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Release Notes - July 23, 2014


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I'm just waiting for the text/html option to appear in our profile settings, then the forum go silent save for a few people who return to say thanks... and this whole pile-on against GS complaining that they never listen to be completely forgotten the next time to they make a significant update :P

:ph34r:

 

C'mon Groundspeak, make fools out of the haters! ;)

 

I think it's more likely that this thread will be locked as a result of a new update, but I'm sure hoping for this feature to be added, silently or otherwise. I'll be the dutiful hater and come in here to give thanks should this happen.

 

As I see it, the difficulty lies in actually getting an answer out of a company who have chosen to take the stance of "Options Shmoptions... Oh snap! That's just crazy talk! We are drawing the arbitrary line here now. We gave in a little bit, but no further because you really don't know what you want as much as our Design Team does. From here on, we'll be riding out the complaints with our fingers planted firmly in our ears pretending not to hear you, thus absolving ourselves of any notion of the thought that we should actually respond any further."

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Piling-on department:

 

  • By email: HTML has arrived, making the coveted FTF easier than ever.

"Easier", hmm. How, exactly?

 

And even if it makes it somehow easier for YOU, it also makes it easier for everyone else, no? Since nobody can turn off the HTML advantage. Hence, how can this statement make sense?

 

All I can think of is, the managers and dev team were at an offsite one day, leaving only marketing in the building...

 

I knew the FTF was a legitimate part of geocaching, first the geocoin, now this, yay FTF.

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Here are two screenshots from my WP8 phone. The leftmost is the Daily digest coming from this forum thread and the rightmost is a new cache notification email. No wonder FTFs are easier as half of the competition is eliminated by the unreadable notices.

 

be123800-33e3-4a91-8c00-6db27834a21c.png

 

Jokes aside, I would like to bump the idea I posted in another thread. As Groundspeak is clearly developing email functionality of the site, I would like to see relevant meta data inserted into the mail headers. This would make automatic sorting of messages or scripting actions based on emails much easier.

 

An example set of headers would be:

X-Groundspeak-Cache-ID: GC12345
X-Groundspeak-Notification-Type: Publish
X-Groundspeak-Cache-Type: Unknown cache
X-Groundspeak-Cache-Difficulty: 1
X-Groundspeak-Cache-Name: Fix email notifications for good
X-Groundspeak-Cache-Owner: happy-paying-customer
X-Groundspeak-Favorites: over 9000

 

Relevant set of headers might change depending on the Notification Type.

 

Thanks for restoring the subject line. I'm still waiting for the plain text vs. HTML selection to appear in the account preferences.

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I don't mind the HTML. It looks nice.

...

Larger fonts would be helpful for those of us who are blind.

If they didn't change to html-mail, you would be able to read this mails in the size, you read all your other mails.

 

So, it's not a bug,it's a feature!

Edited by Thoric67
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I believe the new HTML emails are on the order of 2-4x larger.

Without loading the pictures, a new Publish notification is about 11KB, the old one was under 2KB.

 

The gc_logo_white.png, which we all will collect in dozens and hundreds on our devices is at least 2103byte – even more than the complete old publish notification.

 

We aren't getting 2-4x as much useful information in those emails, so the change simply doesn't make sense.

We even don't get ANY additional information, so there is absolutely no need for html-mail at all.

 

all the concerns here, about other positions, cropped headers, unliked colors, to small fonts, unklickable links, are problems that where affected by html.

 

If there won't be any html in the mails, there wouldn't be any of them.

Edited by Thoric67
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As a comparison, here is how they old vs. new appears on my android:

 

2ebdZiY.png

 

As you can see, my phone does a pretty good job at adjusting everything.

I like the older subject line MUCH better, but I don't mind the body of the new one.

I agree though, the option should definitely be there to have it either way.

Edited by ADKer
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Surely one would filter on the email subject starting "[GEO] New cache: ", not merely on the word "New"?

 

That's exactly what most of us have been filtering on. It's not uncommon to get dozens or even hundreds of emails a day and the subjects containing [GEO] and [LOG] are not only easy to filter for, they are visually catchy. Plus, with the [GEO] text being used for notifications and contact emails, it is easy to separate the "these are a little more important" emails from the "here are some interesting logs to read when you get a chance later" ones.

 

I see that, as of this morning, the old style subject lines are back. Please, can we keep them? B)

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I see that, as of this morning, the old style subject lines are back. Please, can we keep them? B)

The old style subjects have been back since late Friday 25th (UTC) except for cache publication notifications, which is the subject of this spin-off discussion <_<.

 

Groundspeak wants to differentiate new cache notifications from all others and presently do that by having the email subject "New {cachetype} Cache: " rather than the original "[GEO] Notify: {reviewer} published...".

 

When Groundspeak reverted to the old style for other notifications I suggested that it should also do the same for new caches [*], thereby re-enabling the consistent, easy automatic and visual filtering that you - and just about everyone else - seek.

 

[*] A few weeks back when they changed the PQ emails I suggested they revert that too, and for the same reasons. Hasn't happened yet, though :(.

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Is it just me or have notification emails dried up? Nothing for a few hours now.

 

Edit: It looks like Groundspeak's mailer has given up. I've just sent a test email from one of my accounts to another and neither the copy nor the original has been received. Perhaps the change to HTML has overwhelmed the system? :D

 

Edit2: Wouldn't you know it? As soon as I post this mail starts flowing again.

Edited by Alan White
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Secondly, and perhaps this isn't as much of an issue elsewhere in the world, but in Canada our data plans for mobile phone users are rather expensive and often come with very few included MB/GB worth of data in the plan. As such, given that increasing a person's wireless data plan is somewhat restrictive from a monetary standpoint, what consideration was given to people in this scenario where the emails have jumped considerably in size? Yes, I would agree that most current email providers support HTML Formatting, and most people wouldn't have an issue if the sole place they went to for some "Oh Snap!" was their desktop computer, but I'm really not sure this is the case. People I know have 100MB total for their monthly data plan with no recourse other than to turn off/filter all notifications at the email provider level so that they don't incur overage charges since the new size will eat through their data bucket far too quickly. Perhaps that is ultimately Groundspeak's intent: If the masses hate them enough, they'll turn those notifications off and we won't have all that pesky bandwidth to pay for!

 

I think it's awesome that perhaps some of the changes will be tweaked, though I've yet to see anything concrete on that matter, but judging these forum boards and conversation on other social media site that I frequent, if Groundspeak aren't allowing a user-selectable email format, you simply aren't listening well enough.

 

That's MY problem too. And as I'm used to read my e-mails on my mobile it's hard to read now with zooming and scrolling left and right and down and up... annoying! And why am I forced to increase (with extra costs!) my data volume for my mobile? Because Groundspeak wants it? Serious? Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought that as a paying customer of Geocaching.com I could require some customer friendly features? HTML is everything but customer friendly - it's a change to the worst! So I really hope for an option for plain text mails (which were perfectly comfortable to read and TO GET THE INFORMATION I NEED) instead of Oh snap mails!

 

Btw - my user name is "Allgäuerin" but GC isn't able to solve my "Ä" problem so I can't get into the forum with my normal user name - and no - I don't want to change my name to an "ae". GC may be an US company but should realize that there are some members out there in the whole wide world... - and I have to add, this is my very first comment here in the forum - but I "felt like" (common thing these days) posting one.

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I think the new "published" notification subject line is quite useful, BUT it needs a more distinguishable tag or word like "[GEO]" or "published". The words "New" and "Cache" are not specific enough to filter these notifications efficiently.

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Count me in with those asking for the distance to be included in all notifications. That's one thing I miss. Otherwise, they look OK to me. I'm not sure what is meant by "green text on a white background". My notifications have had black text in an off-white box.

Having the option of HTML or plain text would also be great. I don't care too much either way, but I can see why some do.

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I totaly aggree with most of the others.

 

The new mail-format is no improvement.

 

I would like to get the notification in plain text rather than html.

 

The subject lines changed to meaningless.

 

Keep it short and simple.

 

Most important is the kind of log, kind of cache and dircton and distance.

 

For us a subject lines like:"published traditional 5,7km NE Cache name" or "enabled multi 6,3km SE cache name"

 

There is no need to have the reviewer or the cache owner in the subject.

 

Most cachers are paying for your service. Unfortunately Groundspeak doesn't care fore the requirements of their customers.

 

The question is why paying for a premium acccount in future if the value decreases.

 

Linus.de

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Hi,

 

Most important is the kind of log, kind of cache and dircton and distance.

 

Yes, direction and distance.

 

And IMPORTANT:

The name of the "Instant Notification" which triggered the notification!

 

In the text/plain part of the publish mail there is no indication which "Instant Notification" was used, so i don't know what the direction and distance in the subject means, because these are calculated relative to the center of the IN and *not* from my homecoordinates ;-)

 

Matze

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Well... business hours are upon The Lilypad, and yet there's still no comment from Groundspeak on the many requests for an option for HTML emails. I think I counted 5 separate threads in various locations within these boards, but it seems that just isn't enough feedback to suggest that there's a good section of the customer base that aren't enamored with this change, and that perhaps another look at this switch is warranted. Thus, not even deserving of the courtesy of a comment of position of the company.

 

I'm curious... were the Volunteer Reviewers asked for their input on this? Surely to goodness they would've caught the issues for you prior to this launch and would've commented on the lack of a text option, so I'm guessing the answer is no. It begs the question: Other than The Design Team, who on earth thought that HTML emails (with no option for text!) was a good move for the company? When coming up with this update, who exactly gave feedback and said this was an improvement?

 

If this HTML email directive is for some marketing metric counting, is there a concern that there won't be a valid random sample size because of the amount of people who would switch to text only if given the option? I can't imagine the cost overhead on the company side of bandwidth for having to send out email in the order of 6-8x their previous size. Is the endgame to have people stop receiving notification emails as some sort of cost saving measure?

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Hi,

 

Most important is the kind of log, kind of cache and dircton and distance.

 

Yes, direction and distance.

 

And IMPORTANT:

The name of the "Instant Notification" which triggered the notification!

 

In the text/plain part of the publish mail there is no indication which "Instant Notification" was used, so i don't know what the direction and distance in the subject means, because these are calculated relative to the center of the IN and *not* from my homecoordinates ;-)

 

Matze

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If this HTML email directive is for some marketing metric counting, is there a concern that there won't be a valid random sample size because of the amount of people who would switch to text only if given the option?

 

I wondered about this... would Groundspeak want to include some sort of tracking beacon or remote image request to track user views of emails? From what I can tell by looking at the source of several messages, they currently don't do so.

 

This brings up another concern of mine: why is the entire message base64 encoded? I understand that there could be some benefit if including images, attachments, or other content in the email, but why use it for HTML? In my experience it actually makes messages larger. For example, a randomly selected email that is 12,468 bytes encoded is only 9,216 bytes when decoded to UTF-8.

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I have to agree; the continuing absolute silence from Groundspeak on the whole HTML only email kerfluffle is very disappointing.

One would hope the silence is due to ongoing internal discussions regarding how to resolve the situation.

 

...but then, silence from the Lilypad isn't exactly uncommon...

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I have to agree; the continuing absolute silence from Groundspeak on the whole HTML only email kerfluffle is very disappointing.

One would hope the silence is due to ongoing internal discussions regarding how to resolve the situation.

 

...but then, silence from the Lilypad isn't exactly uncommon...

 

I generally interpret silence, from anywhere, as a sign nothing is going to change. They're waiting for the complainers to run out of gas and accept the change.

 

Not a very good strategy as it tends to leave people embittered and the next item they don't like will produce even more bile. Heck of a way to foster a sense of community.

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I have to agree; the continuing absolute silence from Groundspeak on the whole HTML only email kerfluffle is very disappointing.

One would hope the silence is due to ongoing internal discussions regarding how to resolve the situation.

 

...but then, silence from the Lilypad isn't exactly uncommon...

 

Silence is due to the planning of yet more HTML. The first little bit of HTML to hit the general public a couple months ago was met with the same response this batch of HTML is getting. The message is loud and clear, HTML sucks. Does Groundspeak care? Nope they have totally impressed themselves and want to continue impressing themselves. Oh, the users don't like it? Well in a week or two it will quite down and then we can say the Great HTML campaign was a rousing success.

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Ya know, I think I'm getting a little too personally involved in this topic, so I think I'm gonna politely bow out. I sincerely hope there'll be a text option for those of us that still want one since I think that's the best option for all sides.

 

Groundspeak folks... I think I got a little haughty there for a bit and offer my apologies.

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I have to agree; the continuing absolute silence from Groundspeak on the whole HTML only email kerfluffle is very disappointing.

One would hope the silence is due to ongoing internal discussions regarding how to resolve the situation.

 

...but then, silence from the Lilypad isn't exactly uncommon...

 

Silence is due to the planning of yet more HTML. The first little bit of HTML to hit the general public a couple months ago was met with the same response this batch of HTML is getting. The message is loud and clear, HTML sucks. Does Groundspeak care? Nope they have totally impressed themselves and want to continue impressing themselves. Oh, the users don't like it? Well in a week or two it will quite down and then we can say the Great HTML campaign was a rousing success.

Which is unfortunate. The email is still the awful labor to read that it was last week, nothing really improved from this futile exercise in rolling out bloat and cruft. I'm sure there are Dilbert strips that address this, but it might not hurt to pass along the idea to the author, he's always in the market for foolish corporate behavior examples.

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I have to agree; the continuing absolute silence from Groundspeak on the whole HTML only email kerfluffle is very disappointing.

One would hope the silence is due to ongoing internal discussions regarding how to resolve the situation.

 

...but then, silence from the Lilypad isn't exactly uncommon...

 

I generally interpret silence, from anywhere, as a sign nothing is going to change. They're waiting for the complainers to run out of gas and accept the change.

 

Not a very good strategy as it tends to leave people embittered and the next item they don't like will produce even more bile. Heck of a way to foster a sense of community.

 

At the risk of being labeled as one of those passive-aggressive whiners, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think Groundspeak really care about fostering a sense of community, or about retaining existing users. Most of the recent changes seem to have been aimed at bringing more newbies in, rather than retaining existing ones.

 

I gave credit where due further up this thread when Moun10bike posted an update and when they changed the subject lines back, but as the thread has progressed, the silence continues and the old Groundpeak has returned.

 

It would be interesting to know how many of the GS staff who have inputs into the system design actually get out caching and have to make use of the "features" they have inflicted upon us. Surely if those with final say on things actually had to use the system in the field to be notified, to find caches, to hide caches, to log and to deal with trackables, they'd realise where its shortcomings are.

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If this HTML email directive is for some marketing metric counting, is there a concern that there won't be a valid random sample size because of the amount of people who would switch to text only if given the option?
I wondered about this... would Groundspeak want to include some sort of tracking beacon or remote image request to track user views of emails?

 

I wouldn't discount the possibility completely, but it would be pretty daft given that most modern email clients block external images for exactly that reason.

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I know this has been said before, but the name of the notification needs to be visible in the header rather than the wasted words "New Traditional Cache". I have new cache notifications in several areas and in the past I could see which notification had created my email from the header line. All I can see now in the header is the distance from the notification center point. As a result I have to open each mail to see the location of the cache.

 

Please add back the name of the notification to the mail header.

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I know this has been said before, but the name of the notification needs to be visible in the header rather than the wasted words "New Traditional Cache". I have new cache notifications in several areas and in the past I could see which notification had created my email from the header line. All I can see now in the header is the distance from the notification center point. As a result I have to open each mail to see the location of the cache.

 

Please add back the name of the notification to the mail header.

 

Agree.

Not only open the mail but open the "HTML-part" of the mail!

In the text/plain part of the mail there is only 1 sentece but no indication which notification triggered the mail.

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I know this has been said before, but the name of the notification needs to be visible in the header rather than the wasted words "New Traditional Cache". I have new cache notifications in several areas and in the past I could see which notification had created my email from the header line. All I can see now in the header is the distance from the notification center point. As a result I have to open each mail to see the location of the cache.

 

Please add back the name of the notification to the mail header.

As far as I can see, the name of the notification has never been in the email header.

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why is the entire message base64 encoded?

The notifications have always been MIME encoded, even before the recent changes when they were sent as text/plain . I assume this is because cache names, logs etc may contain "foreign" characters and it's just simpler to encode everything.

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I know this has been said before, but the name of the notification needs to be visible in the header rather than the wasted words "New Traditional Cache". I have new cache notifications in several areas and in the past I could see which notification had created my email from the header line. All I can see now in the header is the distance from the notification center point. As a result I have to open each mail to see the location of the cache.

 

Please add back the name of the notification to the mail header.

As far as I can see, the name of the notification has never been in the email header.

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Probably everything has been said hundreds of times, but obviously it has not been heard.

 

I filter incoming mails to send the important ones to my mobile.

Now with the HTML version and the wasting of space even in the subject line I'm not able to see enough content in the mobile mailer overview to decide if this one is worth looking at.

 

Please, shorten the messages as much as you can!

The old [GEO], [LOG] system was perfect, you can add [NEW] if you want.

 

Adding the "Owner" to the notification was overdue, thank you!

 

But, on the other hand, give us back the "distance/bearing" info. If you're covering a wide radius with notifications, at least I do not know the names of more than 10.000 caches in the area any more.

 

Last point: I make an urgent plea for giving me & us the text mode back!

 

Worldwide the internet providers struggle about capacity. But you seem to think, that an increase of 400% in mail notification size does not matter.

BTW If there were some content in it, fine. But you just seem to send out millions of links per day to facebook, twitter, google, apple, and alike. What for?

 

Regards from Berlin, Germany

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I have a question about the TB logs. Can you please put back the name of the cache where the TB has been dropped or retrieved (and the location?). Can you also please clear up the header of the TB-logs? It does not make sense that the trackable logs are so bad now.

I ask Groundspeak: geocaching is your core business. Please keep that in mind.

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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.

 

This is also by design. Many people choose to have their publish notifications sent to email-to-text services. We wanted to create a format for text messages that is more concise and functional in the limited space available for text messages.

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!

Edited by NinjaCacher!
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I love the HTML emails. With HTML, it's possible to expand BBcode used in log text so that I can actually read logs from people who use lots of BBcode, which tend to be the most interesting logs.

 

And it's great that Groundspeak recently set up a User Insights forum, so that they were able to gather users' ideas prior to implementation.

 

Oh wait ... GS didn't use the User Insights forum. And they aren't expanding the BBcode. Well, that's awfully strange, since that was really the only possible argument at all for using HTML! And weighed against that missing improvement, we have these major degradations:

  • Poor contrast of text vs background! Pastel on pastel is hard to read. That may be difficult for many of the 20-somethings on the design team to recognize, but a lot of cachers are retirement age. Eyes do develop deficits over the years. (I've had five eye surgeries in the past year and a half, and I feel lucky. Fifty years ago, the doctors would have said "you're going blind, deal with it".) Note to design team: Read Jakob Nielsen on usability!
  • Very closely related, the code forces the use of Helvetica or Arial if they are available on the system. Though common, these are poor choices for reading on screen. I choose Verdana, which was specifically designed for legibility on screen. It's very rude of GS to override my choice, especially when they overrode my choice with a less legible one.
  • Awful HTML. It uses table-based formatting, which screams 1998. Modern? No, not with this crufty trash in the HTML code.
  • Excessive formatting. Coders gone wild. People would be complaining far less if the HTML were only used to provide necessary formatting. Instead, the design team has fallen into the common trap of using formatting capabilities just because they can.
  • Wasted characters. The HTML in a typical message contains almost 3000 spaces at the beginning of lines, which is of no use except to those who read the HTML code that underlies the messages. (How many, even of the complainers, have done that?)
  • Total typical message size (excluding headers) has increased from about 600 bytes to about 10,200 bytes. Of this increase, about 3,000 bytes is the line-leading spaces mentioned above, and about 5,500 is HTML tags, most of which are unneeded. Some tags are needed just to use HTML, but I'd guess that a nicely formatted HTML message needs at most 2,000 bytes.
  • To make it worse, I cannot override the choices. When I'm viewing cache pages in a web browser, I can set up my own style sheet to adapt to gc.com's poor choices. That possibility is not available to me when I'm reading email.

I'm glad to see that the subject lines have mostly been fixed. And a couple of issues brought up are not valid complaints about the recent changes:

  • Images in the messages: the actual images are not included in the messages, only the links. Those with data-limited accounts may still have a valid complaint, since the images will be downloaded when they view the message -- but the image will probably be cached and only downloaded once. At any rate, the mail storage is not being bloated with multiple copies of the images.
  • Base64 bloating: GS has been base64-encoding emails for a long time, even with plain text messages. There was actually a point to it with plain text, because plain text email does not handle most characters not used in English, even simple accented characters, and base64 is part of the solution to this problem. But this is not necessary in HTML, which has a much defter method of handling this and does not need the blunt club of base64. GS is to blame for leaving the base64 in place for HTML emails, but this is a sin of omission, not a sin of commission.

Finally, I wish GS would standardize on a single subject line tag, perhaps [GC]. This would simplify my filters, since I would not have to juggle [GEO] and [LOG]. But as others have pointed out, omitting the tags would make my caching life much harder.

 

Edward

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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.

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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 :ph34r:
  • 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? :ph34r:

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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 :ph34r:
  • 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? :ph34r:

 

I honest don't think that Jeremy's business advisers could be that dumb. I think if anything, charging for something that was formerly free would not only be crossing the line, but getting a running long-jump over it and spitting on it while passing by. What I mean is, people will leave if they do that.

That's my guess anyway.

Edited by ADKer
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Looks like it would be fairly straight forward to have your emails sent to a gmail account, write a google apps script to process them, pull out the relevant bits, and forward to your real email as text. Has anybody tried something like this?

I haven't, but the real question is why does Groundspeak depend on third party apps and scripts to make their site useable? Seems like they would have enough pride to provide a useful product that their users and customers like. But apparently I have missed an important memo somewhere along the line.

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Looks like it would be fairly straight forward to have your emails sent to a gmail account, write a google apps script to process them, pull out the relevant bits, and forward to your real email as text. Has anybody tried something like this?
Ah yes, a Simple Matter of Programming™. Quite the straight-forward solution, really...
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Looks like it would be fairly straight forward to have your emails sent to a gmail account, write a google apps script to process them, pull out the relevant bits, and forward to your real email as text. Has anybody tried something like this?
Ah yes, a Simple Matter of Programming™. Quite the straight-forward solution, really...

I wonder if there any good programmers in the Seattle area? Maybe for some freelance contract work...

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Looks like it would be fairly straight forward to have your emails sent to a gmail account, write a google apps script to process them, pull out the relevant bits, and forward to your real email as text. Has anybody tried something like this?

Here, wesi proposed a workaround using procmail to filter the HTML with a short script. Until Groundspeak realizes that annoying their paying customers is a bad idea I decided to give it a go and see how it worked. Other than having to insert a bit to add a trailing end of line at the end of each message, it worked pretty well. Plain text, no "make the emails look like a web page" nonsense, and the links are even included at the end of the message. That's the bit I couldn't get to work on my own. Watchlist notifications, instant notifications and messages from other players are handled so far, but it looks like a bit more work is needed for publication notices. I'll see tomorrow morning how pocket query notifications come through.

 

This is how it comes through:

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Stash n' Dash (GCA0D6) on your watchlist has a new log:

Logged by: Reece's_Pieces

Log Type: Found it

Date: 7/30/2014

Location: Alberta, Canada

Type: Unknown Cache

Log:

Fantastic idea for a cache! We had been watching this one, when we saw it wasn't too a drive off we went. Will place on Friday. Remove this from my watchlist

 

2. http://coord.info/GCA0D6

3. http://www.geocaching.com/my/watchlist.aspx

4. http://coord.info/PR12CT7

5. http://coord.info/GLF0VGPN

6. http://www.geocaching.com/my/watchlist.aspx?id=xxxxxxx&DS=1&ACTION=REM

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Why Groundspeak couldn't do this... sigh.

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Yes, I'm also very happy with wesi's Frogtrd Polishr. It's useless for people without their own email setup, of course.

You're right. And I'll have to keep tinkering with it every time the format changes. It's not a solution, just a workaround, and not one that everyone can use. The solution would be for Groundspeak to provide the option to receive plain text emails.

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