and, of corse, made public. The "Deutschland" was just an example for which a bookmark list does exist . But there are also "free" series which use common settings or texts and titles to show that they are a part of these series. In Germany there are for example series for churches. No one is able or willing to search (here we are again) new caches, which are part of these series, as every owner can publish it at any time and everywhere. As I said: Just an example and just a comment to show that people are using the GC pages in different ways. There is not THE ONE AND ONLY way. That's what makes menkind so interesting. By the way: I think searching for a keyword like "Deutschlandtour" is not vague

Sorry, but pocket queries are limited to 1000 caches and they don't allow a "search by name". So PQ is not an option. And even if it was: Why are basic users not allowed to search more than 30miles around a center point. Sorry, but I still do not like the limitations of the new search even though some points are not bad. The total result is not as good as it could be. Listening to customers and adapting to their needs would be much better than imposing new things (unless you want to be a monopolist and/or dictator <- sorry for this word coming from a german user).

... and for me it's the opposite. So people, habits and needs are different between people all over the world

Even if not everybody can image why a world wide search can be interesting the need still exists. I used to search for certain names or words to find those caches having these in their name - worldwide. But it even hasn't to be a world wide search to show that the new search function is not as good as the old one. As said here many times: There are countries like USA and Germany which can not be searched as a whole in one step. In the USA you have do to 52 searches and in Germany 16 to cover the whole country. So it is impossible to find all caches of the "Deutschlandtour" with one search by name. Sorry, but this is a mess! And sorry again: the number of caches hidden in those countries is high but nowadays this can not really be the reason to limit search capacities. I don't compare Groundspeak with Google or Bing or other really big search engines, but I still think that good algorithms are more important than a modern look. AND, we should not forget: It worked before! By the way: In the announcement for the updates on March, 25th: Not a single word about the new search function and that something might change in future releases. I'm really thinking about stopping my premium membership and maybe move to an alternative platform if Groundspeak continues to behave as they do currently. It's not my wish but so many limitations coming up for premium members and even more for basic members does not really convince me to stay with Groundspeak. It really looks like forcing people to become premium members has become the main target. I'm really frustrated and my geocaching activities have already gone down. What a pitty

Well over in the UK we call them postcodes, they're a different format but serve the same function as a zip code, I think many other countries have their own version by various other names. Yes, I know what Zip Codes, postcodes, Postzleitzahlen are . My post is there to point out that this kind of search is only available for US Zip Codes for US cities) and not for any others in the world (as far as I know). I know GS is an US company. But I think that Geocaching has become an international activity. Therefor there must be "international thinking" as well, when implementing new options on geocaching.com. There are already some "international" things like changing the display language to other languages than english, choosing units in US standards or European standards (ok, UK is different as well ). But using Zip Codes for the search is reserved to US Zip Codes. The same applies to the handling of daylight saving time settings. But maybe this is a little bit of topic and should not be discussed here.

As far as I know Zip Codes are only usable for US cities. They are not usable elsewhere in the world unless something has changed I don't know about. Am I wrong?

The example with "Codebrecher" was just an example. As "Codebrecher" is very "german" it will only find "german caches" even though the search was world wide . But as you already wrote in another reply: USA and Germany are only searchable by regions within the country. So it's impossible for me to find all caches of a series which has caches spread all over Germany but not only in one region (e. g. "Deutschlandtour" which has one cache in each of the regions of Germany ). ... and why I want to search world wide: Imagine, that I want to find out which caches contain for example the string "four" in it, so I can build a mystery cache using this number of the title. I would like to find such kind of caches all over the world to create a nice mystery. Ok, that's a very special utilisation, but why not? If the "string search" within the cache title would allow a "like" search, everything would be ok (and the performance should not really be an issue) if a modern database software is used. And I'm sure other users will have other reasons why they want a search to be more exhaustive than by country or even region of a country.

Maybe I can help you to understand: If you prepare a cache and you need some keywords to appear in the names of caches, this might be a reason to search "world wide". Yes, I know this is VERY special case, but it does exist ... but it must not be the entire world. It's not possible to search "all united states" or "all germany" neither. It has to be by "region" in these countries. But if I want to find all caches containing a certain "key word" in its name, this is not possible but for one "region" within a big country at a time (instead of "big country" it might be better to say "a country with a huge amount of hidden caches"). Here in Germany we have such "series" where the caches are spread over the whole country. To prepare a trip to all these caches I have to "search" 16 times in Germany (would be 50 times in the US). Just as a reminder: The "beginning with" option of the old search was already a degradation of search functionality compared to even older options existing before. When I started in 2004 is was a "containing a certain fragment of a string" search before. This was taken away many years ago due to "performance issues". I was waiting to get this back for a long time but it never came back. Now we have the "new search" and it's still not back . It's only back within "regions".

Nice to hear that the comments are read. Nice to see some sum ups of what was written on other pages already. But I am missing a statement concerning the questions of "basic vs. premium memberships". I think this is also a topic to be considered. It seems that the new search is almost unusable for basic members. From my point of view all members should be able to use the full range of search options. PMs have the PQ as an additional option - that's enough, at least for me.

Sorry, but this is not a good answer as also these countries should be searchable as a whole. I even want to search "worldwide" in some cases. I think every actual database does have a "select * from xxx where cachename=like(%something%)" should work in an enourmous speed when searching for fragments of names - just as one example. Please add this kind of search options as well AND please keep the old search available as well. Why not having the old and the new version in parallel. Both have their advantages and disadvantages...

The new search might have some good ideas but from my point of view it also misses some possibilities of the old search. When I heard about the new search function my big hope was to get a search option to find caches "containing" some strings or even only some letters not only "starting with". And I wanted to have this as a world wide search. But this does not work unless I do something completely wrong. If I try to find all caches having "Codebrecher" in their name I just get a "DNF". Even though the caches I search for start with this text fragment. I don't understand why new options always replace the old ones when updates are done. Please give us back the old search and add the new one as an additional why of searching - and please give all options to all users and not only to premium members. From my point of view Geocaching.com is getting less and less attractive with all these updates which have removed well working things, replacing the with "modern" not so well working and giving less flexible options (as the HTML notification instead of the traditional text messages). If it goes on like this I will look towards other alternatives for caching then Groundspeak's geocaching page. Sorry, but I'm really disappointed with the way it's currently working.

County? State? Search? Newest? ... this only works in the US. At least I was not able to use it in Germany. Groundspeak is not as international as they say they are . ... and the search "Beginning with..." is still there instead of a "contains" search (or might I propose ReEx to be implemented?). And last but not least: In the newsletter I would prefer a "sort by distance" instead of a "sort by date". But I'm almost sure: Nothing will change and the "new features" will be sold as "the best we ever offered to the geocachers". Sorry, but I lost the hope that Groundspeak hears what their users say (and would like to have)... So I will continue to use "add ons" and other tools to find workarounds instead of getting real improvements directly from Groundspeak. I really love some of the improvements delivered by Groundspeak so far - but there are others I really hate (eg. HTML notifcations or notifications without "distance to home"!). For the future it would be realy nice to keep the existing features and add new ones instead of replacing the old ones.

I don't see many changes. Was it most bug fixing? Still missing text notifications and emails as many others. Please consider to bring them back soon! The changes in the account settings page are visible but I don't see the advantage compared to the old version. Anyhow: Thank you for providing infos about changes. ... and even better: Let your customers participate as on the "new gpx file content".

The initial post is really nice. But I'm also missing the "plain text only" checkbox. ... and if I'm already "dreaming": Why not provide checkboxes about the informations to be sent with the notification: e. g. for new caches: T B (T=Checkbox for the "T"itle of the email, B=Checkbox for the "B"ody of the email) [ ] Tag like [NEW][LOG][GEO]... [ ][ ] Cache name [ ][ ] GC-Code [ ][ ] Cache type [ ][ ] Owner [ ][ ] Publish date (and time?) [ ][ ] Event date (in case of events) [ ][ ] Distance [ ][ ] Bearing [ ][ ] Difficulty and terrain rating [ ][ ] ... others I might have missed. For other notifications: The same as above plus: [ ][ ] Type of the log [ ][ ] Text of the log [ ][ ] ... others I might have missed. I'm not kidding - I was just dreaming how it could be...

Is there somewhere a place where users of geocaching.com can vote for or against text-mails and html-mails (or both)? There are so many users requesting the "old" text format (as I do!) but I've not seen anybody saying: Oh, I like these HTML mails they are so useful and much better than the old plain text emails.

Does nobody care about this question? For me this would even justify two DNF counters: Those "issued at all" and those "not having a found later on" (I'm not kidding!).

Hmmmm... I still receive notifcations for new released caches (even though they are in this terrible HTML format). But I'm afraid this does not help you at all. Sometimes it helps do disable an option, log out, log in, enable the same option... Maybe this is also the case with the Groundspeak application

Agreed! You're right, that's nothing to do with the programming of the page. I did not separate the tool and the content. Sorry for that!

Even though I'm afraid no one at GS does care: I'd like the get back a possibility to receive emails and notifcations in text only format (at least as an option). It's frustrating that GS just seems to ignore the comments of us users. It was already the case when the (weekly) notification emails were changed to html format. But this is another topic. Wouldn't it be a good idea to ask users what they might want BEFORE implementing something even without notifying? But it seems more important to organise block parties, mega events and publish hundreds of "film canister caches" than to improve the usability of the geocaching page and notifications. Quantity seems to be more important than quality.

I'm really disappointed. I loved to read notes coming from my watched caches and a lot of notifications. But the "new" HTLM versions are not an improvement at all. The information is spread around the text and some informations are even missing (even though some others have been added). I'm afraid I will reduce the entries in my watchlist and also disable notifications if we don't get back an efficient text only version again. For me HTML in an email is the wrong way (not only at Groundspeak). The content is important and not the presentation. Sorry Groundspeak: HTML notifications is not an improvement and not requested if there is no option for text only informations. ... but I'm afraid Groundspeak does not care about the will of the users and just ignores all these comments of this forum.

I don't know if it matters but I would prefer plain text notifications as they were before. Maybe there can be a selections for us users to choose either plain text or html. The only positive point with the html notifications is the "owner" been mentioned for a "publish" notification. Please give us back the plain text possibility because of lower size, less bandwith, less unnecessary coloured things, easier readable as they need less space on the screen, ... By the way: Were html notifications requested by someone? Was there a discussion, how to set it up with the users? If it was, I missed it

BUGREPORT?! Every time when daylight saving period arrives I get the same problem: Uploading field notes from my Etrex results in wrong times as long as the US already changes to daylight saving and Europe does not yet. As far as I know in the US the daylight saving is switched on the second Sunday in March but in Europe it is changed at the last Sunday in March. So between the 9th of March 2014 and the 30th of March 2014 the times are not calculated correctly when uploading my visits-file. The same happens when daylight saving stops. In Europe the last Sunday of October is used to change back to winter time but in the US it is the first Sunday in November. So again there is one week of discrepancies. Other applications take these details into account. Can we expect that Groundspeak also adjusts the upload function of the field notes in order to work as it should? Let's see if other cachers are interested in this topic as well. Maybe a Groundspeak administrator reads this entry and can provide an answer about this bug...