renruts

A few months (or years) ago i found less confusing, more detailed rules posted online somewhere. i printed them out and stuck them in my tin and really enjoy playing with the kids. Now...i am trying to find the link that i found those rules at. Anyone have the link? Some friends of ours now have the game and don't understand the rules that came with it - which is the problem with the game, the directions are quite confusing! I am trying to help them out and can't find the link. If nothing else, I will type them up and send them, but if someone could supply the link, that would be much easier.

If it had been in the website forum I'll bet it would have been noticed a lot faster...... You may very well be correct unfortunatly this was not as i assume ( and we know the old saying for assuming ) the OP was Trying to follow the forum posting guidelines and posted it in the iphone thread since it appeared to them to be an iphone app issue. Sort of highlights the statement i made above that I feel more can be overlooked using a forum based reporting mechanism.

Yes, I am suggesting that with all of the worldwide users and the push from the company to have mre and more mobile Near Real Time services, there should be someone that can restart services, servers 24/7 when there are outages. I am not suggesting that they have a call center at all. A NOC that gets updates from a web based mechanism is good enough. With such a quasi automated process you can begin to build metrics for the reports being seen and have the potential to be more proactive about maintaining service levels to the end users. Keystone you have not upset me - the recent seemingly constant lack of being able to use a service I have paid for, for entertainment purposes upsets me... Sorry that you took me out of context. It absolutely would have been sufficient... Here we differ... All I am asking for my membership paid and then for the app that i bought is for it (the site, app, and all back end services to make them work) to work, and when not working to have a better communication channel for disseminating information and to get that information in to the hands of meaningful engineers in a more rapid and efficient way so that potential impacts can be mitigated in a much quicker way that would not have nearly as much impact on the worldwide user base. I disagree that the forums are a good place for this traffic as well. Too many things can be missed. Take this thread for example: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=244671 this was basically the 6th weekend in a row that the app was unusable, the first response form a GS employee was a day later. Now considering that most of the user base is more apt to go caching on the weekend versus the core hours of the work week, it makes more sense to me to make sure you have someone watching over the infrastructure when you have the highest potential for having increased volumes of traffic, or as stated for this past weekend the highest ever traffic. I do agree that if I was the only premium member that this would be a more unrealistic request, but collectively with all the premium members world wide we deserve the services we have paid for. It is a matter of principle... I have paid for a service for entertainment purposes that I expect to be able to use as frequently or infrequently as I choose in the advertised way it was sold to me.

Keystone - I am not asking in the feature request sense... I would like to be able to bring issues with the services up. For example roughly the past 6 weeks the iphone GC app's backend has been unstable basically to the point of being unusable... We often see issues with the PQ generators. It would make more sense from a business perspective in my opinion to move this 10 year old company with a growing user base to a 24/7/365 supported infrastructure by engineers other than the button pushers at internap... Twitter and Facebook are you serious? I know it has gotten the word out in the past but seriously this is Groundspeak's plan for the infrastructure engineers to find out there are infrastructure issues and to pass that word to the userbase? So is Groundspeak also now requiring that all users maintain a Facebook and Twitter account to be able to get updates on the services? se my point? I can understand the presence on these Social services but not as one of your main lines for communication of issues to your userbase, that just seems assinine to me. Where is this mechanism for reporting performance issues published?

From surfing the itunes store I found this link for support of the iphone app and was previously unaware of this support site. http://support.Groundspeak.com/index.php Can we submit all support and perceived service related issues at this location with the Submit a Request feature? Will this get more visibility internally than posting in the forums?

Considering that Groundspeak is moving more and more towards a near real-time service with the offering of more and more NRT apps for data access devices like the iPhone, Geocaching Live, planned Andriod app, etc. and then with the site issues as of late. Is there a 24/7/365 public user facing NOC / Monitoring that users can report issues to? If not are there plans to provide some sort of infrastructure to better monitor the services provided and receive reports from users? I know Jeremy indicated to me that a Blog / Portal to communicate infrastructure related issues more directly with the user base was planned for Summer of 2009, of which I do not think ever materialized.

Jeremy - Thanks for the info and for continuing to mature your company and staff... It is good to read that Groundspeak may start actually adhering to Change Controls and informing the customer base when the Change Controls are scheduled for. It is good and bad from my perspective to hear PQs are moving to an upper bound of 1000 per PQ. Honestly I percieve this as a Band-Aid that will reduce some of the users perceived user experience burdens, but honestly just stages the community for another 10 years of the same basic design and no more fidelity. As I posted in another thread, I would like to see and think it would be advantageous for Groundspeak to instead of having a data bounding per tool to have a more general Bounding for all data delivery features and giving the end user the ability to invoke as many or few PQs CAARPQs etc until that Data Feature Bound is met.

I would tend to disagree with the No Premium Features have been removed... We lost a few cache types, and although gained another site (Waymarking) for those to be placed in to still can not query and produce a mass PQ like file for therefore I have lost a segment of Points of Interest that I could query for and return in a pseudo automated fashion. I do agree that this is a GREY area as a cache type is not a PM feature (outside of PM Only) but the ability to query those types was a Feature of Functionality of the PQ generator... Now with that being said, I do not see that as a huge burden to the perceived value. It is a hit for me as I really enjoyed searching for virtuals and being able to log them on the same site. Now I have to manually search Waymarking (actually the wife does..) and then log them on a completely different site. Once again, I reiterate that this is not an absolute example of loosing a PM feature depending on you perception... I can see the limits raise offloading some of the burden users experience, but it is just a band-aid from my perspective.(as stated earlier in this thread my focus for desired improvement is on trip planning not my home area query ability) What I would have liked to see, is instead of an upper bounds on tool limits changed, is to offer more fidelity in the way the limit is imposed. I would like to see the tools not having defined tool bounds, and instead having an overall Data feature bounding. In other words I would like the ability to run as many or few PQs CAARPQs etc until I reach the Data feature upper limit.

Markwell - Thank you for the very informative and excellent example. I agree this is a very effective solution for my home area. Although for traveling it is a bit harder than having a broad home area of interest from my perspective. Where my problem lies is we are not exactly sure where we are going to stop as of yet on our 2600+ mile trek to Carnation. We decided last year that we were going to determine a rough route that will take us by some Landmarks we wish to see, but other than those few areas we plan to just wing it. With that said your method works well for a broad area but for a linear corridor it does not work quite as well. The CAAR works fairly well, but it is limited to 500 miles / 500 caches... The issues I see are all the specific tool based upper bound limits instead of a more general data limit per day/week/month. I also agree with you that one does not need the data for every cache in the region, but being able to chose geographic areas to get small clusters versus non-deterministic geographical clusters based on date ranges would be more preferable to me. HYNR - I agree in general I am satisfied 90+% of the time with my PM and with that do not see a huge decline in my value other than I still can not run a PQ like query on Waymarking (unless there has been a change I am not aware of). I responded with sentiment to the pain of planning for GW and the request for suggestions on improving the flexibility of data delivery based on my route planning experience for this trip.

It potentially can be (more than likely will be) accomplished but not as efficiently as one (I) would want. I mean look at it this way... I can create 90 PQ's delete 50 with saving the GUIDs in a spreadsheet and hope they are persisted long enough that I can recall them during the trip, but the bigger issue is that I would like to have more fidelity with the Number of saved and the total number of caches returned from queries. I find that I loose a lot of data gathering ability due to the limits... For example I tend to run CAAR pqs and then supplement those with Regular PQs. One thing I commonly see is that my CAAR does not return the 500 limit and then I am unable to make that delta up on my next 4 PQs, thus throwing data away that technically I am allowed to gather on this day due to the limit of the system... Once again I can see those of you saying "you have never found 2000 in a day much less 2500" but that is not a valid argument by any means. The argument is that I have the potential for covering the area in a 24 hour period that far out weighs my data collection ability for that same area of interest. From there it simply comes down to the potential. What would potentially help alleviate some of these hurdles is a fixed number of caches that can be gathered per day no matter how many or few PQs are sourced in conjunction with a much higher or unlimited number fo saved queries. For example it would be great to be able to search for 25 caches in every major town we will pass though that are Regular, 3/3 or higher and have been found in the last 30 days. Then from there be able to generate 20 PQs for those "areas of interest". on top of the 7 CAAR PQs that I will have to generate for the trip out and then the 9 for the return trip and then the regular PQs that will be run for each area of overnight stay... I feel that making the changes to how the current limits are imposed would handle most of the planning I would wish to do, although it will still require excellent preplanned execution.

HYNR- I agree the system in its current configuration leaves a lot to be desired for anything over a couple of states (metro area) trek. We are seeing some of the same limitation issues with our planning for GW. We will be departing and driving a northern route from Pittsburgh to Carnation. We then plan to be there a few days and from there head south down through to Texas and pack to PA. The problem I see is the limitations for the PQ's of 5/500 with 40 saved. For our trip I will have well more than 40PQs that I would like to have staged to run, which is not possible with out multiple accounts. This model is the biggest limitation to me. If I could have unlimited queries created and sitting on my PQ page to run at will, and have the ability to run as many or few PQs per day to get the 2500 caches limit per day 35000 per week, then the model with the current data limitation may still be feasible, but the current strict model of 5/500 able to keep 40 plain sucks for any major route planning. The problem is not with finding 35,000 in a week, it is the potential to find 35 across a 2600 mile span without having to adhere to a strict route and then burning a chunk of time during my trip to manage that data. I too use the iphone app and think it is a good addition but in this case take a look across the country from PA to Carnation taking a more northerly route and then take a look at at&t's coverage map...

hmmm looks like changing STRIP_DOTDOT_URLS:FALSE to STRIP_DOTDOT_URLS:TRUE has taken care of my partial reference issues.

Tried reverting to LYNX to get some things done on the site, and am seeing more issues with it than I was with a graphical browser... Seeing many pages failing to load, and seem to be having issues with a lot of bad partial references. I am also having issues with cookies in LYNX but that may be purely a LYNX issue...

From my perspective: this is depressing... and as for the justification, that is just PPPlanning! It seems to me that by the time Groundspeak came in to the picture as "the listing service" geocaching was a world wide game. Hell it is on the World Wide Web - Why would you not have included multilingual functionality as a core feature from incarnation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_T...ructure_Library http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design

You left Ft Irwin and Ft. Drum off this list. At least from my last visits for MRXs both had caches just outside the gates. still on DoD property. At NTC there is one in the guard rail just after the painted rocks... I also think there maybe one at Camp Perry, but a lot of the oridignal 640 acres of Camp Perry I think has been changed to Park status.

Hey guys, if you are skeptical on this seller you are more then welcome to stop over at http://www.wpaga.com and click on our store link to purchase cans or e-mail to paga.mods@gmail.com with the shipping information and quantity. We have .30 and .50 cal cans as well as a host of Groundspeak licensed merchandise.

I know it is trivial, and there are currently independent links to delete each record individually, but I would like to see a check box sort of like what the PQ page has that allows multiple selections for deletion. It is not often that I have had the issue but there have been a few times that I failed to check the box when importing from the colorado and end up with a bunch of extra records that are duplicate to old records already logged, other times we have already uploaded the field note from the IPhone and are trying to fill in the gaps with the field notes from the colorado.

For the stuff I have done I have used diamond impregnated bits as well as a masonry bit. For ammo can sized you may want to check with a lapidary supply house and see if you can acquire a smaller diamond impregnated saw blade.

I completely agree they are the listing service that we have licensed to list our content and as such they have all the ability and rights as licensees to protect the data from proliferation, and try to maintain their business model. I have absolutely no qualms with that at all. What I was not understanding was why individuals were referencing it as Groundspeak's DATA. It is their DATABASE but our data makes up the contents and we are completely liable for our CONTENT not Groundspeak from my interpretation.

I will jump on the bandwagon and say that I too would like to see the limit changed from 5 X 500 = 2500 per day to N X C = 2500 per day. Unlike some of the others comments, I often create route PQs that at times do not even return 100 caches due to my filtering out of specific types or D/T rating limiting combined with a small radius, as such if I create that as a full fledged PQ I could potentially not get the full limit I am allowed. Now granted this is usually not a problem for me as I never really need all 2500 I can get back in a day but it would be nice to potentially have the option. One reason I say this is that I plan to take a huge road trip next year and plan to create several such routes that are off the beaten path and could potentially see the option of limiting by total number of caches one can have returned per day versus a stock number of queries with a max return limit of 500 as reducing the number of days I have to do some manual work on GC and with my OLDB. IE. I could create 10 routes of approximately 100 caches returned per each and run the PQs the same day and still not reach the 2500 limit versus having to schedule them over 2 days and once again not come anywhere close to the 5000 that I could get in 2 days. No matter I will still get my planning done fitting in the current model or if it is changed. The big difference is that I could potentially spend N hours in one day doing my planning versus x hours one day and n minutes over a day more more pulling the already scheduled data form my e-mail and importing it in to GSAK.

How is the relative size of the market relevant? Actually I would argue that Groundspeak has more to lose, proportionately, than the recording industry - and far fewer resources to sue people. And don't expect "the authorities" to protect you much - most piracy cases end up in the civil courts. I completely understand why these guys are keeping the crown jewels under lock and key. This is the one argument I have never understood. Please do not get me wrong I am not trying to start any fights or mud slinging at all, and do not think this is any leverage point for making any changes in the delivery of data from GS. I just do not understand the references to our cache data and log submissions as Groundspeak's Data. I think it is fairly well stated in section 6 of the TOU that all of the cache submission data and logs belong to the author, and us by agreeing to the TOU have given GS a full non expiring license to use that data in any way they can dream of. Am I misinterpreting this section of the TOU?

I think that a status page makes loads of sense at the web services url if the paid for services are down, and feel this is a lot easier from my perspective than most people are making it out to be. I would venture that for most larger web fronts geographically dispersed DNS is a best practice. I think that if GS were to set the TTLs on their zones to 300 seconds and set ACls for zone transfers for only their local subnets and the other DNS servers in the cluster, then they would have the fidelity to make a fast approximately 5 min change to point all services to an information site and then another approximate 5 min window to re-point after resolution of issues. With their current topology if they decided to move their servers it would more than likely take much longer than 24 hours. I am not sure if they own their IP space or if they are leasing that space from internap with the bandwidth and rack space. But if they had a disaster that caused them to have to bring services up in another data center on different IP space then I would speculate that the DNS would take more than 24+ hours to update as they would need to change the authoritative DNS server names and IPs from the registrar and that information would have to propagate to the root DNS servers and out. Whereas if they already have geographically dispersed DNS and a low TTL they could make those changes much faster...

http://www.geocaching.com/hotels/default.aspx So I see we now have (or have had as I may have overlooked in the past) a hotels search and booking link and drilling in to a state and list of hotels and down to a specific Hotel or by clicking on the nearby hotels link on a cache page and selecting a hotel brings up the hotel information and a list of the nearest landmarks, geocaches, and waymarks Are we going to be able to create a query directly from this page with the hotel coordinates as the center point, or when we reserve a room from this page will it then give us an option to create the PQ? Also will we be able to get the list of Points of interest or specific POIs as additive points in said PQ? Right now the rates seem way to high for me to book a room using this feature but if you get to the point of competing with the other big name travel sites I think I would be more apt to book from this service, especially if you auto magically create the PQ for me and/or do not charge it against my 5 per day allotment as a bonus for booking using this interface.

Just click the British flag on the top right under where it shows you are logged in as:

mtn-man... I apologize if this was meant for me. I did not think I was being rude, I was just frustrated and very tired after driving all night and then attending the GW7 all day. I do appreciate Elias looking in to it for me, and apologize that I have not been able to get back to this thread before now to let you guys know my results. I did end up running a new query, but did not try to re-create the ones that messed up yet, as my cellular connection was very slow through most of the route we were taking after I posted. Although I did end up creating a **NEW** route using coordinates for my starting location and an address for my final location and was successful in receiving that query. Now with that query I see the same results with a large search radius that is mentioned in another thread with the caches being clustered mainly around the starting point. I also did not edit any of the points on this route by dragging the markers around like I did with the others that failed and were listed on the back-end as problematic. All routes were created using the on-board utilities from Geocaching.com versus my normal method of creating a route in Street Atlas and then converting the .an1 file to a .gpx using gpsbabel and filtering down the number of points. Once again if my post was construed as rude I apologize. As mentioned before I was tired and frustrated and just wanted to be able to do some caching to turn our 10 hour trip in to 36.