HiddenGnome

Dashboard updates Reduce avatar size in Recent Logs feed - Previously the image url was using the original image which was resized using CSS. We have updated the image size to deliver a more reasonably sized image, but it looks like the CSS didn't make it along so the image is still displayed at 50x50 instead of 40x40. We'll follow up shortly with the CSS. Change the Geocache 'Logs' link in sidebar to point to /my/geocaches.aspx Update the "Log Geocache" link to go to new logging page Update breadcrumbs that navigate back to the dashboard Update translations in several languages to fix an encoding issue Update: the avatar in the Recent Logs is now sized at 40x40.

First of all, let's remember that for a long time, this list was the only major function on the profile page. So we're not coming to this list out of the blue and then trying to figure out how to achieve things: our geocaching practices were formed around this list. I was not trying to imply that anyone is doing anything incorrectly. In many ways the website is a special snowflake that the community has learned to work with (and around). I am trying to understand both how people are using the tools in the current website as well as how they would like to use the tools in an ideal world. With all due respect, dear HiddenGnome, geocaching.com did not necessarily go to great lengths to make themselves appear as if they care about user feedback over the past 2+ years or so. So I can certainly understand cachers who opt to take matters into their own hands and clean up their news feed by unfriending, rather than to wait for a future update that likely won't ever happen. You make a fair point and I agree that the current reaction to the Profile and Dashboard is largely a learned response from previous feature releases. I am hopeful that we can improve our process for releasing new features to make it more transparent about what out expectations our for products ahead of time. We have asked many people, many questions during every phase of this project. However, like anything you can ask 10 people the same question and get 10 different answers. My philosophy is to provide a framework that allows rapid iteration based on community feedback. We have to start somewhere and whether or not you like the first version there will be more iterations coming. We realized along the way that there are at least 3 different pages for viewing your geocache logs and each one provides slightly different functionality that brings value. One version includes paging so it loads faster, another displays better information and the last provides filtering. We would ideally like to consolidate and improve the "all logs" page, but we need to investigate further what functionality is required in the most situations because loading a page with thousands of logs is not a good experience.

Currently, we are showing the most recent 20 logs. If you are finding 12 caches per day then you correctly would only see about 2 days worth when we display 20 logs. However, if we display the last 30 days then you could have 300+ logs. That makes for a much larger request to the servers which results in a slower response and takes longer to load the data. Several people have mentioned wanting to see their recent logs for the last 30 days. Assuming you are looking at only your own logs, can someone help me to understand what you are trying to achieve? How often are you scrolling through all of those logs? What are you trying to find? (i.e. updating logs, remembering recent adventures, checking your work - didn't forget anything?) Do you prefer all of the data in a very long (slowly loaded) list or a shorter list that allows paging or requesting more data as needed?

To me, this seems like all the more reason to create a separate user-editable tab for statistics, souvenirs, badges, or other trophies. That would leave the "About" tab for a more personal view of who someone is. Without making any promises this is something that we are thinking about as well.

I understand that some people do not want to see their friend's logs in the Recent Logs feed, but why remove your friends? What I do not understand is that 1) we have repeatedly clarified that we are updating the Recent Logs to show only your logs (with the option of seeing your friends), and 2) you are not being forced to use the new page. The friends functionality on the website has historically provided very little value to the game, but we are hoping to change that. We are not looking to make Geocaching into the next social network, but we know that many people find geocaching more enjoyable when with 1 or more additional people. With that in mind we will be working to make it easier to connect with other people, plan and share experiences, and interact with the community (if you choose).

Thank you Pontiac, we will get that fixed.

It is and I am very appreciative for the constructive and thoughtful feedback!

The current iteration of the dashboard does not add much in terms of additional functionality. However, the goal of this current version was to create a base that new features could be added to. We are working on plans for additional features that will bring a lot of additional value to the page. We are continuing to evaluate the styling based on feedback from users. While some people are not in love with the new design there are a lot of people who we have heard from that really like it (and this includes existing geocachers). Recently Viewed: We are looking into options for allowing certain sections, like Recently Viewed, to be collapsible. Recent Logs: As I mentioned earlier, we will be updating this feed to toggle only your logs.

As some of you are painfully aware, if you tried to view the Dashboard on a tablet you would see the loading spinners for eternity. This was a bug that got introduced just before launch and was overlooked, but has now been fixed. I am sorry that bug wasn't caught sooner and thank you all for your understanding. For those of you who are familiar with software process you know that it is not uncommon for bugs to find their way into a system. We do our best to bring the number as close to zero as possible before anything is released and fix the remaining bugs as quickly as possible. This has been mentioned several times, but I know that not everyone reads an entire thread so: * Unpublished caches will be returning more prominently in a future version * There are plans in place for updates to the Recent Logs section so you can view only your logs (with the option of viewing your friend's logs) * The new profile and dashboard are intended as a work in progress to allow community feedback along the way and while we would love hearing from the community about the new pages we are not forcing anyone to use the new pages. In fact a lot of work went into a new system to make sure your preferences are "sticky". If you choose to view an old page then that is what you will see. The development process for this project is going to be different than in the past. We know that in the past some projects have been released and then it is perceived that we have abandoned them, leaving the community to use (or not) something that they didn't want. With that in mind I understand why so many people would be weary of these changes that seem so drastic and "unpolished". We are trying to communicate our intentions as often and in as many places as possible. Jayme and I plan on being transparent and open about changes so everyone is aware of what is coming up.

A couple of releases have been deployed this morning to improve the performance of the Recent Logs feed, reduce the number of items in Recently Viewed to 5 and reduce the padding around everything in the main column. This will be the first of many additive changes so keep providing feedback! If you are having an issue with either the Recently Viewed or Recent Logs feeds please let us know what OS and browser(+version) you are using so we can look closer. If your content has not loaded after several seconds then it likely encountered an error. We will be adding filtering to the Recent Logs feed to allow people to disable logs on their own profiles from other players. There are more plans for the unpublished geocache listings on both the Dashboard and the "view all" page.

Hello! Thank you to everyone who has provided such in depth feedback so far. We will be looking through everything very closely and making adjustments, but I just wanted to quickly address a couple of items that jumped out at me. Performance of Recent Logs: this is a known issue and we are actively working on making it faster. We were trying to find a balance between making the recent logs available quickly and highly optimizing it. Unfortunately, for some of you that balance tipped more on the side of watching a loading icon for eternity. It will get faster though. Filtering Recent Logs: Our intention is to provide more flexibility on what is displayed on Recent Logs. Once again there was a balance between trying to make it available and adding all the bells and whistles. We didn't want to add lots of filtering options if the community only wants on/off. So yes, lets discuss how this can be more functional long term without making it overly complex. Recently Viewed is HUGE: We will be reducing the number of recently viewed geocaches to 5 in the short term. There are also discussions about reducing some of the padding so each item isn't quite so large and long term making the entire section collapsible. More to come! Thank you for your feedback!

Hi everyone! I thought I'd jump in and say hello. As Jayme mentioned our team is going to be approaching things differently this summer. We could go heads down for the next 6 months and build 20 new features and widgets, but then the community will have very little say in the process. So instead, you are going to be hearing from us a lot about what is happening and hopefully we'll be hearing from you too. The process is going to be fluid and we will be delivering many small updates throughout the summer. We have a good idea of the direction we are heading with this project, but we are intentionally building in flexibility so that we can factor in changes from the community. I am very excited and I have a lot of very high hopes for this summer and the new features that will be coming throughout. With that said I would ask that you please bear with us as we improve our own processes in order to respond more quickly to your feedback. I can't promise that every request will make it in or that everyone is going to love everything, but I hope that everyone can find something that they love and that brings value to their own experience.

Hi oerterg, We have had reports of this type of behavior in the past, but each time our systems show a single email being sent to an email -> SMS address. The messages eventually stop, but unfortunately there is nothing on our side that we can do that would alleviate the issue once it has begun. If you would like to privately send me the email address that you were using for the notification I can check our systems to confirm that we are not sending duplicate notifications to you. Thanks!

Hello! The issue with the message center has been resolved and we are back to normal again.

All issues have been resolved and map usage has returned to normal. Thank you for your patience!

Hello! An errant deployment yesterday appears to have locked up the resources on several servers including the location where the data is stored for the map pins. The deployment was quickly rolled back, but we are still tracking down the resources that were locked. We hope to have the issues resolved for everyone soon. Thanks!

I am sorry to disappoint everyone, but it turns out the issue was not related to a time machine after all. The issue has now been resolved and notifications from the past should no longer be delivered.

As I said, I didn't receive the publication notification for GC6QNHZ, which I should have as it's within 40km from my home coordinates. I can't find any trave in my mails / junk. Others have found it so I guess I was just not lucky. Hi Gillala, It looks like you were included in the batch of notifications for GC6QNHZ and our reports show that the email was sent to your primary email address. I'm sorry if the email did not make it into your inbox. If you continue to have issues I would suggest contacting your ISP and email provider to make sure that emails from Geocaching HQ are being allowed through.

I did not receive notifications for GC6QG1R, GC6QN6K, and GC6QN6M. I did receive notifications for GC6R75J and GC6R74J. The main difference between the two sets is that the notifications I did not receive were caches closer to the center coordinates for the notification than the others. Hi fizzymagic, I had a look at your notifications and I believe that you received the correct notifications based on the center coordinates and radius of your mystery cache type notification. The 3 caches that you did not receive notifications for are approximately 3 miles outside of your notification range. The 2 caches that you received notifications for are 8 and 11 miles inside of your notification range. This seems like the opposite of what you were expecting so I would suggest checking the center coordinates of your notification to make sure it is located where you think it is.

Can you please provide more details about the notifications that you believe have gone missing? What kind of notification were you expecting and what are the relevant geocaches? Did another geocacher receive a notification and you did not? Any additional information that might help to pinpoint the issue would be appreciated. Also, please make sure to check your spam folders to make sure that changes with your ISP or mail provider did not cause your notifications to end up in the wrong location.

Just a heads up that this is on our radar and we are investigating. Our present-day selves are not working on a time machine, but I can't speak for our future selves. Perhaps Geocaching HQ is using the notification system to communicate with ourselves in the past (which is our present). And no - we don't have anyone on staff named John Connor.

I realize it felt like a long time with little progress, but we are at the point where we feel confident that the issue has been resolved and all notifications are being sent. For those that are interested I will provide a summary of the issue and the resolution. When a geocache was published (from an existing system) a message was placed in a queue for the new notification system and then the geocache status was updated (also in the existing system). The new notification system would attempt to process a notification, but the geocache was still listed as "unpublished" so no notification would be sent. If the system was under heavy load and the queue was backed up it would process the notifications after a sufficient delay that the geocache had been updated to "published" and so the notification was sent. This worked in the old system because it ran slower and it essentially had a built in delay that was long enough to allow the geocache to be published before processing the notifications. The issue was not identified early on in the new system because we were unintentionally allowing notifications to be sent for unpublished geocaches for the first 24 hours after the new system went live. The fix was to update the existing system that was handling the publishing of geocaches to make sure that the geocache status was updated to "published" *before* adding the message to the queue. With this change the geocache was then always in a consistent state by the time it reached our new notification service. Troubleshooting and load testing of this issue was initially focused on finding an issue in the notification service and did not take into consideration the inconsistent geocache status because that part of the system had not been changed. It was not until we significantly increased the amount of data that was being collected around every notification that we were able to understand that (in some cases) we were handling inconsistent data.

You make a fair point and I agree that was a poor choice of words to explain the situation. At this time we are planning on continuing to move forward with the new notification system and are making progress on identifying the issue and resolving it. In an effort to remain transparent, in the last 24 hours we have deployed 10 updates across 4 separate systems which is making it possible to see everything related to notifications that is happening, at once (opposed to split across individual reports). I appreciate everyone's patience as we continue to analyze the situation and work towards a resolution.

As this is an ongoing issue I wanted to provide an update on our efforts and some background. As you by now likely know we recently switched over to a new system for handling our notifications. The change to the new notifications architecture involves multiple systems operating as one. Each of these systems were updated and deployed together in order to migrate away from the old notifications architecture. "Rolling back" at this point will involve guaranteed downtime for the entire system and all users will be affected. Due to its sporadic nature (my most hated type of bug) it is extremely hard to pinpoint the source of the issue. This new system was tested for months before being fully rolled out and the truth is that at no point did we identify an issue with missing notifications. An increasing amount of logging is being added to shine a light into every corner of the system. We are also working to correlate all of the logs into a single unified picture that will reveal where the hole exists. I understand that this has been extremely frustrating and it might seem like little is being done, but as one of the developers who is actively working on this project I can guarantee that we are looking at everything and working to identify and fix this issue. Additional developers are being pulled in to review associated systems in order to speed up our analysis. No one is happy with the fact that notifications are going missing and I know there will be questions about how and why we changed something that seemed to be working. Please believe me that this change was necessary and that we are doing everything we can to return to business as usual under the new system.

Hi Team Microdot! I'm glad that you were able to use the conversion tool to such success. Would you mind providing an example of one or more logs that you had expected to be able to convert?