ycjapan

On the one hand paying members feel more the part of a private community, having privileged access to a growing number of services (becoming more and more restricted to regular members). On the other hand, "basic members" (they used to be "members", btw the term "basic" targeting a person is rather rude, "basic membership" is better), from the long term regular members panel, feel more and more rejected (some say duped) by this never ending and even growing fee-hunting policy. A donation model, like Wikipedia, would be understandable, because the content, after all, is made by members. Doing pretty simple statistics (with a Perl script that analyzes the members profiles from caches logs, sampled from around the world, at different times), the percentage of paying members was amazingly high (did that a few years ago, I'd have to fix the code to cope with the new version of the site and give proper & current figures), That multiplied by the yearly fee (removing members who are paying members for 1-month (or less)), results in a very successful business. (in comparison, such a site hosting cost is negligible and human cost for code and system maintenance, that I don't know precisely, but being in this IT field myself can give a rough guess given the site changes, are not significant enough to justify such a free). Personally, I admire people who manage to build a solid and very profitable enterprise. It's just that over the years, it seems the company has always been targeting profit while the vital content comes from its members. GC is still usable even for a regular member, but today I feel disappointed that such an essential link to visit another member found-caches became a paying-only feature. Having a couple caches alive, it seems to me important to be able to see what a other caches a "finder" has found.

Hmm maybe because you are a moderator? Tried also with Firefox, the caches found by someone else are not clickable anymore... (tried to click on almost any text around!) IIRC Traditional Geocache 36 was clickable not long ago.

Hi, I visited the profile of someone, clicked "Geocaches", then I try to click "Traditional Geocache" or the number "36" to view the list of their found caches (see below). But the link doesn't work anymore ?? (using latest Chrome) Is it a problem with the site? Regards Geocaches Found Name Count Total Found 36 Traditional Geocache 36

Hopefully they didn't find all these caches the same way Sent a kind message... it's up to her what she wants to do with that! Thanks for your replies.

Was reading the logs of one cache, and was surprised to see "Found" from someone who "thought the cache is gone"! https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=8aa4c3a9-7967-4129-8e99-ed20ba0a27b1 But the cache was still there and in good condition (next log) https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=18467806-ae55-478b-b5fe-d221a7f42bcc Not that I care much, but, in this case, it was clearly a DNF. Is a Cache Owner able to change the status Found => DNF of one of their cache?

That reminds me of one of the first cache we (finally) found with a friend. Difficulty 1, Terrain 1 and we couldn't find it, going there, searching..... We thought "if this is difficulty 1, the one hidden inside the Voyager 1 space probe must be difficulty 2"! After we finally found it (it was a slim magnet paper rolled around the interior of a security pole!), no more similar caches would surprise us! Experience...

Absolutely, and I respect that deeply. But But. Well, patience is a virtue that I'm learning... The cache was published today, yes!

Absolutely, and I respect that deeply. But that shouldn't be the answer to everything. I do some volunteering as well in other fields. That requires to assume the role completely (an hour a day four days a week). Doing it. Always. Never complaining. Knowing that if for some reasons I can't/don't want to do it anymore, next step is easy: stepping down. I know the rule. They know the rule. We assume.

Indeed, and I read that a long time ago, and I even remember reading it! However, like in Tokyo, in this area where there is nothing interesting, I wanted to give a kind of reward to the GCacher, as the coffee shop is indeed wonderful. However (bis), if it can help the cache to be published, I just edited the description - no more names - just mentioned roughly "shops nearby north-east" (and also in Japanese, a coffee shop and an italian - without "good" or "recommendation")

There are two - did this in Tokyo as well, as it is nice I think to have a good coffee after/before a cache hunt! And there are two so that I don't promote "my" coffee shop (have none btw) Well, it used to be not a problem, if it is now, if I have to remove the references or the names, at least I'd like to know ... it'll be done in no time ;-)

Ok thank you, I'm glad the Premium status has nothing to do with reviewing a cache. Just curious, for people having already posted a number of caches, why the "review" should take time? - the minimum distance with another cache is already pre-calculated (basically, the cache is rejected at submission time if it's too close to another one) - then ... well when the cache is a traditional cache, in a public area, and looks like 90% of the other caches (by the description) - what kind of "review" is still necessary? I read the doc about that but ... I guess the reviewer doesn't go physically at the location to check the cache?! (we could provide a picture of the cache (or location) if necessary). tl;dr ..... Isn't the "review" just a matter of clicking a button "Publish"? I read on the site that geocaching has (only) 200 reviewers around the globe? Maybe the data is obsolete? But if those 200 volunteers have been doing all the caches worldwide for a number of years, it is understandable they may become a bit blase, no? Considering the number of afficionados, why not just grant that responsibility to more people? So many people would love to play a bigger role @geocaching!

A couple of years ago (about 5), posting a new cache was a matter of hours. Except big problem - and usually there is none - the cache was reviewed and published within a day at most. Now 5 years later, it seems it takes much longer - "within 7 days". Question: Is there a new policy that require us to take the Premium package to get a new cache reviewed within a day, like before?

(Sorry if the subject has been beaten to death already, but I didn't geocache for a while) So, Google Maps is ended, replaced with OpenMaps. Clearly, Google Maps is vastly superior to Open(Street)Maps - which is actually barely useable (maybe it is in big cities in the US, but definitely not useable in Japan). It seems the reason is that Google was asking for a prohibitive fee, and GC cannot afford such price tag (hundreds of thousands $ yearly). But, I wonder if GC does not make a mistake in the interpretation of Google's Terms of Service. Technically, Clients (us) just download some HTML+Javascript from GC (not from Google), and our browsers do the work - contact Google Maps - show the GCs - display So, the ones who connect to Google is not GC, it's us - people around the world, using GC pages. Considering the difference between Google Maps and OpenMaps, it is worth double checking the ToS and revert to Google if possible.

It sounds like the FTF is not that insignificant: after I posted the 1st log - saying I was the 2nd - the moderator (or so) changed the date of the FTF log - 1 day earlier - so that it was shown first.... see GC2DD45. The funny thing is that the cache was initially published the Aug 15th, and the log / cache date is 14th :-)

Today I was on the search site within 2 hours after the cache was published. Quickly found, no log on the iPhone, I was on the way to register my first FTF. The log showed, however, that one (actually two, together) GC found the cache a few minutes before I came. I usually take a picture of the neighboring and quickly log the find thanks to the iPhone. But I was wondering, should I log (saying explicitly I was not the 1st), the log being the 1st one in the list? or should I wait for the FTF to log first? What is the rule regarding this, and, more precisely, how works the "FTF" counter assignment? Who does that? Or is it automatic?

Ok! Thanks!

Can I change 'yctokyo' to something else? It was chosen too quickly while doing my first search with iphone...

Of course I would assume the site is well made: counts only members, and counts a member only once (like add a table member x cache). That number is not intended to be perfect, it does not mean "exactly N people had an interest on this cache". Just an indicator of interests in that particular location, rough indication about the cache. If today it is N and a week after it is N+1, it indicates that place is maybe not that popular... Just a thought.

Plagiarist! :-) "mean crap"? Well, in that case just display the internal counter you keep for each record in your database when someone reads a particular cache info...

I'm not sure adding a rating system is the best way to keep that nice atmosphere among the GCachers.

Suggestion: add number on a cache page that indicates how many people visited the page. As many people do not log DNF, this number is a rough indication of members who had an interest in that cache.

Actually nothing. dfx is right, the problem must be with the aspx that handles the data.

Thanks I could see that in Firebug. The problem is that neither the <form>, nor the page are specified with utf-8 encoding. This is an easy fix, and would save a lot of trouble for many people. Add this to the <head> section: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> Add this to the <form> tag: <form action="..." method="post" charset="UTF-8">

I posted today my first cache (in Japan) and added some Japanese in the description. Unfortunately the Japanese is changed with '???' (GC2BZG7). This is typically a problem of encoding, where the GC website does not specify how characters are supposed to be entered/encoded, and the GC server doesn't handle them correctly after a POST is performed. (This is also true with the iPhone appli) UTF-8 becomes the universal encoding, as it is friendly with regular English and its format handles pretty much anything. Is there a way to input some Japanese? (or is there a chance the site specifies a "generic" encoding?) Thanks

thanks! Lot's of fun, as expected, as intended