NinjaCacher!

aaaand it's live get ready for the s***storm..

I also don't think anybody really needs "arbitrary garish combinations of colors and fonts". But a proper clean format, not blown-up with 90% whitespace, and without a font so big that it becomes difficult to read, would be better than e-mail bloated up with corporate brand s***. Plaintext-option would be fine too. The main goal of any email format (except maybe advertising mails) should be to make it easily readable, not to push the corporate brand. The reader should be able to read mails in an easy to read format, ideally adjustable on his device.

I understand the decision to disallow html. But why not just keep UBB code? Is it less safe than Markdown in any possible way? I also kind of understand the technical decision against converting 560 million logs, but i don't think it is a good idea to leave it with "Therefore we have decided to recommend that users convert their own logs". Going through all the logs will already be a HUGE "pain in the .." for a cacher with 100 finds, but with thousands of finds this will never be possible. Meaning we'll have up to 20 million (3.5% of 560 million) broken logs showing broken HTML. Wouldn't it be possible to "grandfather" the existing logs and keep the formatting as it is for all logs written prior to Feb 2, 2016? Regards NinjaCacher! a.k.a. Luzian

good one.. can't be so hard.. the substantial part, the plain text emailer, was already there. now all we need is a flag, a setting if the user wants this option... now if that is a substantial technical issue, i wonder how everything else works on this page well no matter what percentage of users wants to have HTML in newsletters. HTML in notifications is still a bad idea.

Ok again: I still don't like those html mails "The Team" has forced upon us. It is also obvious here that many others don't like them. In fact, I would be quite surprised if even a single geocaching user (not sitting at GS HQ) has ever asked for the notification mails to be changed to html format. From a user's perspective, a forced change to html mails with no option to keep what worked before is a bug. Could you, on the other hand, provide us with any estimate of how likely it is that this issue will ever get fixed? And if it doesn't, at least explain us the real reason why not? Whether it be that GS can spam us with farcebook/twatter links in every message, or if there are future plans to include other advertisments, or any other hidden agenda? Thanks.

Hmm, a little problem at the server end, and another little gaffe that somehow got past QA. ("QA"?!?) ...and it can't be copyright by "Geocaching", that's not an entity. Groundspeak would be the entity. ...and they didn't write the log text, so how can they claim copyright on that? The comedy continues... Copyright owner of the log text is always the log writer. From Terms of Use Agreement, 3.C.: So yes, Groundspeak claiming copyright would be wrong. Maybe with "© 2000-@DateTime.Now.Year Geocaching" they mean something like the copyright is held by "someone at Geocaching", in that case that would be the user. But yeah don't think that's legally correct, as "Geocaching" is not an entity..

Looking back through the emails I've received, it broke sometime between 11:28 am and 11:51 am Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday August 12. I can narrow it down to between 11:39 and 11:47 PDT on August 12 And it's not only in [LOG Owner] mails but also in [LOG Watchlist], [LOG Bookmark], [LOG Attendee], [GEO Notify], "New xx Cache" etc.

+1 for these great ideas (all of them if possible)

which essentially comes down to the same issue: the forced HTML mails are bad. some of the problems people are having with the changes: - no or very bad plain text part in the multipart/html message -> useless on all text-only devices/readers - message size several times bigger -> increased bandwidth use on mobile devices - a lot of "wasted" space in the html message (logo, empty space) -> essential info more difficult to read, needs scrolling on small devices - less information in the title/body -> useless for mail-to-sms services - changed subject lines and body format -> existing filters and other automated processing broken - bad readability of the forced color scheme on some devices - bad readability of the forced font type on some devices - bad readability of the forced font size on some devices - html mails sometimes filtered as spam - no option to receive plain text messages for those who would prefer it

(removed my post - was slightly off topic)

Another idea would be if we all ask for a refund of our premium membership fee. Notifications mails are one of the premium features, we paid for them as they were and now they are broken.

+1 for give us back plain text mails

I don't care about colours and font types and such... I'd just like to have a "plain text" option (in fact returning the control over font colour/type/size to me on the client side)

Sorry if my (removed) post was unnecessarily harsh. It was not meant to be personal criticism of the Lackey who posted, but criticism of Groundspeak's way of handling their paying customers' feedback. It seems pretty obvious here that LOTS of people are very unhappy about the notification mail changes and would prefer to have the old style as an option, and yet the only response seems to be "we appreciate your feedback but actually we don't care". It doesn't feel like Groundspeak actually appreciates our feedback or is willing to do anything about it. So again, as a paying customer I ask Groundspeak to undo these changes to the notification mails. They broke a product I paid for. I'm thinking about asking for a refund of my Premium Membership - not because I don't like Geocaching anymore or don't want the other premium features anymore, but because it feels like this might be the only way that people "up there" actually start listening to their customers' opinion. At least if several of us start doing that.... But there never is any feedback or dialogue, of all the threads where the issue of HTML mail has been raised the only "feedback" I've seen is one saying basically "we know you don't like it, but tough - we're not going to do anything about it". That sort of attitude from Groundspeak just leads to frustration which no doubt prompted the replies you had to remove. Give us some proper feedback and dialog and we wouldn't be battering our head against a brick wall. +1, agree 100%

Actually in the meantime i suspect a different plot: What if Groundspeak doesn't want us to be able to automatically process the notification mails: while their newsletter also contain a text/plain part (even though also in base64), the new notifications simply leave that part blank. notifications are just garbled base64 html now, no way of doing anything useful automatically (even less if they keep changing stuff around) while they made some changes to the subject quickly after all the complaints here, they don't seem to be willing to go back on their decision to give us html even though we don't want it and probably nobody ever asked for it even the request to make html optional is just laughed at. basically a big stinky middle finger to their paying customers. Speculation about some possible reasons: they are going to launch a paying sms notification service in the future and need to make current solutions useless first their constant paranoia that cachers want to collect/steal their data. some people certainly update some offline db based on the notifications, for example to update cache status and/or logs. much more difficult to get any useful info out of the notification mails now. they have other reasons/planned features which require to make the current notifications useless Sounds possible? can you think of other possible reasons? Who's in on a bit of conspiration?

Suggested read for "The Design Team", marketing people, newsletter writers and other staff at Groundspeak HQ involved with any kind of emails being sent. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32643/Why-Marketers-Must-Optimize-Emails-for-HTML-AND-Plain-Text-Infographic.aspx Note: this is not from 1997 or so, it's from 2012 and still absolutely valid today. Note 2: the title is "Why marketers MUST optimize emails for HTML AND plain text". It's not an option or question. Note 3: the article is about marketing mail but goes of course also for notifications. Actually even more for automatic notifications/alerts etc., where HTML is just absolute nonsense.

I might be late in the discussion.. I was still hoping I'd find the option to turn off these broken emails either in the notification settings or in the general account settings. But didn't find them, so now I figured they are broken by design, that's why I came here... +1 that this entire change was a bad idea. which feedback is "The Design Team" basing their assumptions on? +1 for bringing back old subject lines also for published notifications +1 for returning to non-html or at least allowing to turn off html in notifications +1 for never changing emails that people have elaborate systems set up to process/sort/filter/forward etc.. if you really need to add html, make it optional, leaving current notifications the way they are (opt-in to new format, at least for existing users) +1 for don't fix it if it aint broken!!!! it's rarely a good idea. really rarely. new features good only if they don't break existing ones (unless you're really really sure your customers don't want/use the existing ones). notification and watchlist mails were perfectly fine before, no need to change anything. where, where, please tell me where in the world did you (ie. Groundspeak, The Design Team, or whoever is the brilliant mind behind these changes) get the idea that HTML is more concise and functional in the limited space available for text messages? and where did you get the idea that changing notification mail format from what already works fine would make it easier to use/process? +1 unhappy paying customer edit: hmmm.. my old sgnature seems too big here. and can't remove it from already posted message. oh snap!

try the gsak forum: first, check here... and if that doesn't help, ask here.

This is late but may still be useful - my number one site for Garmin maps for pretty much anywhere in the world is: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ The content is coming directly from Openstreetmap, so 100% free and legal. If you select a predefined country in the top navigation or individual map tiles, it's fast and easy; if you make your own selection of tiles it can take some hours or even days to complete but then you have your perfect map for exactly the area you need. Hope it helps - maybe also for other people

I've only just seen your post now - hope it's not too late. This is my number one site for Garmin maps for pretty much anywhere in the world: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ The content is coming directly from Openstreetmap, so 100% free and legal. If you select a predefined country in the top navigation or individual map tiles, it's very fast; if you make your own selection of tiles it can take some hours or even days to complete but then you have your perfect map for exactly the area you need. Hope it helps - at least for another time and maybe for other people looking for maps

Oh ok. With beta this now makes sense (and I "retract" my previous comment) Just remains to say that hopefully the "public launch" will follow soon! And let me add: thanks for all your great work - even if many users (including me ) are very impatient and therefore sometimes unhappy not to see some of the expected big new featuers live yet....

comment "retracted" due to change in original post

I have used up almost all of my 1000 PQs and don't want to remove any. Is there any chance this could be raised to 2000 or maybe 5000? ... Just joking Thanks for this change, it's a really helpful one... I've been waiting for this one for a long time!!

That just happened to me too. No email, no "Groundspeak Renewal Notice" in my inbox, not even in my spam folder or anywhere else. No big deal, I just renewed, but still think it's weird not to receive any notice.

The problem is that the way the question was asked, it can't just be answered with a simple Yes or No. Let's look again at "what you've explained above": I highlighted the two significant parts. The problem is that "error of plus or minus 20ft" is a misunderstanding of the displayed value. The displayed 20ft EPE doesn't mean that anything is within plus or minus 20ft, it means it probably is within this range. So the display values is already about probabilities. 20ft EPE means we're 90% sure that we're within 20ft of the displayed coords (that's what we call "confidence interval"), but it also means that there's 10% chance to be outside. Which means it could be 1% chance to be something like 50ft or 100ft away, or worst case even more. 20ft confidence interval means we're "quite confident" we're within 20ft. Now adding two of these confidence intervals together, of course you can say the worst cases would add together. But the worst case was never 20 feet, so the new worst case is also never 40ft. In theory, the cache could be 100 or 200ft or 2 miles away, just that's highly unlikely (very low probability) given the accuracy of the GPS system. So that's why it was suggested to calculate your new "confidence interval", which for the same level of confidence (90%) would be 28 feet. So to answer your post: The answer is actually a simple Yes and No: Yes, in the worst case, two errors could add together. But no, you can't use this to calculate the worst case error. In other words, it seems like a simple question but there's no simple answer. That's why you receive long answers about probabilities, nuclear physics and the start of the universe... Edit: fizzymagic was faster but what we say is probably the same...