GC.com outage, how did u cope?

[+Dorsetgal & GeoDog]

No doubt, many of us will have had some level of inconvenience with the latest outage. Given that it hapened, how did you cope?

 

We had house guests who wanted to go to Stonehenge and had previously decided two of us would go into the stone whilst the other two would go and find the Cursus Cache which we ran out of time for last time we were in the area. (otherwise we'd have cached close to home with a 1 day old PQ)

 

I normaly only have two weekly PQs, one is London unfound and the other is my nearest 500 unfound. Unfortunately, neither of them contained the cache that I had in mind at Stonehenge, so I searched GSAK and found a copy of the page from two summers ago, the last time we were caching in the district.

 

Still didn't know for sure if the cache was still live or indeed if it had moved, so a quick off chance email to the owner. No reply by the time we left home, but when we pulled into the car park at Stonehenge, which incidentally does have 3G coverage, I checked my email to find a very helpful email from the cache owner Billwwh. This enabled us to go ahead and successfully comeplete the cache, thanks Bill.

 

By the time we finished out picnic the gc.com site was back up again so we were able to find a few more before we left the area.

 

But this got me thinking last night that perhaps I should broaden the area of my PQs to an area which might be covered by a day trip, but that does seem a bit OTT to do that every week on the offchance the site goes down.

 

If we all did that wouldn't it out an extra burden on the servers when they are working?

 

What did others do?

[+sTeamTraen]

If we all did that wouldn't it out an extra burden on the servers when they are working?

Don't worry about the PQ servers. Compared to the load which the Google Maps overlay puts on the database as people scroll it around, I'm guessing that the PQ load is probably peanuts.

[+GAZ]

I'm on hols in Turkey at the mo.......45deg.......too flippin hot for caching! We DNF'd one cache and logged it, then no GC.com for a day.......and the GAGB forums are "forbidden" here , so we just had to sit by the pool to keep cool

 

To be honest, I don't cache as much as I used to, so it was no big deal

 

Gaz

[+HazelS]

I did other stuff instead....

 

I had planned to do a long multi and so I caught up on jobs at home... the cache isn't going anywhere, it'll save for another day!

[+HouseOfDragons]

I downloaded a month old PQ for the area round my parents and then <insert expletive> left my Colorado on my sofa instead of taking it with me. So, all the TBs and coins I'd hoped to leave a little further from home came all the way back with me.

 

Bah!

[+speakers-corner]

I was lucky. I wasnt intending to Cache this weekend so yesterday I worked in the garden and watched IE to see when gc came up again. This morning I then did a stf and another 2 Caches, after that it was too hot to do anything here. Now I am going to start the BBQ.

[+Stuey]

I was totally oblivious to the outtage. I was on a plane out of Exeter to Edinburgh at 7am on Friday, got home at midnight last night after doing the Three Peaks challenge, then by the time I woke up this morning I guess it was all back to normal?

 

Lucky me, but at least the outtage was fairly quickly put right.

[+chizu]

We were at a wedding from Thursday to Saturday evening so we too had no idea something was going on (we'd already run the PQ for the wedding area). We did miss the virtual at Birmingham Bull ring on the way home though because Geocache Navigator wasn't working.

[+Graculus]

Put my feet up..... enjoyed the break

 

Chris

Graculus

Volunteer UK Reviewer for geocaching.com

UK Geocaching Information & Resources website www.follow-the-arrow.co.uk/resources

[+bumbleguide]

I had planned to do swinley woods but couldn't download, lovely fellow cachers helped me out with these details and I was ready to go .

As I was going out the door white-tiger says wait till tomorrow and we'll all come and make a day of it ,wasn't sure but I agreed.

Big big mistake, got up early and he disappears off to the gym for a couple of hours and comes back saying he's too tired for that geostuff .

Now I've got my download done and next saturday morning I'm off at 6am walking to swinley wood for my day out ON MY OWN!!!

[+harrogate hunters]

If it was a couple of weeks it was down then I might have different thoughts.....

 

BUT

 

for a little over 48 hours..... (I have another life as well that can continue)

 

Well done chaps in the USA for sorting out the problem so quick... keep the good work going.... 24/48 hours off line in 7 years is not bad !

 

I bet television cant beat that record !

 

HH

[+MartyBartfast]

I was working Saturday so wouldn't have been able to go out caching anyway. Having said I've got a handful of PQs which run during the week covering a 40-50 mile radius from home, plus nearest 500 to work, so effectively I've got my own offline DB in GSAK of anywhere I'm likely to go. Wenever I have a trip elsewhere in the country planned I set up a PQ for that area straight away, so I'm already collecting caches for Weston (I'm off to the Mega), and Norfolk where were going camping at the end of August.

 

One problem I did have was that I'd moved one of my caches on Friday evening, and wasn't able to update the cache page, but then no-one was able to access the out of date cache page either so no big deal.

 

BTW I was following Jeremy on Twitter so had hour by hour reports of what was going on.

 

All in all I think Jeremy & Elias did a pretty good job in difficult circumstances so well done both!

[+keehotee]

Even if I had been planning on caching it wouldn't have been a huge problem...... or am I alone in having PQ's that don't turn back into pumpkins on the stroke of midnight???

[+Original A1]

There was a set of 13 or so caches that I had hoped to try two weeks ago when cycling with a friend from Dunfermline to Alloa and back, but she isn't into Geocaching, so I had to just pass them by like a dog straining at the lead to follow a wonderful sniff! So I thought I'd return and do them on my own. However, in between times, I'd had to remove some codes from my GPS to make room for day trips hither and thither, and unbeknownst to me it included 10/13 of the aforementioned.

 

I resorted to a mix of caches which were still on my GPS and paper printouts made before I became a full member, but despite this, only found 5/9. A couple I had to abandon due to muggles/nettles and will return to find in due course.

 

Logging chronologically was a bit haphazard, but the caching itself was still fine.

 

[+The Bongtwashes]

I found a few caches that had been published earlier in the week, but I had details for, then I started doing some groundwork for another cache I'm planning. (Can we have another outage next weekend so I can do some more on it?)