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wesi

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Everything posted by wesi

  1. Dear Lilypad Geeks, thank you for sending me an email that tells me to go to the web site to read an email that was sent to me. It just breaks my heart to see what you are spending your time on, "fixing" things that ain't broken. There is plenty stuff on the site which is, in fact, in need of repair or upgrade. And there are also plenty of prospective smileys beckoning to be found, all over beautiful Seattle. Heck, I don't even mind if you use my Premium Membership fee to have some Pizza and Beer. As far as I'm concerned, you are welcome to it, and entitled. But kindly please try to inject some common sense into your feature and change management process. Thanks.
  2. Maybe because the location of the cacher changes? Not all of us are stationary .
  3. +1. But hey, lost TBs are replaced by new TBs, which need to be purchased. So I suspect the economics are not on our side . I urge all TB owners to send out "replacements" that recycle the original tracking code, once the initial TB/coin hasn't been heard of for 2 years. If the original turns up, all the better, in my experience, the current holder of the duplicate won't mind one bit if he/she is asked to take it out of circulation. That's the only way (I guess) that we can tilt the economics of this to our favour. Less sales of new TBs -> more interest in lost TBs by The Powers Who Rule
  4. Whenever I do a pocket query, I find myself making the same half-dozen adjustments to the default. YES, I want it to run right now. YES, I want the query to delete itself once run. YES, I want 1000 hits not 500. YES, I want the results to go to my alternate mail address. YES I want them to include the query name. Huh? Even ATMs remember how much money I pulled last time, and offer a quick option on my next withdrawal. Hello, Groundspeak? 2014! What's wrong with just triggering a One-Click Pocket Query, based on previous selections, and no questions asked, if a Premium Member requests such from the map display? And, while you're at it, how about upping the 1000 cache limit a bit .. you know, as a tiny favor for us lowly Premium Members, who actually pay for the privilege?
  5. AdBlock Plus, Procmail and GSAK do a decent job at keeping the frog crud at bay. It is unfortunate that we have to resort to glue logic to keep our beloved hobby web site useable, but if this is what it takes .. fine with me. I won't let a couple of [expletive deleted] MMMMMs (modern mobile media marketing modifications) ruin my favorite outdoor pastime.
  6. Even better: Why not scrape real logs that real cachers took the time to write, shuffle them a little, and then repost? Combine it with GPS proximity, so that the "Found" log with scraped random text posts automatically once the IntroApp user is within 50ft of the cache coordinates. Oh snap, that would be awesome!
  7. On related news: Our Burgers are now Better Than Ever . They now contain six spherical slices of onion instead of five. Please disregard that the beef is still ground roadkill.
  8. Reading this entire thread, I'm frankly not quite sure if first hand info is any less suspect .
  9. Well hey, at least you have the option to (Give a Gift Membership) to poor unverified francis I suspect this mess is just another chapter of the Grand Plan. N00bs buying 10$ apps that they only use once. And seasoned cachers who, exasperated, mark their caches as "Premium Members Only" to weed out the noise, and by doing so, keep the premium member income stream alive. Maybe Facebock acquired Groundfrog, and we just weren't told yet? Would explain a lot. .
  10. No need to adopt. It is perfectly possible to maintain an old cache as a community of cachers, without the listing being transferred. Of course nobody can then clear the "needs maintenance" flag from the listing, or weed out trackables that haven't been in the cache since 2004, but these are minor issues. What counts is that the cache is findable, and dry. No reviewer will force-archive a cache that has a handful of successful finds every week, without complaints. If you have an ancient treasured cache in your neck of the woods that is getting "needs maintenance" logs, and the owner hasn't been seen for a couple years, just get off your butt, scrounge for an ammocan, and replace the box. All it takes is 10$ worth of ammo can, and two hours of effort. The listing itself can perfectly stay as it is. Yes, I have done so myself. Three ammo cans, and counting. I absolutely think that the truly old caches should stay, because it is instructive and entertaining to see where the pioneers opted to hide.
  11. If you run your own mail server on Unix, procmail and the frogturd polisher: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=324356&view=findpost&p=5406488 will help to get rid of the HTML crud until Groundspeak sees the light (if ever).
  12. Haters?? Nah. It is more like the feeling when your favorite sports team scores an own goal. You are just disappointed, exasperated, and thinking "What the beep!" But hate? Surely not.
  13. Oh snap! Over in the "other" thread, I posted a .procmailrc rule and script: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=324356&view=findpost&p=5406488 If you are on Unix, this is a reasonably quick way to get plaintext/ascii back. Feedback & adjustments welcome.
  14. Grin. I've been living in the US for too long to still care about their a**-backwards way of writing a date. But sure, add it in. Insert it after s/^\s+(\S)/$1/g; and write it thusly: s/^Date: (\d*)\/(\d*)/Date: $2\/$1/; that should work. Thanks for testing && feedback!
  15. For those who use Unix, .procmailrc and script to help with polishing the frog turd is available here: http://pastebin.com/WA5nF4tb The procmail rule and script grab the base64/html emails and turn them into ascii. Still ugly and work in progress (I only tested it with "found" logs so far). Let's jointly make it better. Edit: Updated frogturd.sh script is here http://pastebin.com/Kz77h8kj
  16. Thanks!! for bringing the old subject line back. Looks good.
  17. Please do. Custom format (%cache found by %finder, or maybe even following GSAK terminology) would be best. But I happily settle just for the option to choose between the old and the new format Who provides the rest? A feral feedback flashmob out on the street at the Lilypad?
  18. I suspect that we (the cachers) are not the customers, but rather the product that is being sold. Which explains why many features and changes appear odd to us. Kinda like on Facebook. -wesi
  19. +1. The old format was fine. The new format doesn't add anything of value, but it adds a lot of useless bytes. It is highly unlikely that cache owners need to be told in every "found log" email where the Geocaching web site is, and that gc.com also has Twitter and Facebook. Plain ascii was also perfectly fine. @gc.com, if you keep everything else, please at least provide a Settings option to switch between HTML and Plaintext emails. thanks! -wesi
  20. +1. The old format was fine. The new format doesn't add anything of value, but it adds a lot of useless bytes. It is highly unlikely that cache owners need to be told in every "found log" email where the Geocaching web site is, and that gc.com also has Twitter and Facebook. Plain ascii was also perfectly fine. @gc.com, if you keep everything else, please at least provide a Settings option to switch between HTML and Plaintext emails. thanks! -wesi
  21. Yup. This indeed is one of the reasons why I mark some of my caches as "premium". It hides the coords from the one-day chache wonders with 2 finds who make owning caches (and trackables, for that matter) heavy on maintenance. I would vastly prefer though if "premium" weren't tied to a 30$ fee ... something like 250 finds and 1 approved hide would be a lot better and more democratic as a hurdle to overcome. Once you get there: welcome to the family. The influx of new players isn't really the reason that quality in many areas is going downhill. The main reason is "density". In metropolitan areas, the "good spots" at historically significant locations, on hilltops, in the parks, etc, are all taken, and often only the guardrails and dumpsters remain. Nonetheless, I've been living in Westchester County for seven years now, and caching STILL brings me to nearby parks and portions of the Long Island Sound that I never visited before. And every now and then, you come across an epic hide/find that you know you'll remember forever, and it makes all the low-energy unremarkable average smileys that you picked up along the way .. perfectly okay. Happy trails, y'all! -wesi
  22. Fully agree, these are also my priorities. What is "fun" changes though .. sometimes, I go for a power trail hike like Al's Trail (GC3BQPV), other times, I hike 20 miles for a single five star smiley (GC2VFRX), and other times again I have zero finds for a week or two, and instead spend the time on devising new hides, etc. It is a really fun hobby that gets me outdoors several times per week since 2006. I used to go for mtn bike rides in the evening after work, but I kinda always followed the same paths day after day. Geocaching brought me to new, absolutely insane locations that I would never have found otherwise... and it continues to do so (though admittedly filtering out the camoed-as-an-used-chewing-gum-tucked-under-a-dumpster-behind-the-walmart caches has become more of a chore over the years). Still, it's been a good ride, and I enjoy every day of it.
  23. Yup .. pretty rampant. And I doubt it is simple oversight by newbies, though that definitely also plays a part. About half of my 90 trackables have gone missing, and most of them here in the US. I'm from Switzerland originally, and have started many of my trackables in Europe .. and guess what, hardly any got lost. And for those that did, I actually know what happened to them (cache muggled, etc). Two European cachers who misplaced a coin of mine even contacted me to fess up and to offer a coin of theirs for adoption in compensation. Over here in the US, the TBs and GCs just seem to melt away. It's gotten so bad that I mostly only release basic dog tag trackables in the US these days, and save the coins for Europe. Dog tags have the advantage that it is trivial to release copy tags if the TB keeps disappearing. In my entire history of 2202 finds, there were exactly THREE occasions where a cache contained a trackable that was not listed, but present in the box. On the other hand, there were about 500 occasions where a cache did NOT contain a trackable that was shown in the listing. There's been a gc.com feature request in the queue for like FOREVER to allow experienced cachers to mark a TB that is not present as "missing", but this privilege continues to be reserved for the trackable and cache owners, and hence cachers keep being disappointed from visiting caches that have trackables in the listing, but not in the box.
  24. http://www.geocaching.com/my/owned.aspx shows the cache name and the date it was last found. Yawn. How about showing in addition * status flags (like "needs maintenance", or if a finder posted updated coords) * favorite points * total logs since publish / total logs in past 30 days * number of trackables present If done right, this would give cache owners a one stop shop to check on the health and status of their caches. I'd say you can't reasonably expect cache owners who own 50+ caches to closely follow all emails that are pouring in ... a more meaningful status screen sure would make a difference! -wesi
  25. How about BriGuyNY's OCATT? Starts at Croton Dam (http://www.coord.info/GC2R6Z1) and leads all the way to Van Cortlandt Park, along the old Croton Aqueduct right of way. Though I wouldn't call OCATT a power trail, because it takes hiking or biking, has quite diverse hides, and certainly isn't one of those drive-by-caching roadside suckathons that are so 'popular' over in Nevada . And are now coming to NJ, it seems... As for the original post: Film canisters along a busy road? Maintained via public transport that doesn't exist? I respect your ambition, but suspect that reality might turn out to be a tiny bit different.
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