Viscus

Okay, to be perfectly clear: I am too satisfied with the new design to continue discussing in this thread. It gave me most of the things I wanted, including ease-of-access-details such as submenus, better organized pages, news on the front page and a better, more content design. The best thing of all is that Groundspeak seems to be putting as much focus on the Geocaching community as I do. On the front page you can read 1. Browse [for geocaches], 2. Discover, and 3. Share which I interpret as a wish for an expanded community and social interaction. Unfortunately no changes were made to profile presentations nor communication between members (such as guestbooks), and the forum remains external instead of integrated with the site (as seen on http://www.geocaching.se/). It would have been a great improvement as having it integrated (like a page, that is) could have served as a flexible stand-in for an actual social network. Over-all, the update covered many of the main issues I adress in the starting post. And like many pointed out, changes must come one step at a time, and improving the foundation of the site might just be the preceeding step before expanding the actual community services. Let's hope so. I guess there are better threads atm to discuss the update. Just wanted to share my few coins here

Yay, I like irony. Back on topic, I love the new design! Will get back with further analysis later today.

BEven if that was even remotely correct, it has exactly zip to do with this discussion. And I have accumulated more money for Groundspeak in 2 months by word of mouth than you do by paying for one year of premium. Drop the nonsense.

I often log the physical log book but sometimes time is a factor, or the log book may be too hard to extract from the container. Just the other day I found a cache that needed "special tools" to extract the container from its hiding place, so I couldn't even get the cache out. Virtual logginng sometimes have to preceed physical logging, I think it's the hunt that's important. Although I often write something more than "tftc" nowadays

Like I said, I have generated about 75 euro to Groundspeak for buying the iphone app and ialking friends into buying it as well. But this does not matter. I should not have to pay for the right to voice my opinion, nor should anyone else. Pointing out that I am not a premium member is completely and utterly irrelevant. I will buy premium if I would benefit from its features, not to raise charity.

Not sure if you saw my comments above. I mentioned that I felt the layout was fairly easy to figure out even for new folks, but I hate the color scheme (too dark), and I don't like the gigantic top banner. Again, it's an okay layout, but I'm not thrilled or anything. The colourscheme can be changed. I agree with you; it looks more like a site for anarchists judging by the presentation. But again, it can be changed. The banner as well. But the main point was rhe layout which is intuitive and informative.

Besides your completely incorrect conclusion of my standpoint, you are also saying that I should not be allowed to add my thoughts to this community unless I send Groundspeak money (for services that I do not require; ie premium)? If it comforts you, I bought the iphone app and recruited about ten friends to buy it as well. Lets clear things up: i do not want to be "in charge" of this sites development, nor have I EVER mentioned that I want "intrusive social networks", quite the contrary: that it should at least be optional. You seem content with disagreeing and I am perfectly fine with that. But please refrain from concluding false ideas and paste them onto mine. This is a discussion, nothing more, so relax.

Thanks for all the great responses in this thread. It seems most people are sceptical to the notion of this site adopting accessibility and communication as prime directives in its development. Others are more open and positive to it. I think we will have plenty to discusw after the update and I am looking forward to it. Again, I should mention that I hope the layout will be close to http://www.geocaching.se/. Any agreements/disagreements or comments on that, for the meantime?

@StarBrand, I'm not here to gain your approval and I'm not in the slightest interested in argumentum ad populum. And I'm sorry if I "portrayed" the site to be as bad as it actually is, I still think it's a great and informative site, and I was planning to add one section in my starting post where I'd point out positive things about the site - but it would have served no purpose. This thread is solely meant for my request that the site should be improved, not a thread where I vent any hate towards it. In other news, this is what Groundspeak wrote about the upcoming site update on Facebook: Get ready for a new sleek design and improved performance on Geocaching.com. The site, along with mobile apps, will be offline on Wednesday, May 4th for up to six hours as we add more hamsters* to power our site. Details here: http://bit.ly/iiVycA *Our servers are not powered by hamsters. We're upgrading our database servers. So, not only can we expect better performance after the update, but also a "new sleek design". This should prove to be interesting. Really looking forwards to this. I completely empathize and agree with you. While I wish for increased connectivity between members, I would not want a Facebook-clone or a mainstream-platform for teenagers who wants to be part of something "special". No one wants that.

Let me answer this with a counter-question: What sane person would prefer a complicated, clunky and unnecessarily intricate layout than a smooth, simple and user-friendly one? I don't need source-material, just check the direction that about every computer-software (offline or online) is going towards. I already compared geocaching.com with geocaching.se which has a generally better design (and so far, no one has disagreed). It seems you would have been satisfied with the web as it was 10 years ago, where coding was too undeveloped to give a content and flowing experience. I however, would not have been. Back in those days navigating through sites were normally difficult and there were no sense of giving a pleasurable experience through easy-to-use GUI, most pages were simply HTML-files linked to eachother. Then came the demand for user-friendlyness in order to attract new members and give them a pleasurable experience. When the impprovements are there, everyone will be happy: It's the transition that frighetns people. And, of course it's my opinion that Geocaching.com should follow this same direction. You don't have to put on your captain Obvious-cape to prove that. Everything in my first post is purely subjective. However, an increasing demand for user-friendlyness and ease-of-use is a reality, whether you choose to "believe" me or not. You're the one who does not see blatant irony and I'm the one who is stupid. This will keep me up tonight..

Here are the new updates for the website: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=269950&st=0 A video section (YouTube implementation, that is). I like this. Although it's youtube implemented which people should hate - I mean, youtube is banned in schools as well and it, like Facebook, is a social network with an extremely large amount of members. I must've forgotten what's the problem with this again, as Groundspeak seem to have missed it as well. A very nice addition to the site. At first glance I thought this video section was something like the photos section in profiles, where members can share their experiences with personal photos and images. But sharing experiences is not the important thing, right. The important thing is geocaching, right. Let's remove the photos section, right.

I' date=' of course, meant the trends that marks modern social networks as up-to-date. Such as easy communications, ease of navigation - and these are not trends in merely social networks. If you check out the rest of the web, most modern and particularily proffesional websites have these qualities, whereas Goecaching.com does not. User-friendlyness is generally considered to be an importment platform to develop over the coming decade, and you already see Google and Microsoft taking it seriously (smartphones have become ridiculously easy-to-use, just as computer software, OS's, web-services and websites). It's commonly accepted and more often commonly requested. As for you getting a notification e-mail instead of the actual message, you can get the actual message in this e-mail, and several websites already has this system. Given, you would still have to access Geocaching.com to answer the message, but it should take care of your addressed problem. And if you think that's an ordeal then I can't [i']believe[/i] how you can even stand the site in it's current condition, where basically everything involves taking you to another page or site (forums and shop for instance). You're very contradictory here. And like I've written over and over again: I personally would be okay with the option to turn off IM, PM etc. and just go with e-mail for those who want to. Either as standard or as personal settings. This means I respect your wish to just get e-mails (because as I see it, that's your main argument, the rest is just whining) while you on the other hand demonstrates no respect for my and several other members wished for increased connectivity. It's like talking to a brick wall. Pointing it out have seemed necessary as all the answer I get is: "NO IT'S NOT" without any motivation. Take a look at d+n.s's post above this one. Had we implemented this axiom effectively, mankind would never had evolved beyond sticks and stones. @d+n.s, what you write is true and it's nice to see that I'm not the only one who finds it an undeveloped fun-factor to connect with other geocachers. The site will be down for maintenance at May 4th for 4-6 hours - maybe this will involve something like the topics we've discussed? I can't believe for the life of me that Groundspeak would not want to increase the connectivity between members.

Good post, and I particularily agrees with the bold part. But it seems change is kind of taboo here: The "Let's not fix what isn'ẗ broken"-mentality.

So? So, Wordpress United is how you merge forums and Wordpress for example and that project has been so delayed it's darn near abandoned. Not up to date on current patches. You can bet there's at least one ticked off cacher who has the knowledge and desire to bring our favourite site down over a missed patch. Groundspeak owns the code to their site, and owns the responsibility to it. I believe Groundspeak is a bit large to be running the operation on Wordpress, or PHP-Nuke, or even Drupal. Those are (well PHP-Nuke *was*) excellent content management systems but will suffer greatly with the database load that the Geocaching dataset is. Edit: Add URL for WP-United This is entirely besides the point. The point was the overall layout, not the underlying mechanisms.

So?

@Ike, whatever.

This is the official main geocaching site in Sweden: http://www.geocaching.se/ This is what the official website should be like if you ask me. The front page has got some news about the site and the organisation, info on newly added caches at the left side, some ads to generate funding, upcoming events and best of all: One main-menu at the top with sub-menus to help navigation. And this is what I mean by ease of accessibility. The profile, in this case, is much better than the one on Geocaching.com. It's simplistic, yet informative, allows for a large avatar, statistics, custom personal info and more. It's basically your forum user profile with a few tweaks. Needless to say, it's more comfortable to have one profile instead of two. And oh - what's that on the left side? Is that a "Send PM"-button? Indeed, and this brings me to the next point.. Forum integration. This isn't quite what I had in mind when I went on about turning Geocaching.com into a social network of some sort, but the swedish site pulls this off quite nicely by integrating the normal site with the forum. Notice how the forum itself is not a seperate page, but part of the main site as a sub-page? Well, that's a working model right there. Sending PM is done via the forums and you're brought there when clicking "send PM" on a user's profile, without leaving the site or anything. Now to the most important issue: Searching for caches. Here is the search-page of the site: http://www.geocaching.se/?page=map/map. Notice the map/location details compromise and the size (and fluidity) of the map. This is a lot like the iPhone Geocaching-map which has a similar system. Now, if you search for caches, and click on one, you get some basic details about that particular cache plus the option to open a new tab with more detailed info on the official website. Furthermore: Notice that a complete list of all shown caches are located below the map. It's not the nightmarish social network many people here seem to think would happen if Groundspeak merely increased the level of accessibility and connectivity between people. It's a well designed, informative and user-friendly site that simply does it's job much better than Geocaching.com (in my opinion of course). Feedback shall prove interesting.

I don't think you are seen as an attacker. You have a point and want to stick to it. Heck fire, nothing wrong with that. Other think you don't get it here and want to stick to their guns too. This does point out a HUGE flaw in trying to turn this into some additional social networking site. This exchange is somewhat impersonal. You read the words the way you want to. I can see your passion, and I see others that feel passionate about their feeling about what this site should be. The impersonal nature of the exchange is bad historically in forums and such. I have a great example. fizzymagic and I have gone toe to toe here on lots of occasions. We FINALLY met in Seattle last summer. He thought I would not want to meet him. It was one of the highlights of my trip. We don't always agree and we have certainly thrown some evil barbs at each other, but when we met we had a great conversation (all too brief) and I think we both gained immeasurable respect for each other. You want social networking, go to an event. I text, yeah, but man sometimes I wish some people would just call me. You have my phone number right there! Again, impersonal and slow. I can get more done in a three minute conversation than in thirty minutes of texting back and forth. You are missing it here. This is a game. We play here and we meet friends along the way. You can then add those friends to your social networking sites and get more in touch with them in other various ways beyond just geocaching. I have many guestbooks for people to sign. They are my hidden caches. You can easily look at my hidden caches and see what people think of my work. If they like my work, they gush on my cache pages. If my cache is a stinker, they say "TFTC". Oh yeah, I bookmark/favorite the pocket query page, the field notes page, the find another user page and greasemonkey script a few other query pages (hidden by user, found by user, user's profile, etc.). I use the bookmark toolbar to one click my way to various forum landing pages. Your browser is your greatest tool. Use it wisely. First of all, I do not have problems navigating the site, but I am bugged about it's general layout. Secondly, thanks for patting me on the shoulder, I think I went out too hard as a newcomer to this forum. As an old forumist myself, I probably should've known better. I had to take a caching-walk to get my senses back straight, sorry if I ventilated it all in your face earlier. I found your wall-of-text the most intelligable so far, but I was quite overwhelmed by it's length. I really have nothing to add as a response, seeing as most of the issues has been brought up already. Hope there's no hard feelings and thanks for sharing your thoughts. Also, thanks to the rest of you who gave my words consideration. I have one left coin to add in my favor, coming up in my next post...

Since you dedicated that entire post to ensure me that improvements are unnecessary and that the site is virtually perfect already, then blames me for not putting as much value into actually caching as with connecting with other geocachers is frightening. As a web-developer you should be even more keen on improvements on websites than I am, and I would hav expected more. Furthermore, I am cornered as an attacker. I am not. I simply wish the site to be improved by the measures I presented in my first post, and I never ever expected such fierce and aggressive responses. Now, in order to prove my loyalty, I have to buy myself a premium account, which I have no need for, no money for, and would serve as no indication that any of my desired improvements would come true. I think I will leave this thread to mature on it's own for a while. Pearls before swine was never my intent..

Then shut it off. In other words: Keep your mail. Like I've written a few times now, the PM inbox for Geocaching could easily be made optional. Like friend requests are optional.

Neither did I. I still think it could be vastly improved. On a side not, every single person that I've talked into registering on this site has found it quite unhelpful and even I still find new stuff and pages here and there by random. Why not? It's done in the iPhone app: You simply click the cache and get linked to an information page with everything you need to know. I don't know how the web-map works though, but I've seen they're working on a new one (currently in Beta). Well why do you need to see your cache-logs "all the time", and why can't them both be merged? Just make it more fluent, I don't actually need two profiles. Fact of the matter is that I have never had 2 profiles on any other site where I've had to register. Most criticism here seem to be "nope, can't work, end of discussion". While I'd like to keep my mind open enough to at least include all of my wishes as optional, if they would ever be included.

Then shut off your inbox. Thanks for making sense out of that. Valid Points, absolutely. But rather than objecting to anyone who would use this system, why not simply suggest improvements, such as the option to block people from posting PM to you, or an option to receive an e-mail notification about new PM's? These are common options for many/most websites. To clear things up, it is already a social networking site and the forum enforces this fact. All I want is those four small improvements and they could all be made optional. If you disagree then I fully respect your opinion.

I hate to repeat myself, so let's agree to disagree. Wait, I need to grasp my mind around this... Are you implying, that I'm implying, that an integrated IM-system for Geocaching.com, or a guestbook for that matter, would FORCE you to quit using Live Messenger? I really don't see your message here. Maybe I misunderstood you. I've been using Facebook, with it's integrated IM-system plus log/guestbook for years, and during all that time I have always used Live Messenger on the side. Where is the contradiction?

It doesn't matter if I expose my e-mail adress or not, the system is still unnecessarily intricate. Like I've written about one zillion times already, user-friendlyness and accessibility is important (for ANY website) and e-mail contacting could still remain optional. I personally hate to have to go to my e-mail just to check for a message from a site which could have had an integrated PM-system instead. But requesting ease of access seems to be taboo here.

Still talking about Facebook here or do you mean your Geocaching profile? I did not find any IM adress (unless you've hidden it in your personal text - in that case, it's third party right?) and e-mailing could be an option besides integrated PM messaging. Which would be more accessible. I agree one hundred percent, but I never mentioned "auto-scanning for friends". Like I wrote in the starting post, I referred to being able to share my caching-logs on facebook. Like I automatically share my game experiences from my PS3, or my jogging rounds with my iPhone. Needless to say, it should be optional for those of us who use Facebook.