java.lang

I'm confused. Burying these options one level deeper than they were before, with no other changes, is somehow making it easier? I'm seeing the exact opposite of "easier". This isn't exactly new though - GS seems to like to claim/advertise exactly the opposite of what it's paying customers think. The last release also promised super easy and useful new email notifications and we all saw where it has gotten us... I can also remember a while back, when they wanted to sell us the new improved search functionality as a big step foreward, which regrettably can only search for prefixes of cache names anymore...

I couldn't agree more with most of the users in this thread. -> bring back plain text emails. Some of the changes you made are good and have long been requested (owner name in publish emails) but no one asked for bloaty HTML mails filling up our inboxes and eating paid data volume for no additional value. It's fine if you send out your newsletter in HTML using the corporate design, but all the mails changed with the latest update are essentiually there to inform cachers about important stuff which they should be able to grasp immediately and don't have to dig through a lot of useless clutter. From my point of view the email system was working just fine except for three points which the users complained about quite a bit: * No owner names in publish logs * The date format doesn't stick to the preferences the user has set (the US format is _very hard_ to grasp at a glance for the rest of the world - you are aware of that?) * Clumsy/impossible to set up notifications for multiple cache types So you did an update to the mailing and notification system and addressed just one of them and that only just half heartedly. I read my mails in plain text format and the publish mails masically just include the GC-Code in their text. So you missed quite some opportunity to finally fix some long lasting "bugs"/missing features but implemented something no one really asked for and really gets people annoyed because it breaks things and makes our well-learned e-mail routine much harder. If the design team really wants to have HTML mails - then that's fine. But a lot of users want to have plain text (and no multipart messages which are even larger) so please give your users the option to switch to receiving plain text mails with concies subject lines including all the necessary information in the body too, but nothing more. No HTML, no greetings from HQ, no advertisement for the latest and greatest GC-app and no links to Facebook or Twitter. We simply don't need that.

I would like to propose another addition to the bookmark list and the official internal database: http://coord.info/GCB652 - Europaeische Paesse One has to go to a mountain pass and take pictures of the GPS and the view from there. Just passes in Europe which no other cacher has claimed yet are allowed. This cache can mess up statistics, maps, distances and souvenirs.

The problem with this is the [usual] lack of communication from GS. We don't know if they are still paying attention here or just ignore this thread. No information if they want to change something or this is set in stone. No official statement (even one saying we'll be coming back to you with a longer official statement in 1 week) just leaves still more room for speculation and abuse.

Let's just assume, that GS wants to comply with the EU legislation for whatever reason (maybe this can be enforced somehow in the US, or they want to open premises on EU soil and thereby have to do so). In this case there are still problems with the new price sheme: Why should European customers have to accept the additional 'buffer' you are calculating for currency fluctuations. This buffer will obviously always be in favour for GS, so this clearly discriminates European customers. Why should a geocacher in Luxembourg (15% VAT) have to pay the same amount as someone in Sweden (25% VAT). What advantage will it be for someone in Sweden paying in EUR? You can't really argue with currency conversion fees you want to save your customers from, since a customer in Sweden will still have to pay conversion fees from SEK to EUR. In this case the only one who will win is PayPal or the CreditCard company, since they'll get payed twice. What if the EUR <-> USD rates change drastically? Do you really want to adjust the prices for PM each and every time? Becuase one way you may lose a lot of mone, or the other way your customers will complain big time. So in the face of this new legislation probably coming to effect in the US itself, I think the best thing GS could do about this situation: Get yourself an EU-VAT-number Publish it on your website Publish it on all your (European) invoices In case you have to adjust the PM price, because you need more money and can't have it locked at the current level (which is more than understandable - just add up 10 years worth of inflation): Increase the price - for all customers worldwide - recurring or not (I guess everything else will lead to problems and more duscussions). State on your website that the price for PM is XX.YY USD* *) excluding sales tax / VAT When a customer buys a PM, charge XX.YY USD + applicable taxes for the country the buyer resides in Sum up to a grand total in USD State on your invoice, what the net price is, what the VAT rate was and what the VAT amounts to Let the customer pay in USD. This saves you a lot of trouble and worries about currency fluctuations, and also gives us the good feeling that we aren't ripped off here. By the way: we are used to pay for things we buy somewhere outside of Europe in USD (or AUD, or CAD, ...). Let currency changes and conversion fees be our worries - not yours. Oh - last but not least (and I assume probably hardest of all for you) - at least try to appologize for this situation. Think about the last time you upset your customers like this and were talking about "Let's make better mistakes tomorrow". I guess we do have "tomorrow" by now, so I assume it might be time to make "better mistakes" too. I guess this is would be a solution most of us would be happier to accept. Nobody wants to have increased prices, but in case it has to be done, let it be transparently.

Do you know whether an open source database is used? Does anyone know more details about the software in use? Would be quite interesting to know. Still - open source is no excuse for bad performance. Just take Wikipedia as an example. They are using MySQL and are switching to MariaDB right now. Of course they surely have much more server capacity too, but they also serve a huge load of requests every second. This huge amount of requests also includes a lot of searching (probably a much bigger percentage than here at GC.com) and still they manage to do so very fast by using Apache Lucene - which has been brought to Groundspeak's attention quite a few times recently. Lucene would enable GS to create a very powerful and very fast search facility for their page - something the users have been asking for ages. Oh yeah - Apache Lucene is open source and still used by a lot of very big services.

Nothing more to add I guess. Well summarized.

And there is the next unanswered question: If you change to recurring now will you then pay the old price?Say, I am a norecurring PM and my next turn would be in June and I'd tick the option recurrung today, what would they charge me in June? Exactly what I was asking nearly 3 pages ago in this thread, and we are still missing an answer...

The status page practically never shows anything but "operating normally", because this page has to be updated manually by one of Groundspeak's employees. This of course makes the page quite pointless, since they don't even seem it fit to do so today, where they clearly do have problems...

So since you state that VAT is now included - what is the exact percentage of VAT you are adding? And please don't worry about the fees we'll have to pay - better worry about implementing features your users really wanted in the first place, or about bringing out an update which doesn't break at least three other features for a change. Seems like the testers really did a lot of (anything but) testing for the latest update - as so often. Sorry for the hash tone here, but this really seems to get more and more ridiculous by the time, and GS know they can do more or less whatever they like, because there's no real competitor out there. And even if there would be - no one easily wants to leave behind all the caching history he has gathered here... Edit to add: What if we now change from non-recurring to recurring? And why wasn't something like this announced a bit more prominent?

This is a joke - right? You are taking away some functionality and then sell it as an improvement? The search facility is limited enough as it is without this new restriction. What is the big performance problem here? Is Groundspeak using some toy-database software to handle all the data, or is it simply the aged and ever expanded database scheme which makes effective searching impossible? A 'real' database should not have any problems looking for a string in some 2 million cache titles...

You can use http://project-gc.com to do that. After you authenticated the API use, you can look up duplicate logs for any user by going to Profile/Find bad logs

I started a similar thread two months ago: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=306168

Indeed. See the feature Request I just made (http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=306168) - before I learned about this release note thx @ Groundspeak for your efforts and for letting us know about it!

Of course - after a few months without them I didn't check that forum anymore. - dadgum Still my original request holds - I just change it to: Post release notes regularly and communicate with your customers...

I really liked to read through the release notes pages every time Groundspeak made some changes, since this gave a great overview what changed, what was added and what has been removed. Somehow I really miss this, and the latest (re)introduction of the "View Gallery" link in the upper right plus the ability to flip through pics in the gallery is just one example of functionality I would like to read about. How are we supposed to know this functionality has been added, without anyone telling us so, or even marking the respective feature-requests as [DONE], [iMPLEMENTED] or whatever? I guess this request here can be generalized even more and formulated as: Groundspeak: please communicate with your (paying) customers and tell them what you are doing. This improved communication should include: - Acknowledge bugreports, update their status, post an estimate when a fix will be in place, update the status again once it is fixed. - Give us more feedback on the suggestions we make here. Tell us whether they will be considered, if they are to be expected sooner or later, or dropped completely. - [...] The key aspect here is communication. I think this is crucial, and the lack of communication we are seeing here leads to a lot of disappointment and frustration. I guess I'm not the only one thinking along these lines...

Am I the only one missing things like these in some regular "Release Notes" posts? I know you don't intend to post them anymore (http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=303613) for minor things, but for the ones interrested in the site's progress this would be very helpful.

+1 for text/plain

Noticed the same behaviour recelty too. I too got a new farthest east cache, and it wasn't shown on the statistics page when updating the statistics. On the next day however it was there. I guess GS doesn't calculate these statistics when updating, but will do so with some recurring task once a day.

@The A-Team: I think I have to apologize here, since it was me who posted first about this email issue. At the time I did this however, the symptoms were exactly matching the topic of this thread. Maybe a moderator can split the thread and move all the posts related to the current mail-server issue into some other thread or so.

It just happened again: 2 (3) different situations, where I didn't get mail, even though I normally do. All the missing mails would have to be sent today (I guess), so maybe they are still in some queue, but since I got at least one of them I don't think so. Situation 1: http://coord.info/GC3QYH4 - A new cache in my area. It is on my watchlist, I logged a "Found it" and never got the email. http://coord.info/GC3QYHG - A new cache in my area. It is on my watchlist, I logged a "Didn't find it" and a "Needs Maintenance" and never got the emails. Both caches from the same owner published on the same date. Situation 2: http://coord.info/GC3RBFW http://coord.info/GC3RBF2 http://coord.info/GC3RBEK I just got the publish notification for the last cache. Just discovered the other two when I was looking at the map. All three caches of the same owner, published today. (Situation 3:) http://coord.info/GC3H7ZV The latest log (User "Lytsboekemon" from 2012-07-29) - never received a mail for this log, even though the cache is on my watchlist, and I received two mails for the previous logs of the same user (no idea why they logged it three times though) [Edit] Just received the DNF-log email for http://coord.info/GC3QYHG. Still missing the NM-log mail [/Edit]

Just noticed this problem too. It seems to have happened yesterday or today. Me and the user "2_chemists" own 3 caches here in my area (I own one, the chemists own the other two). We have each others' caches on our watchlist. The caches in question are: http://coord.info/GC2RKGP http://coord.info/GC2V0F8 http://coord.info/GC31DJA Neither of us did receive a mail notifying us of the logs for user "moses_was_here" from 2012-06-26. We neither received mails for the caches we own, nor for the caches we have on our watchlist. Just to make this clear: I receive notification emails from Groundspeak - so does "2_chemists". Maybe we didn't receive all of them in the past - who checks all the logs for all the caches each day. I just discovered these new logs by accident right now...

I already wanted to create this "feature suggestion" after the last site update, but somehow forgot to do so. Just now I read a post by jholly (http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=296718&view=findpost&p=5060903) which exactly reflects my thoughts. So my request would be: Stop implementing new features (no one asked for in the first place) - concentrate on fixing the bugs and inconsistencies in the already existing functionality of the page instead. Just to mention a recent example from the quoted thread: It's not possible to create a new mystery or multi cache in certain regions of the world. Groundspeak knew about this quite some time before the last scheduled update, still this 'critical' bug hasn't been addressed, but we got some fancy new feature no one asked for (and which can't be dismissed/removed by the ones which don't like it - at least not the way one would expect). Additionally - as feared/anticipated by some - the latest update again introduced a new completely unrelated bug (missing link to map on search results, which as been fixed quite fast) So bottom line: Stop implementing new features - go fix all that little and big bugs in the existing functionality. There's a huge load of threads in the bug report forum, and most of the time there's no response from Groundspeak other than a "Merging duplicate threads" here and there. Am I the only one thinking along these lines? Who wants to give me a +1 on this? [Edit]Just saw the typo in the topic title which I can't change anymore now ;-)[/Edit]

Does it make any sense that I can add the "Needs Maintenance" Attribute, when creating a new cache?

I somehow still fail to see the big problem in this. If someone tries to battleship the coordinates of a mystery, then the only one they are actually cheating are they themselves. Where's the big problem here? The only reason to keep coordinates well protected by not having such a system is, that if I have a very hard/creative puzzle or so, and want to have just honest finds, then it may bug me, that some people found the container without doing the hard work. But on the other hand: what do I - as a cache owner - gain by this? I can't really judge how the people who log a cache actually solved the puzzle - I don't have enough control over the coordinates anyway. Once the puzzle has been solved by a single person (i.e. the FTF has been made) everyone can contact that finder and ask him for the coordinates. In areas with strong Geocaching communities, all the puzzle-freaks know each other and you'll surely find someone who helps you out and tells you the coordinates if you call him...