Jump to content

Geocaching.com


TheAlabamaRambler

Recommended Posts

If any of us are unhappy with how the company is serving our needs, we have the option to discontinue our membership and wander off to one of the other listing sites.

 

We also have the option of letting the company know they aren't serving our needs...an easy place might be a forum of some sort...oh looky, here's one right here!! ;)

 

There are plenty of arguments for and against shared resources between the sites and I see nothing wrong with the questions raised in this thread...just hope no one gets upset if TPTB ignore us or say, "we're spending the money on any sites we want, love it or leave it".

Link to comment

what a bunch of whiners! Does everything you own or pay $.08/day work as reliably as you expect a website to perform? Has your car which I am sure is more of a necessity than this web service never broke down...ever? what about the routine maintenance costs/insurance/fuel of said automobile? I have been a premium members since 10/07 and this is the first hiccup on the website since I joined. Still it was corrected in less than 48 hour so what's the beef here? This me,me,me now spoiled and selfish attitude will be the end of this great country someday..probably sooner than later unfortunately.

Edited by KJcachers
Link to comment

Please move it back to the correct forum.

Thank you, Quiggle, for moving the thread to the correct forum. ;) Here, the site developers will see it.

 

Cost of premium membership in 2002: $30 per year.

Cost of premium membership in 2008: $30 per year.

 

Could you also include an approximate count of the number of paying premium members in 2002 versus 2008?

 

If the higher volume of users is causing the problems with response time, maybe the increased revenue resulting from more users could pay for better servers.

That's confidential but I thought that they did just update the servers. They are also coming out with V2 of the website later this year, which will make the database run more efficiently as well.

 

I'm not surprised that's confidential, but it seems a little unfair for a Groundspeak representative to provide only partial information to make a point.

 

I have no problem with Groundspeak making a buck as a 'for-profit' business. I am very happy with the product they provide, with the exception of the occasional slowness of the site.

 

It only makes sense to me that if a viable business grows their revenue by growing their customer base, then they also need to incur additional costs to provide the product to the additional customers.

Edited by Cedar Grove Seekers
Link to comment

I have been a premium members since 10/07 and this is the first hiccup on the website since I joined. Still it was corrected in less than 48 hour so what's the beef here?

Then you weren't here last winter, or the winter before, when the website delays were a regular occurence?

so how long since the last outage? when you find perfection let me know where so I can get some. BTW, I used my premium membership and had my PQ's ready and loaded in GSAK so I had no use for the site this weekend anyway other than to log my finds from the last 2 days. Guess what? When I went to log my finds today around 5:30pm Eastern all was well! :)

The one thing I can say is that if the membership fees where higher I might complain a bit but for $30/year I am quite happy...except for the Mid Atlantic states being lumped into the Northeast forums :ph34r:

Also 24-48 hours of downtime is not that big of a deal. Now if things were down for a week I might start getting "nervous".

Link to comment
The one thing I can say is that if the membership fees where higher I might complain a bit but for $30/year I am quite happy...except for the Mid Atlantic states being lumped into the Northeast forums :ph34r:

Also 24-48 hours of downtime is not that big of a deal. Now if things were down for a week I might start getting "nervous".

It looks like they just labeled that forum incorrectly because there is already New England forum. Technically Maryland and Virginia are both south of the Mason-Dixon line so they could grouped in the South.
Link to comment

If any of us are unhappy with how the company is serving our needs, we have the option to discontinue our membership and wander off to one of the other listing sites.

 

We also have the option of letting the company know they aren't serving our needs...an easy place might be a forum of some sort...oh looky, here's one right here!! :ph34r:

 

There are plenty of arguments for and against shared resources between the sites and I see nothing wrong with the questions raised in this thread...just hope no one gets upset if TPTB ignore us or say, "we're spending the money on any sites we want, love it or leave it".

I see you had issue with my editorializing, but didn't mention anything about my three replies to the topic. I'll assume that you agree with me.
Link to comment

If any of us are unhappy with how the company is serving our needs, we have the option to discontinue our membership and wander off to one of the other listing sites.

 

We also have the option of letting the company know they aren't serving our needs...an easy place might be a forum of some sort...oh looky, here's one right here!! :ph34r:

 

There are plenty of arguments for and against shared resources between the sites and I see nothing wrong with the questions raised in this thread...just hope no one gets upset if TPTB ignore us or say, "we're spending the money on any sites we want, love it or leave it".

I see you had issue with my editorializing, but didn't mention anything about my three replies to the topic. I'll assume that you agree with me.

 

I wouldn't even say I had an issue with your editorializing...just adding another option is all. I tend to agree that it's not worth getting worked up about the fact our gc.com fund may be mingling with such distractions as Jeremy's Lotus/pizza fund.

 

I just also think it's fair to raise the notice that it's hard to watch new ventures coming out when the gc.com site hiccups (as infrequent as it is).

Link to comment
If you are a paying member purely for the sake of the benefits then what has been your loss due to the downtime? Let's see, 5 queries a day times 365 days in a year is 1825 queries a year, if you utilize your membership to its fullest. At $30 a year that works out to a little under 1 2/3 cents a query. Call it $ 0.02. So anyone who missed out on a pocket query, send me your mailing address and I'll reimburse your 2 cents worth.

Holy smokes! This is gonna cost ya!!! :ph34r:

Link to comment

Don't confuse me for a lackey, but I trust the Groundspeak crew to spend my $30 a year in a manner that that they feel is best.

 

That said, I sometimes wonder HOW a site that appears to have such a positive cash flow can become so bogged down during peak usage times. :ph34r:

 

That's about the extent of my angst over my 8 cents a day. :)

Edited by Snoogans
Link to comment

Was there a glitch with the website yesterday?

 

After I finished caching, I returned home and submitted logs for dozens of caches without a single problem.

 

Either your efforts to debase the activity were rewarded in a karma sort of way, or all the snow everhwere has slowed down people caching so the servers weren't so busy...

Link to comment

I would say imagine Waymarking and Wherigo as R&D for geocaching.com. Merck, pfizer, etc. spend millions on researching drugs that pan out to not work. Some do, some don't. The users of Viagra aren't complaining about not getting enough satisfaction our of their money and want more research done on it instead.

 

The problem is that when we see internet, we think free, and the world just isn't that way. I commend Groundspeak for going out on a limb, and especially am grateful to Garmin for working with them on Wherigo.

 

Am I going to run out and buy a new Colorado to be able to play Wherigo? Probably not, but that $500 tax return they're lining up would nicely cover the cost of a new $499 Colorado, and I can even get a small cup of coffee too.

 

Yes, it's frustrating when the website goes down, but you're paying pennies per day for it. Ask for a refund, you'll get your $0.165 cents back. Be happy that Groundspeak is there and working on new things. Those who don't change die. Perhaps someday we'll see parts of Waymarking and Wherigo roll back into geocaching. Maybe someday you'll get bored with the finding, and want to be more interested in the hunt.

Link to comment

Don't confuse me for a lackey, but I trust the Groundspeak crew to spend my $30 a year in a manner that that they feel is best.

 

That said, I sometimes wonder HOW a site that appears to have such a positive cash flow can become so bogged down during peak usage times. :ph34r:

 

That's about the extent of my angst over my 8 cents a day. :)

 

I'm wondering where all this "cash flow" seems to be coming from?

 

From the main geocaching page:

"There are 515068 active caches worldwide.

In the last 7 days, there have been 263082 new logs written by 39838 account holders."

 

That's over 1500 logs per hour, every hour and every day for the past week. I really don't think that it's that nicely evenly spread out. The website gets bogged down for the same reason that other sites do. There can only be so many connections to the website at any given time. It's called the digg effect or slashdot effect.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

 

Every Sunday night and Monday morning as people are back from caching, they're logging their finds. Every Thursday/Friday people are running their pocket queries. Some days the site works fine, others the site may get bogged down. It's just a fact of life, and I'm amazed that I'm still paying the same price for the website, when so many companies are having to deal with rising costs for their employees. Groundspeak is doing a great job with what we're giving them, especially as it's voluntary, and you don't have to pay for it. AND many people DO NOT pay for it.

 

Take a look here http://www.Groundspeak.com/about.aspx as to WHY the site sometimes lags... The President still does most of the programming?! Do you think Steve Jobs is doing ANYTHING worthwhile at Apple besides sipping his Aquafina while wearing his black turtleneck and blue jeans?

Link to comment
If you are a paying member purely for the sake of the benefits then what has been your loss due to the downtime? Let's see, 5 queries a day times 365 days in a year is 1825 queries a year, if you utilize your membership to its fullest. At $30 a year that works out to a little under 1 2/3 cents a query. Call it $ 0.02. So anyone who missed out on a pocket query, send me your mailing address and I'll reimburse your 2 cents worth.

Holy smokes! This is gonna cost ya!!! :ph34r:

 

I didn't miss out on any PQ's. The PQ page worked just fine throughout the down time Friday/Sat. The main page and user account pages however were dead, but the PQ page worked just fine.

Link to comment

Now I may be totally off base here, but it's beginning to bug me that the geocaching.com site still gets bogged down, yet Groundspeak is evidently spending money on Wherigo and Waymarking.com.

 

I have no problem paying for the geocaching.com membership to get access to the listing service; I have said before and still say that I would pay twice that and feel like it's a great deal... but I don't use Waymarking, don't like it, and I sure won't use Wherigo, so is it unreasonable to ask Groundspeak to use the income from geocaching.con ON the geocaching.com listing service that we're paying for?

 

The $30 is voluntary, it doesnt change the fact that it is still a free site to use. It does not give any more access to the listings. If the reason the site goes down is because of traffic, consider that most of the traffic is from non-contributing accounts. Premium members are supposed to run PQs to avoid site issues anyway..

Edited by 4wheelin_fool
Link to comment

And are you saying that as a member but not an investor we should have no say in what the company does with our membership fees?

Correct. There's a big difference. You certainly have the right to voice your opinion, but as a member you agree to their terms. They are not obligated IMO to listen to anybody's comments about how they spend the money.

And, as others have pointed out, it's a Groundspeak membership, not a "geocache listing service membership" as you've repeatedly stated. I think there is a big difference here.

 

 

It's long been said that GC.com V2.0 will integrate fully with Waymarking. That tells me that software developed for Waymarking is also intended for geocaching, and vice versa.

And if you are to assume (there's that word again) that income from the geocaching side helps fund Waymarking and Wherigo, then isn't it safe to assume income from those ventures helps fund the site that costs the most to run, gc.com?

 

Really, this is like complaining because General Motors uses money from SUV sales to fund hybrid car development.

That's the way companies work. They use profits from one product to fund development of other products. Business 101, remember?

 

Yep, what he said. I think so many people are passionate about this RASH, and it makes everybody forget that behind the scnes it's a business.

 

If I don't like how they are spending my money (although you would need to prove where it's going) I have the right to not be a member. Like if I found out that GM was using it's profits to rent boats and go out and club baby seals. I'd quit buying GM cars.*

 

* This is just an example. To my knowledge, GM stopped clubbing baby seals a long time ago.

No baby seals were harmed in the making of this post.

Link to comment
Premium members are supposed to run PQs to avoid site issues anyway..

 

[Devils' Advocate Mode]

I'm still kinda new around here, but I wasn't really aware that this was one of the purposes of PQ's. Is it? Certainly, it's a beneficial side-effect, but is it really one of the purposes of PQ's?

[/Devil's Advocate Mode]

Link to comment
Premium members are supposed to run PQs to avoid site issues anyway..

 

[Devils' Advocate Mode]

I'm still kinda new around here, but I wasn't really aware that this was one of the purposes of PQ's. Is it? Certainly, it's a beneficial side-effect, but is it really one of the purposes of PQ's?

[/Devil's Advocate Mode]

Not really. It's more of a bonus.

 

There is no rule that directs PMs to run pocket queries.

Link to comment

Now I may be totally off base here, but it's beginning to bug me that the geocaching.com site still gets bogged down, yet Groundspeak is evidently spending money on Wherigo and Waymarking.com.

 

I have no problem paying for the geocaching.com membership to get access to the listing service; I have said before and still say that I would pay twice that and feel like it's a great deal... but I don't use Waymarking, don't like it, and I sure won't use Wherigo, so is it unreasonable to ask Groundspeak to use the income from geocaching.con ON the geocaching.com listing service that we're paying for?

Just because YOU don't use it, doesn't mean everybody else doesn't. Now that being said, there are only so many ways you can produce a revenue stream without providing more services. Providing more services provides more enticements for folks to sign up on the Premium membership. With more services, there are more avenues for the paid advertising. In turn this provides more revenue without raising your rates that you are so willing to pay double on; which others may not be.

 

Frankly, the problem is more perceptual than reality. Your PC of 7 years ago was a PDQ machine, but by today's standards, it is PDS. Over the past 5 years I've been on, this system has seen significant improvements.

 

Personally, this IS still just a game and any inconvenience IS NOT life threatening. I think the system will continue to get bogged down, particularly across this season when new members are discovering how to use their new Xmas toys for the fastest growing recreational activity around. Be glad you got in on the ground floor of it and can be called an old timer instead of a noob.

Link to comment

Please move it back to the correct forum.

Thank you, Quiggle, for moving the thread to the correct forum. :ph34r: Here, the site developers will see it.

 

Cost of premium membership in 2002: $30 per year.

Cost of premium membership in 2008: $30 per year.

 

Could you also include an approximate count of the number of paying premium members in 2002 versus 2008?

 

If the higher volume of users is causing the problems with response time, maybe the increased revenue resulting from more users could pay for better servers.

That's confidential but I thought that they did just update the servers. They are also coming out with V2 of the website later this year, which will make the database run more efficiently as well.

 

I'm not surprised that's confidential, but it seems a little unfair for a Groundspeak representative to provide only partial information to make a point.

 

I have no problem with Groundspeak making a buck as a 'for-profit' business. I am very happy with the product they provide, with the exception of the occasional slowness of the site.

 

It only makes sense to me that if a viable business grows their revenue by growing their customer base, then they also need to incur additional costs to provide the product to the additional customers.

Isn't that making a pretty big assumption they aren't? They did afterall hire consultants. They have increased their server farm size several times and they have updated the software as well are in the process of a setting up a new udpate.

 

The one thing that's the most difficult to do is to make sure you have enough resources in place when almost enough people jumps onbaord at the same time to overwhelm your resources. In typical business models, you average your user model for the right balance of resources. That's a basic concept from planning telecommuncation needs all the way up to how many licenses you buy for your user base to be on at one time. It is impractical as well as expensive to have a license for every member as a user when you can almost guarantee they all won't be on at the same time. The same is going to be true to have trunk lines on a phone system to match the number of employees in a business. Averaging usage is based on a historical average active user population plus 10-15% to anticipate growth. Unfortunately, it appears the growth is continuing to outstrip reasonable projections to keep up with appropriate resources. That makes Groundspeak a victim of their success. It is difficult to catch up and stay ahead.

Link to comment

That's over 1500 logs per hour, every hour and every day for the past week. I really don't think that it's that nicely evenly spread out. The website gets bogged down for the same reason that other sites do. There can only be so many connections to the website at any given time. It's called the digg effect or slashdot effect.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

 

Every Sunday night and Monday morning as people are back from caching, they're logging their finds. Every Thursday/Friday people are running their pocket queries. Some days the site works fine, others the site may get bogged down. It's just a fact of life, and I'm amazed that I'm still paying the same price for the website, when so many companies are having to deal with rising costs for their employees. Groundspeak is doing a great job with what we're giving them, especially as it's voluntary, and you don't have to pay for it. AND many people DO NOT pay for it.

From poking around with dig, appears there are 3 IP addresses for GC, 1 for GS (mostly for these forums?), 1 for Waymarking and 1 for Wherigo.

 

If the 2 IPs for Waymarking and Wherigo are vended by the same class of servers as GC, I'm guessing they are not anywhere near as utilized as the GC servers. I'm too lazy to do any real sleuthing to figure out what is behind the various IPs which might show where multiple IPs are vended by the same server. :ph34r:

 

Either way, I could care less about where my $30 a year is spent for my GC account. What I want to know, where is the $1000+ a year profit off of my coin purchases going? If it isn't strictly towards GC, I've got issues, as registering coins isn't always that fast.

Link to comment

Cost of premium membership in 2002: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $30

Cost of premium membership in 2008: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $10??

 

The parts in bold, that I've added, are what, I think, TAR is referring to.

 

I don't necessarily agree that it's much of an issue. Groundspeak is a business. Like most, it is trying to expand and diversify a bit. Is it the right time? Those in charge seem to think so since they're doing it. It's been stated that some of the stuff that Waymarking, and possibly Where I Go, have on their respective sights will be part of V2.0 of Geocaching.com- so is it really 'wasted'? The site has had some recent issues but by and large it's not been too bad. It's still better than it was for a long stretch there.

Link to comment

You're both noobs. ;)

 

You're failing at number three on your list.

For those that didn't buy the Cliff's Notes, M&S is referring to my "geocacher's creed" from my profile page. It is as follows:

When placing or seeking geocaches, I will:

1) Use my brain.

2) Try to make the game fun for others

3) Try not to be too full of myself

To which, I have two comments. First, I think that it was pretty clear to both TAR and TotemLake that I was kidding. They both have been around a long time and have pretty thick skins and good humor. Second, there is a reason that the third line of my creed is to Try not to be too full of myself. :ph34r:;);)
Link to comment

Cost of premium membership in 2002: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $30

Cost of premium membership in 2008: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $10??

 

The parts in bold, that I've added, are what, I think, TAR is referring to.

 

I don't necessarily agree that it's much of an issue. Groundspeak is a business. Like most, it is trying to expand and diversify a bit. Is it the right time? Those in charge seem to think so since they're doing it. It's been stated that some of the stuff that Waymarking, and possibly Where I Go, have on their respective sights will be part of V2.0 of Geocaching.com- so is it really 'wasted'? The site has had some recent issues but by and large it's not been too bad. It's still better than it was for a long stretch there.

I rather doubt that a third of the expenses go to Wherigo or Waymarking combined. Either way, it's not are place to tell the company how to spend it's money.

Link to comment

Cost of premium membership in 2002: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $30

Cost of premium membership in 2008: $30 per year. Amount going towards Geocaching.com: $10??

 

The parts in bold, that I've added, are what, I think, TAR is referring to.

 

I don't necessarily agree that it's much of an issue. Groundspeak is a business. Like most, it is trying to expand and diversify a bit. Is it the right time? Those in charge seem to think so since they're doing it. It's been stated that some of the stuff that Waymarking, and possibly Where I Go, have on their respective sights will be part of V2.0 of Geocaching.com- so is it really 'wasted'? The site has had some recent issues but by and large it's not been too bad. It's still better than it was for a long stretch there.

I rather doubt that a third of the expenses go to Wherigo or Waymarking combined. Either way, it's not are place to tell the company how to spend it's money.

 

I agree. Hence the question marks and 'I don't necessarily agree that it's much of an issue.'.

Link to comment

I give the powers that be permission to use my $0.00 per year to do whatever they want. Wherigo, I don't care, waymarks I've not cared for some 2 years now, some new fangled thing tomorrow, if it's good then I might care.

 

Yes I'm not a premium member (now) and I get what I pay for, ~1450 cache finds in 2.5 years, about 900 of them Traditional, over 200 puzzles, over 100 multi's and very nearly 100 events. Some 900 trackable items of 362 different kinds, some 800 forum posts...

 

Sure I've been a Premium member for a year and then a month but have no real need for any of the advanced features.

Link to comment

what a bunch of whiners! Does everything you own or pay $.08/day work as reliably as you expect a website to perform? Has your car which I am sure is more of a necessity than this web service never broke down...ever? what about the routine maintenance costs/insurance/fuel of said automobile?...

 

Since you ask.

Yes I expect my hammer to be able to pound in a nail without breaking.

I expect my MP3 player to play MP3s. I expect my computer to compute.

I expect things with moving parts to break, but since that's an incovience I fully look for the ones that are of a higher quality. That means I drive a Toyota and not a Yugo.

 

Were you expecting people to not notice that something wasn't working well?

Link to comment

Was there a glitch with the website yesterday?

 

After I finished caching, I returned home and submitted logs for dozens of caches without a single problem.

 

Either your efforts to debase the activity were rewarded in a karma sort of way, or all the snow everhwere has slowed down people caching so the servers weren't so busy...

From January 12 to February 11th I found 108 caches. That's in Colorado where there is no shortage of snow in the winter. What's your excuse? :anibad:

Link to comment

what a bunch of whiners! Does everything you own or pay $.08/day work as reliably as you expect a website to perform? Has your car which I am sure is more of a necessity than this web service never broke down...ever? what about the routine maintenance costs/insurance/fuel of said automobile? I have been a premium members since 10/07 and this is the first hiccup on the website since I joined. Still it was corrected in less than 48 hour so what's the beef here? This me,me,me now spoiled and selfish attitude will be the end of this great country someday..probably sooner than later unfortunately.

Cars do break at random, that is true but most of the time that can be blamed on user error. When the GC.com site goes down it doesn't just break, it goes off the road, hits a tree, bursts into flames and ties up traffic for miles.

 

But anyway back on topic GC.com is a privately owned for profit business. You can complain all you want but it still isn't your business, it is the property of the owners who are entitled to try and build their business any way they see fit. If Wherigo, and Waymarking were the huge failures that everyone believes they are they would probably have been shut down by now. GC.com will evolve just like any other business, and will either grow, or go broke. If the critics are right and adding other services while not raising prices is a bad idea they will go broke, If the owners are right and expansion is the way to go then the business will be profitable. If the business fails it won't cost you anything, if it profits they ain't gonna to cut you a check. Still you better hope they are right because there are a lot of containers out there that no one will ever find if they are wrong and the site closes down.

Edited by bblhed
Link to comment

Now I may be totally off base here, but it's beginning to bug me that the geocaching.com site still gets bogged down, yet Groundspeak is evidently spending money on Wherigo and Waymarking.com.

 

I have no problem paying for the geocaching.com membership to get access to the listing service; I have said before and still say that I would pay twice that and feel like it's a great deal... but I don't use Waymarking, don't like it, and I sure won't use Wherigo, so is it unreasonable to ask Groundspeak to use the income from geocaching.con ON the geocaching.com listing service that we're paying for?

 

You are paying for a Groundspeak membership, not a geocaching.com membership. That being said, I appreciate everyone's donations to help improve Waymarking.com :)

Link to comment
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...