The Dommer Party

Just figured I'd update this thread. I had posted the missing email problem on UserVoice and Jeremy has responded that the problem is now fixed. Jeremy's response: Thanks for bringing this to our attention. A recent upgrade to our own spam-defense system started rejecting requests to our noreply@XXX addresses. We have changed the setting so emails should start going out again. http://feedback.geocaching.com/forums/7586...eived?ref=title

If this is still affecting anyone, please comment and vote for it to be fixed at their new support section: http://feedback.geocaching.com/forums/7586...eived?ref=title

It seems to be affecting quite a few but not all.... and who's to say how many it is affecting but they don't realize it. ** I just noticed that the link to Get Satisfaction is broken now that they changed over to "uservoice". We will have to start a new thread there if need be. While this may not affect everyone, it is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. The more people that chime in, the better the odds of a resolution. **

I've spent quite a bit of time browsing the forums but never ran across this, and of course I can't search on "flash mob" because it's "too short" to search for. I've seen lots of logs on caches such as "Met up with so and so at the flash mob event and we did a little caching afterwards". I understand the basics of a "flash mob" and also the basics of an "event cache". But what exactly is a Flash Mob Event? My guess: An event of short duration where people just meet up with the only purpose being to hook up with other cachers and immediately go looking for caches as a group or separate groups. Is this right? Just curious. I plan to attend a normal local event next weekend but was curious (for future reference) about "flash mob events".

Nice bike! Oh... but you're riding down the wrong side of the road! (J/K)

I posted about this on Get Satisfaction. It didn't put it exactly where I wanted it, but hopefully it will still get their attention. http://feedback.geocaching.com/geocaching/...ils_from_gc_com Edit to add that I figured out what I did wrong and it is now listed as a problem rather than a question.

No luck today. Still not idling right, backfiring, and hard to keep running without the choke. I brought it over to the motorcycle shop and hopefully I'll have it back next week.

going to need more then fresh gas my friend.. a carb rebuild is probably in order.. should have four right? seals, jets and the float bowl can all have particulates or have fuel varnish in them.. so even if you got it running, some tiny particle could get lose and clog one of your circuits. good luck with the recovery and getting the bike going again Yeah, four carbs, and I'm facing the probability of a carb rebuild. However, I've found lots of people on the web swearing by Seafoam. I didn't get a chance to try starting it yesterday but the day before I added Seafoam to the fresh gas before firing it up. I just ran the engine in the driveway but I noticed a pretty big difference in engine performance after about a half hour of running. I'm hoping to look at it again today and if it seems to run good enough for a ride I want to take it on the highway and open it up. I'm hoping for the best but bracing for the worst!

The callback verification is far from perfect. This isn't the first time I've run into missing emails from this same problem. On the other hand, it can be pretty effective at blocking spam when a completely fake 'from' address is used. Either way, lots of ISPs, WSPs and email providers (like Google & Yahoo but maybe not specifically) use this technique to block spam. Unfortunately not everyone can have a whitelist put in place on something like this. It seems to me that Groundspeak will need to fix this on their end by making all of their noreply@XXX addresses accept email, even if it goes directly to null. I'm not sure what the proper way of bringing this to their attention would be. I also suspect that they may use multiple outgoing mailservers/IP addresses. While I have been getting some emails from geocaching.com since my WSP whitelisted the IP address they found in the logs, I failed to receive an email today about a TB I dipped into a cache today. I don't own the TB but it is on my watchlist. I have sent a couple emails through GC the past couple days and who knows if they have tried to reply or not.... I'll likely never get them. Something needs to be looked at.

We are a family of four and usually in a minivan, but occasionally we will ride our bicycles, particularly when caching along bike trails. I also have a '96 Honda Magna 750 but due to back problems, I've only ridden it once in the past two years. My back's doing better after a fusion last August and just yesterday I put fresh gas in it and am trying to get it running better again. Two years of sitting is not so good for anything with carbs! Assuming I get it running smoothly again, I hope to do some solo caching on the Magna every now and then as well.

i would say yes, because everything is still working fine here, and comparing the emails from before and after brings up zero differences, both in headers and body. I'll contact my site provider and have them check their logs. Perhaps GC somehow wound up on some kind of blacklist and emails are getting blocked by another level of spam protection that is out of my control. This happened a couple times with my previous site provider and turned out to be something called Magic Spam. They claimed it was a misconfiguration on the email sender's end that triggered a block in Magic Spam. Something is going on though. Seems several people are missing them all of the sudden, but at the same time other people aren't missing them at all. Strange. I got a response from my web hosting company. They have whitelisted the IP address of the GC mail servers but if this same problem is the cause of others not receiving emails lately then it sounds as though something needs to be done on Groundspeak's end. From what I get out of it, the problem is that the sending address (noreply@geocaching.com) is not a real/working address, therefore it is getting blocked. I asked him why this would have started around August 31st when it worked prior to that and he said that his servers have always been configured that way and that something must have changed on the sender's side. Included in his reply is a log of emails I should have gotten from geocaching.com yesterday but were blocked. Response from my web hosting company (please note I have replaced my actual email address with 'myemail@myserver.com'): ------------------------------------------------------------------- They're sending emails from an account that doesn't actually exist and as such the emails from that address are being rejected. We follow the RFC Guidelines which in layman's terms state that if an email address doesn't exist, it can't send mail, and as such, email from said email addresses should be rejected. root@fresco [/var/log]# cat exim_mainlog | grep "geocaching.com" 2010-09-05 18:11:28 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] sender verify fail for <noreply@geocaching.com>: response to "RCPT TO:<noreply@geocaching.com>" from barracuda.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.155] was: 550 Blocked 2010-09-05 18:11:28 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] F=<noreply@geocaching.com> rejected RCPT <myemail@myserver.com>: Sender verify failed 2010-09-05 18:25:17 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] sender verify fail for <noreply@geocaching.com> 2010-09-05 18:25:17 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] F=<noreply@geocaching.com> rejected RCPT <myemail@myserver.com>: Sender verify failed 2010-09-05 22:51:38 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] sender verify fail for <noreply@geocaching.com>: response to "RCPT TO:<noreply@geocaching.com>" from barracuda.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.155] was: 550 Blocked 2010-09-05 22:51:38 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] F=<noreply@geocaching.com> rejected RCPT <myemail@myserver.com>: Sender verify failed 2010-09-06 09:09:04 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] sender verify fail for <noreply@geocaching.com>: response to "RCPT TO:<noreply@geocaching.com>" from barracuda.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.155] was: 550 Blocked 2010-09-06 09:09:04 H=signal.Groundspeak.com [66.150.167.157] F=<noreply@geocaching.com> rejected RCPT <myemail@myserver.com>: Sender verify failed I've whitelisted the mailserver IP for the sender so that it will pass these checks but you should pass this information on to the sender so they can remedy this. root@fresco [/var/log]# telnet signal.Groundspeak.com 25 Trying 66.150.167.157... Connected to signal.Groundspeak.com (66.150.167.157). Escape character is '^]'. 220 signal.Groundspeak.com ESMTP Postfix EHLO myserver.com 250-signal.Groundspeak.com 250-PIPELINING 250-SIZE 134217728 250-ETRN 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-8BITMIME 250 DSN MAIL FROM: <myemail@myserver.com> 250 2.1.0 Ok RCPT TO: <noreply@geocaching.com> 554 5.7.1 <noreply@geocaching.com>: Relay access denied -------------------------------------------------------------------

I can understand the different points of view on micros and nanos. We're still pretty green, so maybe they will grow old... who knows. But I have to say that if it weren't for the 3 micros/nanos that were literally within a couple blocks of my house, we may never have bothered to try this game. We've since ventured out to forest preserves, parks, etc that we hadn't been to in years if ever, all in search of caches. But it was those small ones that were minutes away that prompted us to go ahead and try it just to see what geocaching was like.

Interesting topic! We're still pretty new but already laugh at our amazement over the first LPS hide that we found. Here's from our log: "Very sneaky spot! We initially moved on to another one before deciding to come back and have another go! " Even more pathetic is that the hint was "w green lps". We had no idea what lps meant. Several days after that find I was going through the forum and it finally dawned on me. I told my wife about it and we both felt pretty darn stupid! I know many people don't like these hides, and while I suppose they aren't very original (although we certainly thought that first one was), they don't bother us. In fact, there have been a couple caches that we couldn't find then my wife would say, "Check the lamp post skirt." There it was.

i would say yes, because everything is still working fine here, and comparing the emails from before and after brings up zero differences, both in headers and body. I'll contact my site provider and have them check their logs. Perhaps GC somehow wound up on some kind of blacklist and emails are getting blocked by another level of spam protection that is out of my control. This happened a couple times with my previous site provider and turned out to be something called Magic Spam. They claimed it was a misconfiguration on the email sender's end that triggered a block in Magic Spam. Something is going on though. Seems several people are missing them all of the sudden, but at the same time other people aren't missing them at all. Strange.

Sorry. Didn't see it when I created the post. Redirecting my thoughts to there.......

My server uses SA but I'm certain that isn't the problem. For one, I have trained all emails from geocaching.com as HAM (not spam) since I have joined and two, I have geocaching.com whitelisted. Last email received from GC on Aug 30th. Last GC site update on Aug 31st. Coincidence? Not sure.....

The last geocaching.com update was on 8-31 and the last email I received from the site (owned TBs, cache watch lists etc) was on 8-30. I was looking around the site today and realized that there were several things that I should have gotten emails on but didn't. Is anyone else having this problem? My email comes through a website that I own and my first thought was that maybe the server I pay rent on is blocking emails that I have no control over, but considering that I always received emails from geocaching.com since joining, until recently, I wonder if it isn't a problem on geocaching.com's end. * Edit to add that some of the things I should have gotten emails on have been "back-logged". I'm not sure if that applies to all of my missing emails, but just curious if I should still get emails on logs/entries that are posted for a previous date.

The log said you "discovered" it, but it should say you "retrieved" it from the cache you found it in. This would put it in your inventory. Once there, you can then drop/place it into another cache (first physically, then virtually in the online log). However in your case it is showing the coin in an "unknown location". In that case, you should be able to "grab" the coin from the unknown location. I think you will need the tracking number again in order to do this. To help log proper miles, you can then "visit" the cache you originally found it in before dropping it into the cache you physically dropped it off at. If you can't get back to the cache to get the tracking number (assuming you didn't write it down), you might have luck in asking the owner for the tracking number so that you can properly log it. I hope this helps! I know there are lots of people on this forum with more experience and knowledge than me but I also know that replies are hard to come by at this hour (well, here in the States anyway). Edit to add that because this coin was marked missing before you found it, you likely didn't even have the option to "retrieve" it from the cache you found it in. When that happens, grabbing it is about the only thing you can do to show it in your inventory.

Thanks for the replies. I'll likely test drive a few to see what I like best. If I'm impressed with the official app I wouldn't have a problem with the $10 price so long as I can pay for it directly and it sounds like I can.

Luckily my employer is replacing our current company cell phones with HTC Evo phones next month. With all the talk I see around here about paperless caching, mobile logging, etc, naturally I am interested. I know there is at least one app that isn't supposed to be mentioned, so aside from that one, which seems to be the best all around? I haven't decided yet whether I want to use the Evo as a stand-alone caching device or use it and my GPS together. An even more important question: I am new to this type of phone ("app stores") and am not sure if apps can be installed manually. The problem is that as I mentioned above, this phone is provided by my employer and therefore I will not be able to just purchase an app since I assume the charge would normally go to the phone account. However, installing one manually would be an option. I ran across one free one that had instructions for manual installation. Are all apps like this? If I decide to go with the "official" app, is there a way I could buy it online and download the app file to my computer then transfer it to the Evo's "app" folder on the SD card? I'll likely clear the installation of custom apps with my employer first but the phone will have unlimited everything and they don't have a problem with personal use of company cell phones (within reason) so I am not worried about data usage. I just know that purchasing an app directly through the phone will probably not be an option for me since I don't pay the bill, but again, I don't know how that works.

For various reasons, trying to contact people through the website doesn't always yield results. If it's been a couple weeks and no reply, you could also try contacting one of the more recent persons to find the cache in question and ask them for a hint.

Sorry my first post above had no line breaks. I had them in there, but it kept taking them out. I think I've figured out how to avoid that now (shift+enter). If you're reading this but skipped that post because it was too difficult to read, here is the basic gist of it: In order to help people realize/understand the need to log TBs and coins OUT (picked up) of a cache, perhaps they should have a reminder message and/or a box where you can enter a tracking number of any bugs or coins you might have picked up while you are at the 'log your visit' section. Similar to when you have them in your inventory and it asks if you dropped any off. It could just list what is KNOWN to be in the cache, but since that is often wrong (because of improper logging), perhaps just a way to enter a tracking number from the log entry page. There are probably a few ways this can be done, but the idea is that when entering the 'visited' log, the person should, at minimum, be reminded to log them, even if only a link to the trackable entry page. Below is a rough mockup I did showing my idea. After entering a tracking number, it could add it to a list then refresh the page, allowing you to enter more.

I read your thread. (Paragraphs would have helped) The fundamental problem is that it is difficult to determine whether or not the logger picked up any travel bug from the cache. I wouldn't be opposed to a partial segment that reminded people about bugs or a click here to learn, but no pop-up, click here to clear kind of thing. Clarify your presentation and you might get a better response. Yeah, I tried editing that post right after I submitted it because it removed all of my line breaks. I've since discovered that shift+enter seems to help retain them rather than just enter. Never saw that problem before. I will clean it up a bit. Edit: Well, I guess it's too late to edit it now. Edit 2: Okay, I posted a follow-up with line breaks and also attached an image showing a quick mock up of what I had in mind.

I am new to geocaching and had one of our first bugs go missing pretty quickly because it wasn't logged as being picked up. Apparently someone swapped it for another (and didn't log the drop on the other one either). I'm not terribly upset over it, but it is disappointing about the lack of understanding of procedures as you said. I tried to straighten things out by logging the bug that is physically there and showing mine as missing. At least the cache contents is correct now and one previously MIA bug is showing its correct location. I'm sure mine will show up eventually. When we decided to try geocaching I spent hours (literally) reading FAQs, this forum, as well as other sites about how this "game" is played, paying close attention to travel bugs and coins because I wanted to make sure I did things correctly. Hopefully I handled this swapped bug thing correctly, at least I think I did. I do think that part of the problem is that it takes some hunting around to know exactly what to do with these trackables when you find them. I started a thread a few days ago suggesting that the picking up of bugs or coins should be brought to the user's attention when logging a visit (much like it is when logging a visit while you show trackables in your inventory). I think it would at least help, and hopefully it will get some attention from the powers that be. The idea being that just before or after the box where you choose your log type, it would ask you if you picked up any trackables from the cache, maybe with links to more info, etc. As it is now, you need to go to a totally separate section of the site (trackables as opposed to caches) to log a trackable.... very easily missed unless you are looking for it. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=256974

Do you have a GPS? You could go back to the geocache site you stumbled on, see what the GPS coordinates are, then go to the website and search for caches nearest those coordinates. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx