rragan

To deal with the resulting geolitter, a local suggested a new stat, Last to Find LTF, where the container is retrieved to earn it. Imagine, LTF hounds. A GGA member mentioned a statewide CITO as a possibility focusing on these.

Great to get the right number. So only 8 have been salvaged. That seems a more reasonable rate. I was asked for a breakdown of the sizes. Size 78 micro 53 Small 64 Regular 0 Large 0 Virtual 3 Other 10 Not Chosen

Re: https://www.geocaching.com/help/index.php?pg=kb.chapter&id=38&pgid=946 Per GGA folk, there has been no real outcry which I found curious. So, time to look at the data. I did an extraction of Disabled caches in GA. Then filtered the log text in Cachly to find those with the unique disable warning from HQ. I did some exploration of the data set of 208 caches and this is what I found. Estimate from GA friend that around 900 were initially disabled for inactive owners. This is out of 13,624 caches in Georgia. Most were rescued by action of owner I guess since only 208 remained when I grabbed the set Of those 208 192 Traditionals 10 Mysteries 6 Multis 18 were high Terrain (T4-T5) I sampled some others that looked interesting (there are likely others but I looked at high D ones and high T ones. ) Some rare combos like D1/T5 GC1GGKB which continues to be found GC2HVEW still being found D4/T5 GC1N2PJ A Baker’s Dozen Challenge Cache - Georgia D5/T2 still being found GC3HW2J 42481 D4/T3.5 Regularly found No DNFs GC2M0GX Belly of the Beast D3/T2 Several instances of community repair but regularly visited GC5963X DEAD PRESIDENTS D3/T1.5 Mystery Regular finds right up to end of 2019 GC1RZBG my first series cache #1 D3.5/T4.5 still being found regularly (last surviving cache of 4 created) Counts By Year Placed 2004 3 2005 12 2006 13 2007 18 2008 18 2009 27 2010 26 2011 39 2012 29 2013 13 2014 10 2015 8 The 208 caches have 149 unique owners Of those 1 has 5 caches 1 has 3 caches 6 have 2 caches All the rest only have 1 cache Initial conclusions -Sleeping owners woke up and acted on many of them -The majority of the caches belong to owners with only 1 cache or only one remaining of the handful they published (rest are archived already). These folks are gone. -Community maintenance is keeping some of them alive. Likely for DT combos people need

There is a mechanism HQ has set up with year 2000 caches such that the owner can designate a local geocaching org to take over the cache in the event archival seems likely. The CO and the Org must agree to this. This handles the demise of the CO who didn't anticipate the tragedy. It is not widely advertised as it need only involve the CO and the Org they choose. The goal is to keep Year 2000 caches going in the face of unexpected problems.

Lackey explanation at the following link: https://forums.geocaching.com/GC/index.php?/topic/354429-release-notes-website-update-coordinates-log-december-17-2019/&do=findComment&comment=5806928

Advice from yesterday's experience doing a lab -- don't put extra coordinates into the body of your lab description if you can avoid it. In this case the published coords took me to the start of an alley of murals. Then I was supposed to walk down the alley and appreciate the murals until I reached some coordinates from the description. I wanted to put the cords into another app as a waypoint and go until reaching that. You can't partly copy the lab text, just the whole thing which means putting that in Notes and stripping away all but the Coords. Or I could have written the coords on paper or (as I ended up doing having a partner with a GPS tell me when we reached the coords in the text. Ideally, make the published coords be the target. I can see the owner wanting you to walk the length of the alley and enjoy the murals, so then use the compass view and tell the user to walk the alley until they were 245'NW to look for the answer. Best would be for HQ to allow copying just parts of the text.

If/when at some future time adventures start expiring, it would be nice to consider issuing a virtual reward for an adventure stage to be converted to (assuming it is a virtual). Many of the adventures choose high quality interesting locations that would be worthy of becoming a virtual. Just an idea.

I hack through the XML file but it is a pain. The leaderboard is really not very interesting after the first 10 or so people. Also I don't think participants can see the Leaderboard so that seems contrary to the concept of a leaderboard. It's more like a first 10 to complete board and FTF for each lab. Lack of any feedback/comment mechanism from participants is a real missing feature.

Thanks. I published and confirmed this also. It would be nice to say so in the help document.

I believe if you own it, you probably can't get a find credit but never tried this.

I added a credit at the bottom of the description to myself for creating it and Geocachers of the Bay Area who own it

Did going public fix the fencing?

I rode along with my tester and all was ok. The app knew when the 10 were done and showed a big Congrats! scre en. I tried a fresh start and saw no history. This might be what you want for testing.

I hope someone from HQ gets us a status on this. The deadline for publishing is creeping up and I want it to work properly when I take it Live.

I've deleted the test and recreated it several times. Fence distances range from 161m to 4000m with most around 500m. In each case, I can start the test and choose any lab when I'm more 7km away and be allowed to answer. I never get the "Get closer" message. If this is just test mode it's not a great test but I can live with it provided the fencing works when published.

I put my Adventure into test mode. I do have geofencing on (but generous to embrace an area with wifi). Despite that, all my labs allow seeing the question to answer even when well outside any fenced distance. Is geofencing not enforced when testing?

The app freezes shortly after launch. Most iPad users will not use one for Adventure Labs but some iPad models have a GPS and could be used. Mine does not but I wanted to browse published adventures.

Today I learned a new downside of Adventure Labs. I beta-tested one for a friend before it got published to ensure it's quality. Since it was not published, I got no find credits apparently. Too bad as I know have to go do it all over again -- assuming I can do that since the app shows it as Completed. This discourages beta testing before publication. One might hope a completed lab happening before publication would be credited after publication.

The recent podcast with HQ folk, suggested the STOP IT letter that was sent to obvious lab cheaters dramatically reduced the incidence. For those still doing it egregiously, remedies like deleting all their lab cache finds COULD be brought to bear.

Some time ago I took a stab at a Mars caching experience one. Alas, the final area is undergoing terraforming so it is archived. If the area becomes accessible again I might resurrect it. https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC7ETJT_arescaching-caching-on-mars?guid=cd0b6bcf-fca3-4a7e-ae7b-0ddd0e984e6a

That resolved the problem with opening a link in email. Seems like platoaddict may have another use case.

In iOS 10, opening a coord.info URL would open it either in the app or in a browser. If in browser you could pull down and choose Open in app and that setting would persist. If in the app, the high upper right in tiny font said coord.info. Tapping that would open in the browser and open in browser would become the default. In this way users could have a preference. With ios11, the above no longer works. Coord.info URLs, for example in notification emails, always open in the app and the text in the upper right to switch default is gone. The Open in Browser action on the cache page does just that but does not change the default (same as in ios10). I rarely use the Geocaching app being a Cachly afficionado. Open in Browser from notification emails is ideal for me since I can tap the GPX File button offer an easy way to store the new cache into an offline list in Cachly. Now I have to deal with opening the extra step of loading the Geocaching app, scrolling down, Open in Browser just to get to the point where I used to be able to get with a tap of the link in the email. Please restore the capability to change the default.

Sort by distance would also be useful since I had to give a location

Sometime in the last week or two, the https://www.geocaching.com/play/search page changed and the Filters button is gone. The new page seems to want pretty much the same things in the input field and only after an initial search which appears to establish a location does the map and a left panel with the filter options appear. Some of the radio button options are gone (Has Personal Geocache Note is one of them). The Limit Search To field is gone and the best I can manage is to go type the state or country name in the search box. The old way which displayed concrete choices for countries and states rathern than free typing has vanished. The more I look at it, the more it looks like the older map filtering panel rather than a filter for the search. Adding search results to a list is now harder as the checkboxes are gone. I can add them all but doing something like checking all and removing a few does not seem possible. If this is not the right thread to discuss, this please point me there. The new beta is not nearly as usable as the old one.

Worked fine. Thanks