FireRef

Does anyone have any idea who to contact if you are having problems with this application? I sent an email to gs.com, and got nothing back after a week. Textmarks said it's not at their end.

It is pretty cool - I just wish someone would answer my emails/questions about why it isn't working for the people who have been caching with me lately.

Well, I don't actually send a full log with each one - Just a couple of words to remember something unique about each cache. When I pull up the field notes and pick "post log", it fills in everything, including my couple of notes, and then I just delete that and type in my real log entry. But I see your point - I have an unlimited plan, so it works well.

I found this about 2-3 weeks ago, and love it - I can send texts from my phone, and it creates a field note, keeps them in order of find, I can send a few words to help me remember the cache, and then just click through the list to post logs (after typing in the appropriate comments). I have some friends who haven't been able to get it to work - waiting for gs.com to reply to my email asking for help. Otherwise, it's a great system. I think they need to add the ability to post a "post note" option, instead of found/not found only, but that's a minor thing. Comments? Good? Bad? Anyone else using it?

Ok - more general question - is anyone else using these at all?

I have been using TextMarks to log caches for a couple of weeks now - it works great! The problem is that I have 2 people with me who want to do the same thing - they have accounts on the website, but when they try to set up the link between textmarks and the field notes on GC.com, it doesn't work. It gives them a device identifier and a pin, but when they log into their account, and input that information, it says that it can't find that account. Any ideas? Do you have to be a premium member to use this? I didn't think so... It doesn't say anything about it in the notes.

And *my* post, above, draws upon a Groundspeak post in a thread *just like this one* earlier this year. Perhaps OpinioNate could program a macro to start a thread once a month stating "At this time, no enhancements are planned for the pocket query generator, except for plans previously announced." Or maybe Jeremy could listen to the people who are supporting his website and consider making some changes like increasing PQ limitations, with or without an increase in membership rates.

And now the Geocaching.com FBI and CIA and ATF are gearing up to go after this grey market and punish those people for violating their TOS. Sheesh...

Can't you enter a short note with a TextMarks log? That is an actual cache log and will show as a find directly on the cache page as a find (or DNF), not to the field notes screen. Plus, doing it this way will limit you to 140 characters, which is the max that TextMarks handles. Incorrect - I have used this for a couple of weeks now. The textmarks SMS posts a found it or DNF to the field notes page, accessable through your profile. It does NOTHING to the cache page. You have to go to the field notes page and click on "post log" for each one, then edit the text in the box for what will be in the log. Then, when you submit it, it actually gets posted to the cache page.

Some of those gave me some ideas for ALR caches - I like #19... good way to get people interested!

Wow... someone just doesn't understand the purpose behind these field notes. I just discovered the functionality being tied to cell phones through textmarks about 2 weeks ago. I like the ability to send a note to the site saying "found" or "dnf" for a cache, rather than carrying around an index card like I did before, and writing down all of the caches as I found them. This also lets me send a few word note to that field note, so I can remember which cache it was when I have done a number of them in one day. I then use the list on the site to type the actual logs. I haven't used my 2-3 word note for myself as a log anywhere. No lazyness involved here... and I resent that greatly that you would consider it such. Also, on a slightly related note from earlier in the thread - TPTB never give any kind of timeline on anything they say they are going to do - I assume it keeps people from holding them to it - they get to it when they get to it, and we have to suffer with the bugs until that time. They have several things they have promised to do, such as returning Archived caches to the geocaching.com google map page, but every time I ask when they plan to actually do it, I get a "when we get to it" answer... I'm not a programmer, but it seems like if they were working on these things regularly, they would fix them relatively quickly. On a positive note, they do seem to be much more forthcoming about changes they have made - release notes help a lot.

Groundspeak is happy to supply you with more product right now - you can buy 2 PMs. I agree that it would be nice if there were a discount, say with the 5th PM being half-price, but then they'd have to decide if they wanted to address the issue of people clubbing together to buy them. And it would also be nice if you could have both PMs on the same account, but if you're doing it for the PQs, you can use the same e-mail address, so there's just the minor inconvenience of managing the actual PQ entries. A platinum membership with 25 PQs per day would be both "more product" in that you get more data, but also a different product in terms of marketing and software. I suspect that the amount of programming required to go from "1" to "more than 1" level of membership, to allow this, would be substantial, compared to the amount of revenue to be generated. Are there really that many people who would pay, say, $100/year for 20 PQs but won't pay $120 for 4x5 PQs? Actually I think there might be a market for Platinum Membership, but mainly as a "vanity" item. A lot of PMs never run a pocket query and are just proud to "support the site". I suspect quite a lot of those would be prepared to support it quite a bit more. Kind of like the people who have black credit cards, or pay $25,000 for dinne to listen to a presidential candidate speak. Of course, then you'd have a load of "Geocaching should be free, I could run this site for $200 a year" people complaining about how Premium Membership was already too elitist, and Platinum Membership proves that Jeremy is in fact Gordon Gecko. More generally, don't underestimate Groundspeak's business acumen. For a small Internet company funded by cashflow, I don't think they're doing too badly. I think it's reasonably obvious that there are a decent number of people willing to pay a little more to get a little more information in PQ's (or a few more PQ's). What isn't obvious is the unwillingness of Jeremy to tap this revenue stream. Multiple memberships doesn't work, unless the person decides to log every find with every account, so that when they do the PQ's, they can filter their finds on the website rather than offline (therefore getting more caches online). And that would probably get rather irritating to cache owners. "Logging this find to keep my PQ's stright" with 3-4 cache names? Why not just increase the limit? Or create the ability to tie accounts together... this has been requested before. Makes much more sense than randomly shutting down cache types (Virtuals) or moving caches to another website (Locationless) which doesn't have nearly the functionality that this one does, and appears to have been at a standstill for a long time now in terms of new features (PQ's for Waymarks being a primary one). But that's another issue...mostly.

This is a good idea - solves 2 problems - the one that keeps your finds available on both accounts, so you're not downloading caches you have already done, and keeps TPTB happy because they're getting the extra $$. How about it, Jeremy? And I very much agree - with the previous poster - just because you don't see a use for something or have a need or desire for something to change or improve, especially when it would have NO effect on you whatsoever if you don't choose to use it, doens't mean you should constantly put down the people that are trying to make things better.

Honestly, I don't know what the problem with ALR's is - I think they add a different perspective to the game. Like virtuals, locationless caches, etc, they sometimes make the game more fun and sometimes make it more of a hassle.

I was told to make the caches that had the requirement to post a photo on the website for them to claim a found-it log ?-type caches. If that's what's required for this listing service to publish my cache, fine, so be it. I have no problem with that. About a week ago, I downloaded a bunch of the "?"type caches in my area, and started working on the puzzles. Turned out a number of them aren't puzzles. One requires you to post a DNF log with your Found-it log. Another requires photos like my caches. Some are puzzles to solve. Some are the cache which requires the collecting of codes from other caches to find it. Yet another, mine, is a 5 step multi that requires quite a bit of problem solving in chemistry before you can get from stage to stage, so I classified it as a ? type. I do think this category should be split up into puzzles, ALR's, and... hmm - any other categories? ALR's should be pretty much their own category, I would think. To say that is what was decided and so we have to stay with it - well, I guess we should be putting food and beer into caches, because that was what was done in the first one, and we better not change those rules.

Based on my experience with them, normal. (If I get a response at all) It is always interesting to see this topic come up over and over, and there are always the following groups: 1) People who want to see the limit upped. (decent number) 2) People who say "You don't need that much info" (which I always find interesting, because if you don't, fine... some people would like it, and they're not you) 3) People who say "There are ways to get that info without upping the PQ limit". (Listing workarounds is fine, but doesn't solve the problem) 4) GS - who rarely comments, but when they do, seem opposed to considering this. For the number of times it comes up by different people, maybe its time GS looked a little less at the business model and what benefits them, and a little more at what would benefit the people who choose to list their caches here. Without the people listing caches here, they wouldn't have a database to be so protective of. With people having the ability to maintain an offline database, they would still need to refresh info, check the website for updates, etc, so GS.com isn't losing anything. Just my $0.02 worth... and I have a lot of pennies (And in response to the comment above mine about bank robbery - there is a MASSIVE difference between a law and the TOS of a website - big time. I don't see anyone ever going to jail for sharing a PQ. I don't - since I don't know anyone else who gets them and what use they would be to me anyway, but I still think this is comparing apples and concrete blocks.)

What you are describing never happened. People create cache pages with html elements all the time. Incorrect. Several years ago, HTML was randomly removed from cache pages. Very minor codes were still permitted, but I had several drop-down boxes with links to my other caches, and they were stripped out. The explanation given to everyone on here was that they were trying to prevent people from using a very limited number of malicious code. I was unable to find the announcement or discussion of it after several searches that timed out, but that is what happened.

Agreed

I haven't had any problems with Yahoo and email - I get them sent to my Yahoo email account, and then also to my cell phone MMS address, so I get the entire published email, rather than just the first 160 characters - that also gives me the link so I can just click on it and go to the webpage if it looks like it's close enough to try for an FTF.

Unless I misread the information from a while back when it was randomly decided to remove all HTML from cache pages, I thought we were told that it was supposed to get restored in some fashion at some point. This was quite a while back - the issue was apparently that some small specific HTML that could have caused problems, so they killed the ant with a nuclear weapon and removed all HTML from cache pages instead of addressing the small issues that could have been a problem. Are we going to get back the functionality of any of HTML sometime in the future?

The new application for the iPhone is already out - that doesn't solve my problem. I'd like to see them go back to what they had before that worked - all this appeared to be was a format change which made it very user-unfriendly. I'd like to see someone from gs.com indicate if this is likely to get fixed or not.

Ever since GS.com updated the WAP interface a few months back, it has disabled the ability to use the numbers on my keypad to select the various options. I have to hit a very small point on the touchscreen with the stylus - it doesn't even have the names of the selections as hotlinks, just the numbers themselves. On most sites with numbers, and the WAP interface before, you could pick the numbers on the keypad, and they would select the numbered option. Can we fix this?

I asked for this a couple of years back, and there appears to be a decent amount of support for this simple software change from a number of people... except Groundspeak. Maybe if we make some noise this time, it will get considered. Or put on the back-burner, like the return of the archived caches to the Google Maps...

It all comes from GC.com trying to protect the lists that they generate from all of us by us submitting our caches and having them publish them on the list. They "own" the list (although they may have legal support, and agreements from people who choose to list caches on their site, I disagree with this logic - we own the caches, and should be allowed to have people do whatever we want with that info), and make it available only in small chunks. They have always disliked the idea of offline lists, and made that very clear. They want us going to the website every time we think about looking for a cache, even though that isn't always practical or cost-effective. It has been proposed before to have large PQ's generated by state in the US, or for your country or others. They poo-poo that idea...

ya.. lovely... In my experience Groundspeak gets QUITE involved, ... Only in such things as they deem it necessary to, for legal and whatever other purposes they choose. Overinvolved in some cases, underinvolved in others... OP - not a bad idea though - I did find 1-2 caches in my hunts for places to put caches, and later found out that they were old archived caches.