elrojo14
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Posts posted by elrojo14
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27 minutes ago, MartyBartfast said:
Are you sure? I clicked the search link for item 6 on your list and it returned this, which is definitely not sorted by distance from me:
NICE! They just fixed it! I am giving MartyBartfast all the credit for making this happen!
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This seems to be a good spot to report my concern too. Please see this cache.
Note that I spent days working on the HTML to make this challenge work. Now none of the links work. I can edit the URL on the regular search to get it down to my .5 miles or less than a mile I need, but then it sorts the list by distance from me instead of the distance from the search point. I am hoping I do not have to rework all of that HTML code.
Anything HQ can do to help with this would be very much appreciated.
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Hey Y'all. Just in case you missed it, here is a way to look up your old logs minus the photos. You will just need to know the PID for the benchmark which you can find on Scaredy Cat Films viewer still.
So has anyone transitioned and started logging benchmarks directly on the USGS site? I have not. Now I sadly just ignore benchmarks.
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On 10/2/2023 at 1:16 PM, barefootjeff said:
Apart from any late loggers, these should be close to the final souvenir numbers from Project GC:
Easy Medium Hard
April (Smileys) 191814 121539 22556
May (Favourite Fan) 146460 - 34201
June (Out & About) 67468 32305 17354
July (Streak Star) 146415 29767 13114
August (Iconic Cacher) 23901 - 16180
September (Teamwork) 88002 - 27878
I'm a bit surprised the Easy number for September isn't higher as it only required finding at most four caches, or even not finding any but just having two people give FPs to your hides, but maybe it's because ALs weren't included.
Yes it appears that Adventure Labbing gives easy FP. It was so strange it was not included in September. I still am intrigued that August had such a low count all together. Although should we surprised that maybe a lot of people's areas were cached out and apparently people do not like to travel to cache much. Well at least some people!
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On 9/11/2023 at 3:19 AM, barefootjeff said:
Following on from my post in this thread in early August, here's an update on the numbers from Project GC giving the souvenirs issued for each of the challenges thus far:
Easy Medium Hard
April (Smileys) 191852 121587 22573
May (Favourite Fan) 146481 - 34218
June (Out & About) 67194 32303 17351
July (Streak Star) 140395 29693 13088
August (Iconic Cacher) 22239 - 15173
September (Teamwork) 27771 - 4574
Interesting that, although the August challenge seems to have had the least participation (and perhaps the least interest), almost 70% of those who completed the Easy level went on to find the other 5 icons to get the Hard level. This month's challenge will likely score highly just from people's day to day caching, whether they're going for the souvenirs or not.
I am looking forward to seeing the final stats next month. It is very interesting that so few received June easy. Streaks are tough so the low numbers for July make sense. August completely puzzles me except to fully understand people do not like events and/or ALs.
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On 6/4/2023 at 7:30 PM, bluesnote said:
Looks like I'm late to the party on this post lol. Were you able to create an earthcache out of this?
If not, it would be helpful to provide coordinates where these photos were taken. Through my geologist eyes, I see very faint columnar jointing, which is quite common in basalt as it cools. It can form hexagonal prisms when viewed in map view. However, if looking at a cross section (like this outcrop) you would be able to see what looks like conduits (although they are indeed not). That is what this looks like to me, but without an exact location it's hard to tell since I need to look at geologic maps and regional tectonics to get a better idea of how this formation came to be.
The original post had a link you must have missed. https://goo.gl/maps/sAdMpS9a7V8studQ7 Thank you! I might still be down to put that up there!
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Look at what this thread inspired me to do! This was an expensive but fun one to plant. https://coord.info/GC7ZNBA
I just checked on the final yesterday and it is still going strong.
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On 1/14/2023 at 8:06 AM, frex3wv said:
I just recently found this and am wondering.... is there any way you could at least get our logged benchmark pages to us so we could print them?
One of the posts above yours shows you can at least look at your old logs with Wayback Machine.
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6 hours ago, thebruce0 said:
These stewards who run this website are doing what they can to keep it alive in a changing world. So. I'm keeping my geocaching account after this, and I fully expect that the loss of benchmarks will NOT put a dent in either the business or the community. Happy caching, all!
Yeah color me unimpressed lately with HQ. I definitely see them less as stewards now and more of a corporate machine that does not care about us, only about the bottom line. They talk a good game, but killing benchmarks and then messing up the search function and telling us "Sorry, we are on vacation and will get around to it when we get around to it" has me completely put off. At least I can go find a ton of adventure labs with little to no effort from a parking lot somewhere. What an adventure.
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2 hours ago, thebruce0 said:
So. I'm keeping my geocaching account after this, and I fully expect that the loss of benchmarks will put a dent in either the business or the community. Happy caching, all!
Did you mistype and meant to say "will not put"? If so, there are six pages of people telling you that this is a direct slap in the face to many members and many members plan on dropping their accounts. For you to come on here and tell these people their experience and feelings do not matter is odd.
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My previous log was deleted probably under the guise of my reporting one more broken website link, but really because I was being quite critical of HQ. So I will keep this one on topic.
Since no one at HQ can be bothered to help any of us, I figured out some work arounds for this this morning after having a frustrating day in the field yesterday working on a Centroid challenge because as you all know, when searching by coordinates, it automatically sorts by distance from our home coordinates, not the much more useful and usual distance from the search location.
So if you go to this link https://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx you can input the coordinates you want to search for and it will give you the much more useful data we all miss so much. Go try it, it works.
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15 hours ago, Zhanna said:
As someone who has searched for and documented well over 1,200 benchmarks over the past 20 years, it certainly was very surprising and disappointing to discover that the benchmark hunting section of Geocaching.com was gone without any warning to me. I do not regularly read the forums, so I had no idea this change was imminent. I only found out when I researched it after the fact. I receive plenty of emails from Groundspeak about souvenirs and their latest promotions—would it have been that difficult for them to send a message about the "retirement" of the benchmark pages?
Another thing that should have been done was to add a deprecation announcement to each benchmark page, so it would be obvious to anyone viewing the pages that after a certain date, the benchmark pages would no longer be available. It's just standard practice.
But apparently it's too late for any of that.
I understand the need to move away from legacy code that has become a maintenance burden, hinders future innovation, and does not fit the current goals of the organization. Frankly, given the lack of updates to the benchmarking portion of the site, I expected this to happen a long time ago, and that's why I began documenting my survey mark recoveries on my own website instead. But many people did not have that option, and they put a lot of time and effort into their benchmark logs on Geocaching.com. We have also heard over and over how useful geocachers' logs have been for professional surveyors. We had built an impressive archive of historical documentation over the decades, much of which is not available elsewhere, and it is a shame to lose that.
For anyone who wants to retrieve the text (not the photos) of their benchmark logs and see others' logs for a particular mark, you can use Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
The benchmarking home page (as of December 30, 2022) is available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221230041305/https://www.geocaching.com/mark/
The postal code search doesn't work, but the PID search does, at least for all PIDs I have tried.
To go directly to a mark's page, you can use URLs of the form:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221208090238/https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=[PID]
where [PID] is the mark's PID.
Unfortunately, because I don't see a way to view the marks a user has logged, you will need to know the PIDs of any marks you want to look up on the Wayback Machine archive.
The NGS Data Explorer can help with that:
https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NGSDataExplorer/
I hope this is useful.
To anyone who enjoyed this activity, took it seriously, and understands its value, please spend some time on the NGS website and learn how to submit your data directly to them instead. Survey marks are still in constant use and your efforts will be appreciated there.
Thank you for this. I just found a puzzle cache that I am fairly certain had the location to the final in a BM photo. So I was able to get back to the page using your info, but as you stated no photos. I bet the CO doesn't even know.
You really did us dirty HQ. I am not happy. I might never be with you ever again. I have little desire to support you in any way any more. That is how wrong this was. However, I do not think you care.
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On 12/5/2022 at 3:42 PM, Geocaching HQ said:We do appreciate the feedback shared in this thread, and understand how disruptive this change will be to benchmarkers. However, for the reasons stated in the original post and in subsequent posts by the Product Manager, we wish to confirm that we will remove benchmarking from the Geocaching.com website on January 4, 2023. This is slightly later than the original time frame, due to the holidays.
I am glad our countless hours of research through logs and plethora of photos mean nothing to HQ and zero attempts are being made to keep our data available in an archived format. All this community talk is nothing but lip service to the corporate machine and bottom line.
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I just realized the biggest part I am going to miss about benchmarking here, the Mark Destroyed. I have spent way more time researching and posting about destroyed marks than found marks. I thoroughly enjoy doing it too. How am I going to log a destroyed mark on Waymarking? I guess I might have to become a NGS reviewer.
I do know one thing, destroying the database seems to be everyone's number one complaint. Countless hours of research and logs about to be dumped without an easy way for us to save them. If HQ cared about us, they would find a way for us to easily preserve that data and those images. People should be upset about this and HQ should not just say "sorry".
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22 hours ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:I’ll respond to this comment representative for the various comments of “just leave it as is, it shouldn’t be that hard”.
I understand that the work and cost needed with maintaining a website and keeping it up and running may not be clear for everyone, so let me give a more tangible examples:
Imagine you live on a couple acres of land with a nice 3000 square feet house. It’s pretty old but looks in decent shape. However, it’d really be time for a remodel because the electrical and plumbing are still from when the house was built 70+ years ago. You had three kids and plenty of space and bedrooms to raise them. All your kids have long moved out and so it’s only you and your partner left in the big house on the big property.
Even though there are now only 2 people living in the house instead of 5 people, you still have to:
- Pay the same property tax, maybe even more because it goes up every year
- Pay the exterminator to keep things pest free
- Clean the gutters
- Maintain the yard
- Keep things heated and dry so there’s no moisture damage
- Make updates required by law because hypothetically all houses must have solar now
- Etc etc etc
You can’t just say that you’re not gonna fix the leaky roof because it’s over Billy’s room and Billy moved out so it’s fine. If you do that, you actively risk larger damage to your assets and other parts of the house. Same with not doing the necessary updates to your electrical and plumbing. All it takes is one busted pipe and you're looking at a couple grand in damages.
Overall the cost to stay where you are far outweighs the benefit of the large house now that the kids have moved out and their families only all come over all at once for birthdays and holidays.
Now, many of you will probably say “well, I’d just downsize and move somewhere else”. Bingo, that’s exactly what Geocaching is doing with benchmarking. We’re moving out into a smaller and more modern house with fewer bedrooms.
We understand that selling the house you built and raised your family in can be hard and is an emotional moment, one where you don’t want to hear the numbers. That said, sometimes these tough choices are necessary to make sure that the whole family will be fine years down the road because if you don’t, the debt accrued by staying where you are is just gonna weigh down everyone.
I hope you get the picture.
I like this analogy. The only thing I would add is you decide to bulldoze the house with so little warning that Billy cannot get out of the house and loses all of his possessions. So you tell Billy sorry about your bad luck, but the progress of your house due to your failure to plan was more important than Billy's possessions. And by the way Billy, keep paying your Premium Rent to us after we destroyed all of your possessions. Thanks for your understanding Billy and by the way the new renters are here and they enjoy the open sewer ALs that are stinking up the property so go enjoy that with them now that your stuff is all gone. It will make you feel better. And also Billy, do not forget if you scrape any of your possessions from the house, you violate the TOS and you will be thrown off the property. Go along now Billy.
1 hour ago, Keystone said:As a reminder:
1. Posts that use foul language or which resort to namecalling and insults will be hidden from view. Criticize the business decision, rather than personally attacking the individuals who are communicating about it here on behalf of HQ.
2. Keep the discussion on-topic to the Release Notes. Off-topic posts may be hidden from view. There are active threads in several other forum sections for tangential discussions.
Thank you Keystone. Do you have any links where the best discussions are happening?
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17 hours ago, Frau Potter said:
We appreciate the passion that some players have for benchmarking. And thanks @thebruce0for trying to come up with ideas to try to help. However, at this time we would like to focus our resources on geocaching and Adventure Lab. To implement any of these ideas, we would have to slow progress on other projects that are more important to our core products. As a recent example, we have a team who made key improvements to the Pocket Query API and is working to fix a couple bugs resulting from that update.
We believe those who are passionate about benchmarking can still participate in a variety of ways. Many of the contributors in this thread have pointed out opportunities where you can still participate, such as through Waymarking or by directly reporting benchmarks to the NGS. You don't have to stop finding benchmarks.As a reminder, in the last 365 days, about 2,500 players have logged a benchmark. This represents ca. 0.13% of players who have logged a find during that same period. We know that some players are disappointed about our decision to retire benchmarking. But the numbers give us a clear indication that this is not a critical part of our offerings.
Yeah I can only handle so much of HQ telling me to pound sand as they continue to remove the fun parts of the game. Moving the benchmarks over to Waymarking automatically would be nice. Providing some way for us to download the data easily would be nice. Geocaching basically told us "Go find a silly Adventure Lab and you will feel better." Maybe you can make us all a souvenir for trying to save benchmarking. Yeah we didn't succeed, but we deserve a souvey anyway. Its the new Geocaching way.
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I put in a lot of effort and time into those logs. To have them just wiped out is pretty disheartening. However, I am not surprised. First the watering down of challenges, then a underhanded attack on my own challenges. This is the reason I did not host my shooting event this year. HQ does not seem to care about us anymore. Whatever it takes to keep Geocaching going with a bunch of everyone gets a prize youth that will never stay dedicated to this game.
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8 minutes ago, TyroneShoelaces said:
Don't be so quick to judge a benchmarking challenge cache as lame if you've never actually encountered one yourself.
The challenge cache that got me interested in benchmark was quite interesting, as it required finding 15 different TYPES of benchmarks. At the time, I didn't realize benchmarks were anything else than the bronze disk you come across from time to time. Turns out benchmarks can be signal lights along waterways, marks chiseled into stone, embedded metal rods, church spires, water towers, just to name a few. It was fun finding these, especially when I had cleared out my area of geocaches.
The benchmark challenges were fun and I did not just log them to log them. It took some serious work because I take benchmarking seriously. I enjoy logging destroyed more than found it quite often. Here are the best benchmark challenges.
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My main concern is what about the countless hours of research I’ve performed on benchmark logs? I can handle you are going to kick us off to stupid Waymarking, but to lose those old logs is a huge disservice to all of us who spent so many hours on those logs and enjoy going back to see them again.
What is the cost of leaving benchmarking there? What about a benchmarking paysite? Some of us really, really enjoy it.
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I am a very detailed trackable mover. I take tons of photos of trackables so you can see where your trackable has been so it takes months for me to upload all of my photos to Geocaching and Facebook. Here is my suggestion.
On a cache page's gallery there is a link to take you to the log the photo corresponds to. See this example 01.png.
However, on trackable page's gallery this link is missing. I often post links to drone footage in my logs for trackables, but there is no easy way to find out which cache that was or where the footage is. See example 02.png.
Really the only way to find this footage is to go to the trackable map and scroll down until you see logs where I have added text to them.
Is it possible to get the trackable gallery images to have that "View Log" option as well? I think it would be nice for viewing which cache location a trackable photo was posted to for those wanting to see where their trackables have been. Thank you.
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Look at this one! It was gone and now it is back! I have heard you are not supposed to mark them as found when they are removed and put back, but then again, how would you know?
https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=MD1749-
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11 hours ago, kayakbird said:All,The original post should have use 'benchmark' instead of' landmark'.A landmark may be, or have an official NOAA benchmark (sometimes two words) associated with it. Please save the snide comments for other social media. MELFrom the 'net': "Semantics! "bench mark" associated with surveying can be referred to a permanent mark created at a recognized height which is used as the basis for measuring different altitude of topographical point.3a : the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs especially : connotative meaningb : the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meaningsnounnoun: landmark; plural noun: landmarks1.an object or feature of a landscape or town that is easily seen and recognized from a distance, especially one that enables someone to establish their location."the spire was once a landmark for ships sailing up the river""
I thought that might be what this was in reference to, but that would actually be wrong. This challenge calls them benchmark landmarks and I was being specific about these landmarks being missing. I suppose if you wanted to be a little more technical you would actually call them intersection stations. I purposely called them landmarks hence me not understanding the attempt at a joke.
Benchmark is actually incorrect all the way around. Here is an explanation of that.
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6 hours ago, Michaelcycle said:
elrojo14:
Since you are revising this topic I must point this out from the "to err is human" department. Please go back and re-read the first sentence of your opening post. Then re-read my reply. I never responded to your reply because it was evident you missed the obvious. So here is a second chance to get the joke and enjoy a self-reflective smile.
Yeah sorry, I still am not fully understanding your humor. What is the error?
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Here is one that even Power Squadron incorrectly logged as present in 1990. Weak.
https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=TZ0048
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Unable to click from cache page to trackables listed
in Website
Posted
I came to report this after I noticed this last week and then logging some trackables today saw it was still an issue. Glad to see they are working on it.