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Release Notes - September 30, 2014


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In the Search box of my profile there was only one link that I used, guess which one?

Not anymore....

 

I never used the ADVANCED SEARCH that was just below the LIST NEW BY STATE/PROVINCE link.

 

If I never used I can only assume that 95% of other people dont use it either.

Shouldn't we remove that too? <_<

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In the Search box of my profile there was only one link that I used, guess which one?

Not anymore....

 

I never used the ADVANCED SEARCH that was just below the LIST NEW BY STATE/PROVINCE link.

 

If I never used I can only assume that 95% of other people dont use it either.

Shouldn't we remove that too? <_<

 

In 7 years of using geocaching.com, I could probably try and count on one hand how many times I have used the Advanced Search feature. Yes, it is handy once in awhile but I never use it.

 

However, the List Newest in my home province I use almost every day. I know MANY people who use it because they go to their "my" page, and click that link to see the most recent caches and recent events. I use it for the events more than anything, but I also use it when we do the Cache Up NB podcast to see what caches have been hidden in the last month. Log into profile, click a link, done. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

 

I don't understand how one link can be such a bother when time and effort could be spent on other things.

 

If the idea is that many folks don't populate the state field correctly, maybe you should adjust the Find Nearest link to use home coordinates before removing it entirely. For those of us who use it, we could continue to use it until you have modified your code to use the home coords instead. There's no need to remove it and then re-add something similar later using home coords.

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We constantly get complaints about how difficult it is to find things and how much of it is useless information.

 

I'm not big on jumping on bandwagons, but in this case, I have to ask...

 

Of all the things that have been complained about over the years that are FAR more integral to actually playing the game, why was THIS chosen as a priority to shove out there? It's just a profile and it isn't/wasn't that hard to deal with. There are so many other things that actually affect the game that needs attention before this.

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We constantly get complaints about how difficult it is to find things and how much of it is useless information.

 

Of all the things that have been complained about over the years that are FAR more integral to actually playing the game, why was THIS chosen as a priority to shove out there? It's just a profile and it isn't/wasn't that hard to deal with. There are so many other things that actually affect the game that needs attention before this.

 

I guess we all here made the mistake of posting our concerns here in the forums instead of writing separate mails to Groundspeak about all these topics. THis is apparently what counts for them - how many mails they receive about a particular topic and how many they have to reply to. It also seems that they they prefer mail requests for which they have a standard turn down reply and need not reply by explaining how something works.

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I guess the number is over 200, as I too was one that used the "list newest" in my state on a DAILY basis, I have very rarely used the advanced search option. Now it takes me 7 clicks and scrolling to get to the same place that took me 1 click before. I can't see how this helps me, when the find nearest benchmarks and waymarks are still there, and I NEVER use those.

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I live in the corner of a state (Pennsylvania). I can be at a new cache or event in West Virginia or Ohio within 45 minutes, or in Maryland within 90 minutes, or in western New York within two hours. As such, I had little use for a list of the newest caches in Pennsylvania since at least half of the events are in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, York, Lancaster, Scranton, etc. -- a half day's drive. For me it's always been more useful to click on the link in that same "search options" box to "Search for Geocaches Near Your Home Location." If I'm wanting to hunt for a cache I will click on the "Filter Out Finds" version of the link. If I'm looking for upcoming events I would sort the results by clicking on the "Placed" column so that the events bubble up to the top of the list.

 

I recognize that sorting on columns is a premium member feature, but this method ought to work for those of you who are premium members. It's two mouseclicks from your profile page instead of one.

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I live in the corner of a state (Pennsylvania). I can be at a new cache or event in West Virginia or Ohio within 45 minutes, or in Maryland within 90 minutes, or in western New York within two hours. As such, I had little use for a list of the newest caches in Pennsylvania since at least half of the events are in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, York, Lancaster, Scranton, etc. -- a half day's drive. For me it's always been more useful to click on the link in that same "search options" box to "Search for Geocaches Near Your Home Location." If I'm wanting to hunt for a cache I will click on the "Filter Out Finds" version of the link. If I'm looking for upcoming events I would sort the results by clicking on the "Placed" column so that the events bubble up to the top of the list.

 

I recognize that sorting on columns is a premium member feature, but this method ought to work for those of you who are premium members. It's two mouseclicks from your profile page instead of one.

 

I agree that your approach works fine in your situation. I used the newest in Austria when I wanted to see the events in the whole country and sometimes when I wanted to see what type of new caches show up in

general or whether new caches have been published recently at all in the country (to see whether the reviewers are on vacation).

 

When I search for caches near my home coordinates the caches in Slovenia and Hungary will show up earlier than those from many states of Austria.

Sometimes I'd like to see however what happens in my country and not so much what happens near my home coordinates. I rather would attend an event in Vienna or in Upper Austria than in Slovenia. I can imagine that there are a lot of people in Europe which want to see the events in their country and not the events around their home coordinates (often the listings are written in languages they cannot even read). A friend living in Vienna could easily reach caches in 12 countries within 400km from their home coordinates while

she would not be able to reach the two provinces in Austria that are farthest from her within this distance (that played a role in a challenge cache, that's why I became aware of it). Distance related searches work very bad in this setting.

 

Of course I can achieve the same result by using the country code for Austria or the advanced search form, but it's less inconvenient and in particular on computers where I do not have a bookmark list available.

 

I think that there are situations where people want to search with respect to coordinates and others where they would like to search with respect to something else. I still do not understand why the location info should be removed from the profile just because there are a few people who find it confusing. I wonder whether one could not offer a better help information for those who are confused, rather than taking away a functionality from the site that a lot of cachers made use of.

 

 

Cezanne

Edited by cezanne
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Oh my. This is not a pleasant update. We've just lost a daily used feature. Here in Manitoba, this feature is part of our training and training materials for people, especially on finding events. One click and go. (Two clicks actually, one on the profile two on the newest and you're there quickly.) Now we're adding layers of complication, 5 or 6 clicks and two scrolling lists. MUCH harder to teach and WAY more annoying and way more time to accomplish.

 

Tonight I needed a quick reference to an upcoming event and had to struggle to get to the event page. What should have been a quick 30 seconds ended up being more than a few minutes of frustration. As a result, I end up popping into the forums here to find out what the heck happened.

 

I for one am not pleased with the now added layer of complexity to get to this information.

+1

I'm not the tech person on this team and CJ's usually so busy, I have to fend for myself.

Seems the easist way (for me) to get information gets removed to something I may not be able to understand/get the hang of.

I've attempted a few times, but never really cared for that advanced search.

For one who'll travel for higher-terrain caches without using pqs, removing "newest" really affects the way I can play.

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As has been mentioned, we are completely overhauling the user profile and this work will be done in a sprint or two. At that time, users will not have mailing address settings listed in their profile anymore, so the link as it existed on the page would become less and less relevant.

The only thing I had filled out was the state. Apparently the link did not need my street or town.

 

Now in the future when you take all this away, where are you going to get the state for the cache listing? Or will the cache listings no longer have the state? Or will we have a bunch of listings with the state blank?

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As has been mentioned, we are completely overhauling the user profile and this work will be done in a sprint or two. At that time, users will not have mailing address settings listed in their profile anymore, so the link as it existed on the page would become less and less relevant.

The only thing I had filled out was the state. Apparently the link did not need my street or town.

 

Now in the future when you take all this away, where are you going to get the state for the cache listing? Or will the cache listings no longer have the state? Or will we have a bunch of listings with the state blank?

That was my same question here.

 

My guess is that Groundspeak will want to initialize the state/country for new caches and it sure seems to me that that same mechanism could be used to get the list newest in <state> list.

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As has been mentioned, we are completely overhauling the user profile and this work will be done in a sprint or two. At that time, users will not have mailing address settings listed in their profile anymore, so the link as it existed on the page would become less and less relevant.

The only thing I had filled out was the state. Apparently the link did not need my street or town.

 

Now in the future when you take all this away, where are you going to get the state for the cache listing? Or will the cache listings no longer have the state? Or will we have a bunch of listings with the state blank?

That was my same question here.

 

My guess is that Groundspeak will want to initialize the state/country for new caches and it sure seems to me that that same mechanism could be used to get the list newest in <state> list.

 

The CSP will default to country/state not chosen, and you will not be able to proceed until you select one.

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The CSP will default to country/state not chosen, and you will not be able to proceed until you select one.

 

Does Groundspeak think that it is an improvement if there is no way for a cache hider to have a default set?

 

The next change could be to remove the default in the placer's field ....

 

Couldn't Groundspeak find a way to make things easier for the new style newcomers (the beginners a few years ago have apparently been quite different) and at the same

time do not make it more and more annoying for the experienced cachers? There are already now so many annoying elements (like for example, having to click that one understands which waypoints are shown on the map each time one starts a submission and many other things of this flavour which are so tiresome and make me feel treated like an idiot).

Edited by cezanne
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Suggestion : if you're planning changes to the default profile page, why not have both the new and old available so that others can take a look and provide feedback BEFORE it is rolled out?

 

A number of online services do that. If they are planning to switch to a new page rollout, they will either

 

1) offer the new layout available as an option for users to try out

 

2) switch everyone but provide the option to roll back

 

You can offer http://www.geocaching.com/my/default.aspx as the existing layout, but with a banner to invite users to check out the new layout, say for example http://www.geocaching.com/my/default_new.aspx

 

In the last few times I've followed the Release Notes threads, it seems to be almost universally hostile. The recurring theme is that existing functionality was removed without warning, feedback, or recourse. This is nothing new, it has been Groundspeak's way since I started geocaching (2008) and probably from before that. But the backlash seems to be getting more and more vehement. Why not find a different way of doing things?

 

For myself, my position has always been that I will resort to GreaseMonkey to change minor issues like layout and ABP to block out annoying elements.

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That search was powered by the State/Country information that each user submitted in their account settings. However, the State/Country box is vastly under-utilized in most accounts. Also, users often misspelled one or the other, and/or confused it with Home Coordinates.

How can either be misspelled when one must choose from a finite list in a dropdown? If these used to be free-text fields a long time ago, data cleanup should have occurred when these were converted to dropdowns.

 

The profile page is a horrid mess. We constantly get complaints about how difficult it is to find things and how much of it is useless information. So, we are overhauling it to make it more user friendly.

I have to assume all these complainers are the same ones who were clamouring for HTML emails. I really need to find out how to submit to this mysterious alternate feedback method. <_<

 

Yet again, we're left wondering if this was really a good use of the developers' time. With the countless bugs, unfinished features, and more-frequently-requested changes or additions, time is being spent on decluttering a page that most members likely only visit a handful of times in their caching careers. If the time and/or knowledge of the developers is so limited that only basic decluttering or cosmetic changes can be made, I'll gladly pay more for my premium membership so that Groundspeak can hire the necessary resources to adequately support the sites (including Waymarking.com). Whether Groundspeak likes it or not, this is no longer just a small hobby site that a few developers can work on in their spare time. It's time for Groundspeak to start acting like the grown-up company that it is.

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So it sounds like the list newest in state was a big hit for people that live in a state that's small enough to constrain the search to an interesting number. The rest of us (including, I'm guessing, people living in Washington State) never had a clue why anyone would find that link useful.

 

So the solution is to replace it with "list newest within N miles of home", i.e., explicitly limiting it by range rather than arbitrarily limiting it by what state the caches are in. That would provide the same feature even to those of us handicapped by living in a large state, and it would do it without using the deprecated state field. I suppose N could just be fixed at 100 miles -- I think that's essentially what happens if you used Keystone's "nearest unfound" then sort by date placed approach -- but to really replace the feature without states, GS could provide a way for me to set my range of operations so for me the limit could be what I think it should be. Hey, that's starting to sound really useful now!

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I suppose N could just be fixed at 100 miles -- I think that's essentially what happens if you used Keystone's "nearest unfound" then sort by date placed approach -- but to really replace the feature without states, GS could provide a way for me to set my range of operations so for me the limit could be what I think it should be. Hey, that's starting to sound really useful now!

That's easy. If you create a bookmark for the "search for nearest caches to my home coordinates," you can adjust the distance parameter easily by adding "&dist=N" at the end of the URL (without the quotes, of course, and substituting the desired number of miles for "N"). If you only care about new caches and events within 10 miles because you ride your bike everywhere, say "&dist=10". If you will drive two hours to attend an event or try for an FTF on a mountain climbing cache, say "&dist=125'.

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So it sounds like the list newest in state was a big hit for people that live in a state that's small enough to constrain the search to an interesting number.

 

Wrong I used it for the whole country as explained further above. I used it in situations where the idea was definitely not to do a search within N miles/km of my home coordinates.

Just an example: When I want to look at Austrian caches, I want to see those that are more than 600km away from my home and I do not want to see caches in Slovenia which are less than 60km from my home.

 

Moreover, the change discussed here has more serious implications than only that the newest search link got removed. One of them is that apparently there will not be any longer a default for the country/state on the form for cache submissions. I also wonder whether the location field from the public profile (where currently the location entered by the users is displayed) will disappear. I found it convenient that a large number of users on this forum provide some information on their location in their profile so that one does not need to search around in their list of hidden and found caches to make a guess about where they live.

 

 

Cezanne

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I suppose N could just be fixed at 100 miles -- I think that's essentially what happens if you used Keystone's "nearest unfound" then sort by date placed approach -- but to really replace the feature without states, GS could provide a way for me to set my range of operations so for me the limit could be what I think it should be. Hey, that's starting to sound really useful now!

That's easy. If you create a bookmark for the "search for nearest caches to my home coordinates," you can adjust the distance parameter easily by adding "&dist=N" at the end of the URL (without the quotes, of course, and substituting the desired number of miles for "N"). If you only care about new caches and events within 10 miles because you ride your bike everywhere, say "&dist=10". If you will drive two hours to attend an event or try for an FTF on a mountain climbing cache, say "&dist=125'.

This is one of the basic problems with this site. Some thing that use to be simple and easy now requires a bunch of hacking around to get back a useful feature. To make the site really useful and get useful functionality one needs to learn about greasy monkeys, add block and use a third party software package extensively. I guess that should not be a real complaint, I do, after all, get to learn about things that on a well designed an run site I would not need to know about.

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jholly, I learned that trick in 2002, at the same time when I learned that adding "&f=1" at the end of any search results list will hide caches you've already found.

 

The site navigation and search functionality is a fair bit better now than it was in 2002. Spend some time at the Wayback Machine site and it puts things in perspective! I also think it will get better in the future, even though this is a bumpy week during a period of transition.

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So it sounds like the list newest in state was a big hit for people that live in a state that's small enough to constrain the search to an interesting number. The rest of us (including, I'm guessing, people living in Washington State) never had a clue why anyone would find that link useful.

I used it all the time and I live in Arizona, a state that currently has over 29,000 caches. That's only a couple thousand less than Washington State.

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jholly, I learned that trick in 2002, at the same time when I learned that adding "&f=1" at the end of any search results list will hide caches you've already found.

 

I have known these tricks (and others) also since 2002, but they are way more useful on computers where one can has access to one's own bookmarks which is not always the case (even though I know codes like &f=1 by heart).

 

The site navigation and search functionality is a fair bit better now than it was in 2002. Spend some time at the Wayback Machine site and it puts things in perspective! I also think it will get better in the future, even though this is a bumpy week during a period of transition.

 

I have been there back then and I preferred the old navigation and functionality that was present by the end of 2002. The only thing that really improved from my point is that now good maps are available, but that's not something Groundspeak has worked on.

 

Yes, I know we now have favourite points, attributes and such things and these are certainly of help to many (most?) cachers, but not that much to me. Of course meanwhile much better tools are available (GSAK, project-gc, greasemonkey scripts etc), but again this is nothing Groundspeak deserves credit for and nothing the gc.com site offers.

 

As far as I remember searching for cache names has been possible 12 years ago without the restriction to "starts with" but maybe I remember this incorrectly.

 

I also preferred by far the old cache submission form I have used with pleasure for many years. The new one is akward and makes me all the time wonder whether I should hide any new cache at all even though I have ideas and plans for several.

 

For almost 12 years it was possible to receive logs and mails in text form, only recently they changed over to this annoying html.

 

Etc Etc

 

I admit that I'm certainly not an average cacher and belong to a minority in many respects. I just write the above to stress the fact that not for everyone the functionality and navigation has improved.

 

I have lost any hope for anything that I regard as improvement.

 

Cezanne

Edited by cezanne
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Seems the way this is heading is to find out what the heck a greased monkey is, know how to bookmark and learn gsak.

Adjusting parameters and possibly some math involved (?), not so hot for dyslexic old farts, who relied on memory (and repetition) to get around the site.

Shame, this was a fun, easy to play hobby.

Ten years later, looks like I've gotta attend a geocaching 101 event. Sad.

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"I recognize that this was an important piece of functionality for some people, but the truth is that many more people never even knew that it existed, and the functionality is available elsewhere on the site."

 

I, for one, would love to see how this was determined. Questionnaire? Online poll? Where are the stats to back up the decision?

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I too would like to know how to add my mysterious input to have changes made on this site. I have some great ideas that no longer seem so far fetched now.

 

I created a PQ of caches closest to my home that shows the closetst 1000 caches (which is up to 30 km away) but when I preview it, if I click the "placed" column it'll show the 1000 newest , some of them well over 100 km away, not sure how it works.

 

This also gets all events to the top.

 

One other benefit, doing it this way you will still see the distances to the caches while selecting newest caches by you won't.

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There is still a link on the profile page to "Search for geocaches near your home location" - click on that then one more click on the "Placed" header and the events pop to the top. Voila!

- And the new caches.

Thanks for that !

Even I understood that one. :laughing:

Wrote myself a note so I don't forget.

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There is still a link on the profile page to "Search for geocaches near your home location" - click on that then one more click on the "Placed" header and the events pop to the top. Voila!

 

This way too gives you the distances and shows a lot more caches than the 1000 from the PQ, thanks, I learnt something.

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jholly, I learned that trick in 2002, at the same time when I learned that adding "&f=1" at the end of any search results list will hide caches you've already found.

 

The site navigation and search functionality is a fair bit better now than it was in 2002. Spend some time at the Wayback Machine site and it puts things in perspective! I also think it will get better in the future, even though this is a bumpy week during a period of transition.

I'm not sure the search function is better when what we have now is "starts with". I remember that not to long ago I could enter "under the bridge" or some other phrase and get a number of choices, most of which were not the start of the name. Given the choice between an accounts page rewrite and a real search function I don't see too many votes being cast for the accounts page.

 

When getting a real search function on the site, instead of relying on Google, is less of a priority than the account page is a mystery I can not figure out. If they want to do some thing to fix the "mess" on the account page they could fix it so that it shows when my membership expires and if I have a auto renew is it for 3 months or a year. I had recent experience with that and I would rather that was fixed than fixing the account page and losing a real useful link. Yeah the functionality can be had in other ways, but why? My solution was to grab a greasy monkey.

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There is still a link on the profile page to "Search for geocaches near your home location" - click on that then one more click on the "Placed" header and the events pop to the top. Voila!

 

This way too gives you the distances and shows a lot more caches than the 1000 from the PQ, thanks, I learnt something.

 

It seems to be limited to 80km, there is a new cache that shows in my PQ way at 82km that does not show this way.

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There is still a link on the profile page to "Search for geocaches near your home location" - click on that then one more click on the "Placed" header and the events pop to the top. Voila!

This is a workable solution, but:

 

  1. It doesn't work for people who want only newest in their state
  2. It isn't the one click option that worked perfectly well before the update

 

I have no problem with the folks on the other side of the border from where I live, but I typically don't wish to see the upcoming events from NY, PA or OH, given the international border rigmarole I'd have to go through to get there, yet that's what the above option would return for me. Preferably, when, and if, I do wish to see events in states/provinces other than my own, I would *then* use the Advanced Search features. That seems a more logical process to me.

 

I suppose I can understand not wanting personal address information listed on the site anymore, but I can't imagine having a field in Account Settings for State/Province info to drive the previous one-click option to find caches is of much (any?) concern to anyone who wants it.

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I suppose I can understand not wanting personal address information listed on the site anymore,

 

There was no need to provide an address at all (and there exists a separate location field). Moreover, for the PMs they ask about the country/state anyway and I cannot imagine that they will stop so as the price depends on that.

Sure one can provide wrong information, but one can do that on every occasion. So to me this seems quite weird: The users cannot be asked for their location when it concerns their profile but they can asked the same question when it comes to paying Groundspeak ....

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I have known these tricks (and others) also since 2002, but they are way more useful on computers where one can has access to one's own bookmarks which is not always the case (even though I know codes like &f=1 by heart).

I find it somewhat... curious... that the fix for "the profile page is cluttered" ends up with a solution involving manual editing of URLs to regain some of the clutter that was clearly used. Yes, I've certainly been known to play games with URLs before, but... I'm a geek, and even I think it's unreasonable to need to do that. For the less geeky users out there, it goes past "unreasonable" into "ridiculous".

 

I have been there back then and I preferred the old navigation and functionality that was present by the end of 2002. The only thing that really improved from my point is that now good maps are available, but that's not something Groundspeak has worked on.

I wasn't there back then, but I can't really recall any improvements to the search/navigation of the site since 2010 when I started. Cosmetic changes, sure, but nothing that has stuck in my memory as an actual improvement to usability.

 

Yes, I know we now have favourite points, attributes and such things and these are certainly of help to many (most?) cachers, but not that much to me. Of course meanwhile much better tools are available (GSAK, project-gc, greasemonkey scripts etc), but again this is nothing Groundspeak deserves credit for and nothing the gc.com site offers.

It seems to me that the value provided by Groundspeak is slowly dwindling away to just the database itself. With so many appalling interface decisions being made for us lately, and with the rise of the (excellent) tools mentioned above, it is becoming much more attractive to just use those third-party tools and apps, and never look at the website (or emails) provided by the Frog at all.

 

As far as I remember searching for cache names has been possible 12 years ago without the restriction to "starts with" but maybe I remember this incorrectly.

You're not incorrect. It used to be possible. It was disabled for performance reasons (unconstrained searches smashing the database). Now I don't profess to be a DBA, but it seems odd that some database optimisations couldn't be made to address this. That said, we know that so much of the behind-the-scenes stuff is... well... of questionable quality, so I guess this really doesn't come as much of a surprise. :(

 

I also preferred by far the old cache submission form I have used with pleasure for many years. The new one is akward and makes me all the time wonder whether I should hide any new cache at all even though I have ideas and plans for several.

That (plus the customer service attitudes from the Lilypad in general) has certainly contributed to my lack of interest in hiding anything lately, too.

 

For almost 12 years it was possible to receive logs and mails in text form, only recently they changed over to this annoying html.

Don't get me started.... :mad:

 

Sigh,. This post has come across a lot more negative than I'd originally anticipated. But I honestly have trouble finding too many positives to add to it. Let's see.... oh. More attributes? That sounds like an improvement. Well done.

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With the decision to remove the state/country from user profiles, what will be the affect on other sites such as cacherstats.com and project-gc.com? Specifically, how will they know what state/country a cachers resides in order to rank by state/country?

The state/country information isn't visible to the public, so those sites can't be using that information anyway. They likely make best guesses based on the publicly-visible "Location" field, the location of a cacher's hides, the location of the majority of their finds, or some other criteria.

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They likely make best guesses based on the publicly-visible "Location" field,

 

I wonder whether this location field (which did not need to be filled) will stay or get removed as well. If it stayed, they could use this field and everyone who wanted to use the

newest search could still so. I rather suspect that they intend to remove this location field too.

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They likely make best guesses based on the publicly-visible "Location" field,

 

I wonder whether this location field (which did not need to be filled) will stay or get removed as well. If it stayed, they could use this field and everyone who wanted to use the

newest search could still so. I rather suspect that they intend to remove this location field too.

This is a free-text field where users can enter whatever they wish. It would be nearly impossible to use the content of this field for anything programmatically. What would the "Newest..." link display if the user has entered "Anytown, USA" or "Mars"?

 

I see no reason to remove the Location field, although I also didn't see a reason to remove the "Newest in my state" link or the state/country fields. :rolleyes:

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I created a PQ of caches closest to my home that shows the closetst 1000 caches (which is up to 30 km away) but when I preview it, if I click the "placed" column it'll show the 1000 newest , some of them well over 100 km away, not sure how it works.

 

This has always been the case. If you 'preview' a PQ, you're not working with a closed set of results. So if your PQ is to 1000 caches within 100 miles and the preview is sorted by closest first, you'll get the closest 1000 caches under 100 miles. If you sort by distance in reverse, you'll get the farthest 1000 caches under 100 miles (thus likely nothing close to home). If you execute the PQ however, it'll have its closest 1000 caches within 100 miles, and you'll be able to sort those explicitly in another location.

 

The PQ Preview feature you just have to remember is more like a live search, and even the sorting is treated as a search parameter. It's odd because you can't ask for the "farthest 1000 caches under 100 miles" in a PQ, so you just need to remember that the preview offers a couple of live search abilities the PQ doesn't.

Yes, it is confusing and not that intuitive.

 

 

As for the other updates, I rarely use the Advanced Sarch page as well. I resort to PQs for all my searching needs. Closest to home in Ontario? PQ. Unfound caches close to home? PQ. Events? PQ. etc. I've never found the search functions all that intuitive or useful.

 

I can understand people's desire for that single link for caches close to home.

 

And I also agree that "just add [text] to the URL" is a non-solution for a vast majority of non-tech people. Yes, it's easily learned by most anyone, but the purpose of the website as an interface is to not have to force people to memorize non-intuitive parameters and values. Removing a single click link in the UI in favour of programmatic syntax that isn't provided or explained let alone requiring understanding outside the bounds of the UI, is just wrong. Bad experience design.

 

Heck, even site bookmarks...

I have so many GC.com bookmarks for pages I use regularly that take time to locate and navigate to via the site. While that's certainly easier, it doesn't encourage me to praise the design and layout of gc.com or let new people know how easy it is to use. Do I need to send them a list of useful page bookmarks if they want to start geocaching through the site without getting frustrated at trying to find something pretty simple? Shouldn't have to do that...

Search functionality should be intuitive and detailed, or users given the choice to use a simplistic interface or go to an advanced version with more/less common fine tuning options. And that argument applies to the CSP as well.

 

Anyway, I'm done for now :)

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They likely make best guesses based on the publicly-visible "Location" field,

 

I wonder whether this location field (which did not need to be filled) will stay or get removed as well. If it stayed, they could use this field and everyone who wanted to use the

newest search could still so. I rather suspect that they intend to remove this location field too.

This is a free-text field where users can enter whatever they wish. It would be nearly impossible to use the content of this field for anything programmatically. What would the "Newest..." link display if the user has entered "Anytown, USA" or "Mars"?

 

It still could deliver something useful if properly filled and bogus otherwise.

What I meant was however something else: what Moun10Bike wrote made me worried that they will delete this field too in the long run.

 

I see no reason to remove the Location field, although I also didn't see a reason to remove the "Newest in my state" link or the state/country fields. :rolleyes:

 

I see no reason either, but who knows .........

The argument that users entered inconsistent data and committed typos must refer to this field.

Edited by cezanne
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There is still a link on the profile page to "Search for geocaches near your home location" - click on that then one more click on the "Placed" header and the events pop to the top. Voila!

This method shows 2 events in my area.....not the 6 listed for the province I live in.

 

As someone who regularly attends events all over the province, the "newest in New Brunswick" link was one I used every day. As the admin for our local Facebook group it was an invaluable, easy tool used to easily promote and post events for the whole province. As someone who regularly hosts events, one click and I knew if my chosen date conflicted with another. As someone who has an online geocaching supplies website and travels the province setting up at events, it was extremely helpful to know in one click what was going on where. As someone who is not terribly tech savvy, it's now become a much more difficult experience to do any of the above tasks. What used to take seconds is now something that I have to stop and think about, or look up a link for, or go through a multi click/scroll down process every single time, just to get the information I need.

 

Removing this option, for those who used it, is extremely frustrating. Please, please reinstate the function.

Edited by milosheart
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And does anyone look at Benchmarks, or Waymarks????? Delete those instead!!

Please don't make false assumptions about the usefulness of these links. There are lots of people that Waymark or visit Benchmarks. Not as many as there are cachers, but they're still out there and these links are useful to them.

 

If Groundspeak was interested in hearing my opinion, I could make many suggestions of ways to declutter the profile page without taking away any functionality from the users. Unfortunately, the membership's opinions rarely seem to be taken into account when making changes to the site, so I won't bother posting them here. We get what the Lilypad gives us, and we have to like it.

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And does anyone look at Benchmarks, or Waymarks????? Delete those instead!!

Please don't make false assumptions about the usefulness of these links. There are lots of people that Waymark or visit Benchmarks. Not as many as there are cachers, but they're still out there and these links are useful to them.

I rather think that was the point. False assumptions about the usefulness of the now-removed "caches in [place]" have been made, so where do you draw the line?

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