pppingme

A couple questions about the Oregons. Is the 300 the same unit as the 400's except for the included maps or are there other differences? Is the "share wirelessly" feature something that's Garmin proprietary or is it based on any type of standard like bluetooth? Can you load any of Garmin's street maps and do they do routing?

I'm not giving or taking away credit for the ability to actually implement something, I'm stating the timing, and that point can't be argued. I have yet to see ANY evidence of any other site having this same issue. Show me one, and I withdraw my comments. This is about time lines, not programming ability.

Neither are basic cache listings which have ads woven between the caches, but premium members aren't supposed to see ads, basic members are. GS is getting enough revenue from premium members and as evidenced by the past week of complaints of performance and issues doesn't seem very well earned, now they are trying to suck more money out of the well before showing a willingness to fix the problems? You missed this post... It isn't intentional. They are working on it. Sure is funny it showed up at the same time as a site upgrade and other sites that use maps heavily aren't having this issue.

No caches were placed before 2000. The bug here isn't the PQ forms, its the fact that the site is allowing bogus hidden dates to be set.

But the Wherigo website sure runs fast!!

Neither are basic cache listings which have ads woven between the caches, but premium members aren't supposed to see ads, basic members are. GS is getting enough revenue from premium members and as evidenced by the past week of complaints of performance and issues doesn't seem very well earned, now they are trying to suck more money out of the well before showing a willingness to fix the problems?

I come up with 153 in the 50 states and DC... This should be more accurate than a bookmark list because its realtime and doesn't need manually updated: You should be able to save and preview it. http://www.geocaching.com/pocket/gcquery.a...ae-f4a053bd9f0b

I know a lot of people, my self included, that have driven more than 50 for an FTF. I just looked at my ftf's and have several over 50 and over half of my ftf's are over 30, so yes, people do drive and are willing to drive more for an FTF than a random cache.

If your using the field notes feature of this unit you can still log them, upload your field notes (see link on right hand side of your my page), you just won't be able to view the cache.

You can already do this. On the top right, just below "log your visit" is "ignore listing" When you setup your PQ's, be sure to check the "Are not on my ignore list"

Are you using a bookmark or the link on the left side of the page to get back in the forums? Hint: You have to use the link at least once after making any changes, after that you can go back to using your bookmark or shortcut.

After you update it, exit the forums (you don't have to "log out"), go to the main site, and click on the forum link on the left.

Route computation can be pretty heavy in terms of CPU (so I could see why the site wouldn't want to do it), there is also issue of licensing. What I do is I load the caches I like into Streets and Trips and let it route the caches I want. You can buy S&T for about $25. If you have a nuvi 700 series (someone correct me if I'm wrong on which series) they can do multi point routing (most of the others can only route to one point at a time, but you can build a whole multi stop route on the 700's). I kind of use a hybrid solution, I plug what I want into s&t to get the best order, then I use a nuvi 200 to drive with, the only downside to this is that I have to set a new destination on the nuvi after every cache, but that only takes a second.

This is a problem ("bug") and has been reported many times with no results. The more I think about it, the more I have to believe its intentional. Consider this: if (cacheonignorelist == false) print (cachedetails) end if Very simple and straight forward. This logic would list the cache if its not on the ignore list, and not list it if it is. If the test for not listing ignored caches were any more complicated than this, I would have serious doubts about the programmers ability. So that would mean the only possible way that this bug would be here is by this code: if (cacheonignorelist == false) print (cachedetails) else if (cachetype == Wherigo) print (cachedetails) end if So, if the cache is not on the ignore list, it gets listed, if it is, its further tested to see if its a Wherigo, if it is, still gets listed. I just don't see any other scenario where this "bug" would exist, so I have to believe that its intentional that Wherigo caches are always listed, EVEN IF they are on the ignore list.

But this really isn't even about getting 5 PQ's (although that is part of the problem), this is about getting PQ's reliably and in a way that doesn't count against you when GS messes up.

GS has already done this, THATS WHY THERE IS A LIMIT OF 5. They have promised 5, but can't deliver. This isn't about preserving resources, GS proved they could do it before the summer change. I highly doubt that the number of PQ users changed that much at the exact same time they did "site upgrades" last summer. GS isn't promising 5 pq's on every day except thursday and friday, they are promising 5 every day. On top of that, they are REMOVING the ability to get your full 5 PQ's if their system decides to lap your previous days PQ's. Now a common complaint.

Although using google this way is a good idea, it can miss a lot. For example, you have to be logged in to see the "geocaching web site" forum, so google isn't catching this. Same for the Off Topic forum. Just something to be aware of.

It very much is the case. Don't believe it? Do a quick poll. Here's the question: If GS/GC were to drop PQ's, would you continue or drop your PM. I'll go ahead and give my vote: I wouldn't wait a second and I would demand a prorated refund.

Was geocaching.com and the forums not available when these repetitive PQ's did not run? If so, hand me a torch and pitch fork, I am right there with you. More accurately, it is like the fact that Comcast cable (i.e. geocaching.com) offers Rhapsody (i.e. PQ'S) to their customers free. If Rhapsody goes down for a day or even two, and your ISP (Comcast) is still up, I am fairly certain Comcast will not view it as a service outage. I am also fairly certain those that call into complain about not getting what they paid for would be so small as to not even warrant being called a minority. Unlike Rhapsody being down, if your PQ's are not received by a certain time, you do have the option to run a fresh one that most likely will run in less than 5 minutes. I don't pay for PQ's so if there is an issue (I have not really had more than 1 or 2 in 5 or so years of being a PM with PQ's), it is hard to complain since the service as a whole is still available to me. My $30 goes to keep the database and forums in place, anything else is more or less icing on the cake. I am sure a year or so from now there will be a similar discussion when a Colorado owner can not immediatley access the system and complains because that is what they paid for. Would it be nice if they could make sure that even repetitive PQ's ran early on a given day? Sure, however while they have repeatedly pointed out that they do not support offline databases, as much evidence points to the fact that they are working on it as they are not. Since you want to nitpick at his perfectly valid example, lets try this differently. What if on Thursdays and Fridays your ISP couldn't deliver any sites that started with a "G", that means that every Thursday and Friday you can't get to Google, Gmail, Oh, and Geocaching... Your ISP still works, its only a little part of it, your not specifically paying for sites that start with "G", so it shouldn't be a big deal if all the "G" sites go down. Honestly, thats about the level of your reply. For most people, the ONLY reason they pay is for PQ's, yes, that makes PQ's the driving factor of premium membership. That should mean that GS should spend time, effort, and if needed money, to make sure PQ's are being delivered. Yeah, there will be one or two of you that come back and say "but I'm supporting the site, not paying for PQ's", well I call BS. If GS stopped PQ's today, you can bet good money that they would loose better than 90% of the PM's. So yes, people ARE directly paying for PQ's, they aren't a side benefit.

Screenscraping is usually though of in an automated non-interactive fashion. I don't think most people would consider saving the html (in an interactive action) off one or two pages to be screen scraping, this is what the user wants and is what the suggested macro does.

Its a well known fact that PQ's will often "lap", or run after midnight thus counting against the next day's limit of 5. This is more noticeable on PQ's that are scheduled to run more than once a week. Want an example? Schedule a new PQ to run on Wed and Thu, You'll probably see it run on Wed and Fri. Especially once its more than 2-3 weeks old. The bad thing here is now you don't get your full 5 on Thu and now it counts against your Fri run too, so if you don't already have your friday pq's scheduled, you can't.

But they shouldn't be so low that they don't even run or they lap. This IS a problem and needs to be fixed.

Its attitudes like this why GS won't fix stuff, because they know they can get by with it. I documented very clearly last summer that the timing on PQ's had significantly changed, and a LOT of others agreed, but then there were a few like you that said it wasn't a big deal, or they didn't see the problem and such. PEOPLE, IF YOU WANT GS TO FIX PROBLEMS YOU CAN'T KEEP DEFENDING THEM.

Thursday has become a busy day for PQ's since they won't run reliably on Friday. The sad part here is not the fact that Thursday, Friday and Saturday are bad days, its that a programming change in Summer of 2008 significantly impacted how PQ's run and they have been troublesome ever since. Its rare if not impossible for a daily PQ to run correctly, and even weekly PQ's that are scheduled for those 3 days don't come in until extremely late if they do at all. GS introduced a problem in mid summer and has been ignoring it since.

IIRC, My Finds counts as #40. No, absolutely not true... This bug existed well before the "my finds" query, and the site clearly says you can CREATE, I didn't create the my finds query and don't really care for it. Its a real simple deal, someone coded (x < 40) instead of (x <= 40) and for some reason this seems to be too much of a challenge to find and fix.