rragan

I tested some more. It looks like merely viewing the lab on a map and tapping it will download most of the info to the device. I put my lab into test mode with changes to the question and answer on two locations before triggering test. Then I scanned the QR code to load my test mode lab (much as a user would who just scanned a QR code on the reall thing). The first location accepted only my modified answer as correct. Then I put the phone in airplane mode and the second location showed the modified question and the modified answer was accepted. Conclusion is that most everything is downloaded when the lab is first opened. I'm guessing optional YouTube videos are not downloaded. Which, of course, raises the question "Why can't I play labs when I have no data signal if I open them while still having data?". I'm speculating that logging the find requires data so that your find counts in the HQ server are correct. Bear in mind that I was in Test mode so finds don't get logged so this all might not work for a public AL. Still, one could imagine the finds could be saved to synch later when data is available allowing pre-loaded labs to be played even where your cell coverage is absent. That would be nice to have one day. Labs with YouTube might not be able to work in this setup though.

Be aware that users who have the AL downloaded to their device have a cached copy of the AL information. So if you change things like a question and the answer, their device will still show the old one information. They can swipe left to remove the cached copy and reload it but you need to communicate this. I just tested this with a change to an Answer on one I'm building using Test mode and confirmed this behavior which I suspected. So edit with care.

Yes, vibrate when entering the geofence region but answerable from anywhere in Test mode.

Be aware that users who have the AL downloaded to their device have a cached copy of the information. So if you change things like a question and the answer, their device will still show the old one information. They can swipe left to remove the cached copy and reload it but you need to communicate this. I just tested this with a change to an Answer on one I'm building using Test mode and confirmed this behavior which I suspected. So edit with care.

Be aware that users who have the AL downloaded to their device have a cached copy of the information. So if you change things like a question and the answer, their device will still show the old one information. They can swipe left to remove the cached copy and reload it but you need to communicate this. I just tested this with a change to an Answer on one I'm building using Test mode and confirmed this behavior which I suspected. So edit with care.

Thanks. That matches my recollection.

If I do two stages of a 5 stage lab and come back some other day and use the QR code to re-enter the app, where am I taken? To the main description view or to the next uncompleted location? I have vague recollections of going to the main screen and hitting Continue taking me to the next uncompleted location. I can't seem to use test mode to try this and don't have any AL partially underway. Does anyone know? Thanks

Dealing with this chews up a lot of characters in my stage 4 description so people know they have to make their way back to the 5th journal entry. I know the intercept for Rating and feedback is where it is to encourage people to do this and not just leave the AL but not seeing the 5th location info is a big problem. Maybe a small change like show the Rate and feedback plus add to the screen - See 5th location journal now. At least this would make getting to it easier and remind people they want to look at it. After writing Feedback, again the link to go to 5th location should be offered.

Yep, that faked it out the cropping. However, there does seem to be a light gray cast (the background color) layered over the image. My yellow colored circle was #a68f04 and it now shows as #ffdc06. However, a new consequence of faking it out appears to be that tapping the image no longer opens a separate view where the whole image can be seen in its true colors. I don't need pixel perfect colors but the gray cast is not helpful. Thwarted at every turn.

Yep, that was clear but it's the best I could suggest. Walking back and 4th several miles to do each location would not be enticing.

OK, I tried shrinking the image until it was only 100 pixels tall and the cropping remained the same but the image is much fuzzier. It looks like the algorithm is roughly whatever image size is used, fit it to a Procrustean bed by shrinking or stretching it to around 300px and crop off about the top and bottom 20% of what results to display. This is annoying. I will have to tell the user to click on the image to see it fully. Maybe more generous margins around the important part will do the trick. Sigh.

My first location is using the image as part of a puzzle to be solved. The builder suggests very generous image sizes but the app crops it down to a narrow band. At a minimum tell us the visible dimensions and how the crop is done (it looks centered vertically and horizontally). I can understand why using the full image is a problem as it could easily push all the description text below the fold. Allowing richer text (Markup) in the description, like links and images would help but is a larger undertaking.

Though I have not tested it, I've heard that once you are in the radius and have the Answer page up that you can go away to a spot with coverage and complete answering that location.

I searched all the posts with "Test" in them and did not find an answer to this question: Can I create the first location, then generate a test, see how it all works, delete the test and then add more locations? I have a fairly complex and ambitious lab planned and it would be nice to verify that things work at the first location before building out the rest of the locations. Thanks

The ability to show a video with the AL description would be handy for an AL I'm working on. I know this is not a current feature but thought I would suggest it for the future. For now, I can put a link to YouTube in the description text. Regarding description text on AL view and each stage, at least on iOS, there is no way to select part of the text (like a URL). Copy selects the entire description body so the user must copy/paste it into Notes and select out the text of interest. This has also come up for me on an AL where the stage description included coordinates to go to and project from. Again, a pain to work with. Select/copy/paste provided by the native platform would be nice.

It doesn't say they won't apply them as received --Just that the end of September is the deadline for submittal.

For those who need to generate a list of GC codes in your power trail to get HQ to populate the attribute for you, here is an html/js script that will take a GPX file and put the list you need in a text box where you can copy it and send it for processing. Now if the forums don't mangle things too badly, here it is. Save it to a .html file and open the file in a browser. <html><head> <title>Make list of GC codes from GPX</title> <meta charset="utf-8"> <script> // Check for the various File API support. if (window.File && window.FileReader && window.FileList && window.Blob) { // Great success! All the File APIs are supported. } else { alert('The File APIs are not fully supported in this browser.'); } var output = []; var error = []; var gcSeen = {}; function updateView() { document.getElementById('list').innerHTML = output.join(','); document.getElementById('error').innerHTML = '<ul>' + error.join('') + '</ul>'; } function handleFileSelect(evt) { var files = evt.target.files; // FileList object // files is a FileList of File objects. for (var i = 0, f; f = files; i++) { var reader = new FileReader(); reader.onloadend = function(evt) { if (evt.target.readyState == FileReader.DONE) { var re = /<name>(GC[A-Z0-9]*)<\/name>/g, match; while (match = re.exec(evt.target.result)) { if (!(match[1] in gcSeen)) { if (match[1].length > 7 || match[1].indexOf("-") > 0) { continue; } output.push(match[1]); gcSeen[match[1]] = 1;; } evt.target.result = ""; } } var sortChecked = document.getElementById('sort').checked; if (sortChecked) { output.sort(); } updateView(); } reader.readAsText(f); } } function start() { document.getElementById('files').addEventListener('change', handleFileSelect, false); } </script> </head> <body onload=start()> <input type="file" id="files" name="files[]">&nbsp; Sorted: <input type="checkbox" id="sort"/><br> <textarea id="list" rows="20" cols="80"></textarea> <div id="error"></div> </body></html>

Listen in on the GeoGearHeads podcast this coming Thursday. Refreshing the Game Board will be the topic.

If cache saturation is a goal, this will help but not a lot. I wanted to see how many puzzles are around here that have been found by everyone likely to ever find them. I grabbed the nearest 1000 puzzles (In < 20 miles) Of those 1000, 167 have not been found in more than a year. These are largely urban caches and so are blocking closer in places wher new more productive hides could exist. In the same 20 mile radius there are around 5400 total caches so roughly 20% of our local hides are puzzles with unknown final coordinates. No wonder new hiders get frustrated.

One more interesting stat. In Georgia, 108 of the 208 were found in the last 3 months. Happily ticking along without owner around. And in NC 266/640 were found in the last 3 months.

In my analysis, I sampled some GA caches. This was one of them. GC2M0GX Belly of the Beast. It has 14 favorite points and lots of glowing logs. It is also a tough one to get to. It has a long history of community repair and log replacement. The last owner visit I can see is from 2011. 2019-08-13 Found with 1st offspring! She was super stoked! Replaced log with fresh paper! Tftc 2019-04-11 Nothing like I was expecting. Needs maintenance. Log was soaked so I signed the baggie 2016-02-16 Found cache tube on the ground and remnants of fishing line overhead. Replaced as best we could. This one needs attention! 2014-08-20 Found but in need of a fresh log, this one is dampish and unreadable. :(. Fun container though! 2013-12-13 Needs a new log and baggie; this one's not going to be salvaged. Powerful smell of mildew as soon as the cache is opened, and the log's still damp enough that I wasn't going to try to roll it out & sign it with that smell in the air; may want to take it in for a cleaning too. :\ 2012-09-26 Log damp 2011-04-2018 Thanks to all who like and have been courteous enough to attempt to repair it. I found the time today to come out and take a look at how bad the environment has beaten it to death It is not particularly old nor that rare a DT combo. It is a challenging location and apparently a creative hide. The best thing for it would be adoption by some prepared to care for it (or a more waterproof design as the environment sounds very damp) This by no means implies that a goodly fraction of the caches have community maintenance going on in the absence of a missing owner. I'd guess a number of those with higher favorite counts fall in that area. However, a number of them were being happily found several times a year with no maintenance being needed so the missing owner wasn't causing trouble (yet).

Georgia has 13,611 caches. Of these 418 are currently disabled of which 208 are the ones from the missing owner experiment. That leaves 210 of 13600+ truly disabled. It looks to me like in Georgia NM's are not allowed to linger for months.

Archived challenges can still be claimed long after they are gone if you have signed them. Challenges are widely varied so I'd guess only date-based ones like Original Fizzy and Jasmer and its descendants in other states would be affected by older ones going away. I found no challenge caches in the GA or NC sets. Sampling suggests that folks who set challenges appear to be very active. Or maybe challenges were excluded from those deemed to have an inactive owner. I did find one webcam in the NC set. One might expect the owner to have to log in to verify valid find claims though. Also that cam is unavailable in the winter months.

The near 900 was a guess I got from a GGA person. In this thread, a lackey clarified that for GA the number was 216 so the 208 I found represented only 8 salvaged by owner. There were too many for me to look at all of them but if you note, I sampled some high D and high T ones as they might reflect more challenging caches that don't get hit often. First, note that find frequency is not the criteria, it is that the owner has not visited the site in a long time and so might have left the game. That said all the ones I sampled are being found with some frequency. Of those, one is being kept going by kindness of cachers repairing and fixing logs.

The LTF idea was more of a humor thing than a serious proposal. There would need to be some sort of proof though. I could see our current Very Lonely Cache game morphing into something that would include cleaning geolitter. https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1vLFhx30F9wOdxyZd4Ff1h1s2GL_oiFXCcFUuixrXkh0/mobilebasic