New Feature - Private Waymarks

[+greenhopeseeker]

Hi,

 

I used to do letterboxing in the 90s while hiking but I’m new to geocaching. Over the past several weeks, I have found several caches and read many of the forum postings. I recently upgraded to premium membership and am having a blast…I love the fact that technology and my love for nature are working together in this way.

 

I’m wondering how the community feels about a proposal to have a private category set up that would only allow certain members, once they met pre-defined criteria, view the caches within that category. Sort of like premium membership except instead of all the categories, they would only get to see a specific category or categories.

 

The reason I’m asking is that I have a mail order native tree nursery that focuses on tree memorials and dedications. I would like my customers to be able to take advantage of the technology via an app that would allow them to waymark their tree and upload the story behind the tree - who it was dedicated to, etc. They would receive a reminder each year to update the story w/photos of the tree and the person and other highlights of the past year.

 

The distribution for the stories and locations would be determined by the customer. The customer could set it up to share just the story and not the location to the public. Or they could share both. Or they could share both or only one or the other attribute to a private group of people.

 

From what little I know, I think these types of waymarks would be like earthcaches but the person setting it up would determine whether to publicize it or not. And only people that really had an interest in the story behind the trees would want to access this category. I think this would be an elaboration of the existing category dedicated trees.

 

I haven’t worked out all the details because I’m so new to this, I need to learn a lot more. I’m not sure what people would be willing to pay for. The technology to do seems to exist already, it’s just not a simple thing to figure it out and the average person is probably not going to know about Waymarking unless they know about geocaching….I think…? I'm curious to find out if anyone has gone down this road before...

 

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I wanted to see what people thought and needed to explain it thoroughly.

[GT.US]

I wouldn't expect Groundspeak to add that sort of functionality to Waymarking. All waymarks are public. Waymarking doesn't even have a members only option. Waymarking is the red headed step child to geocaching, and we very rarely get functionality that we ask for that would benefit all waymarks, let alone something to benefit a subset of waymarkers.

 

Given that, Groundspeak is a commercial enterprise, and may consider a venture if the price was right. If you didn't want to go in that direction, maybe you could make a public waymark of the tree and memorial, and for private parts put something like, please email me for more information.

[+greenhopeseeker]

Do you think they would allow access to their code similar to geocache's API does?

[+iconions]

I wouldn't expect Groundspeak to add that sort of functionality to Waymarking. All waymarks are public. Waymarking doesn't even have a members only option. Waymarking is the red headed step child to geocaching, and we very rarely get functionality that we ask for that would benefit all waymarks, let alone something to benefit a subset of waymarkers.

 

Given that, Groundspeak is a commercial enterprise, and may consider a venture if the price was right. If you didn't want to go in that direction, maybe you could make a public waymark of the tree and memorial, and for private parts put something like, please email me for more information.

 

I'm more of the bald headed step child...

[+greenhopeseeker]

I wouldn't expect Groundspeak to add that sort of functionality to Waymarking. All waymarks are public. Waymarking doesn't even have a members only option. Waymarking is the red headed step child to geocaching, and we very rarely get functionality that we ask for that would benefit all waymarks, let alone something to benefit a subset of waymarkers.

 

Given that, Groundspeak is a commercial enterprise, and may consider a venture if the price was right. If you didn't want to go in that direction, maybe you could make a public waymark of the tree and memorial, and for private parts put something like, please email me for more information.

 

I'm more of the bald headed step child...