Submission process flaw

[Dirk_Walks]

When submitting my first cache last night, I was asked to select a region of the UK. I've come across this phenomenon before, and it frustrates me every time because one person's idea of "East of England" doesn't necessarily match another's. (For example, at my last address, Facebook stuck me in London while my electricity supplier said I was in the East Midlands.) Leaving aside the astoundingly obvious question of why such an otherwise well-designed website isn't capable of assigning a region automatically based upon coordinates, the easiest solution is to actually tell the user there is a map showing the region definitions geocaching.com favours, and provide a link to it. My presumably long-suffering reviewer had to message me this morning telling me my selected region was "wrong" and directing me to the map on the wiki.

 

A dismissive person might say the person submitting should go away and jolly-well find out this stuff. But a person who favoured user-friendly web design, pleasurable caching experience, and lightening volunteer workload would just add a link.

[+palmetto]

I appreciate your frustration. The entire cache submission process is somewhat opaque from the hider's viewpoint.

 

And I understand that the UK regions are not quite analogous to well defined political regions.

 

The first sentence of the listing guidelines provides a link to the Geocaching Regional Policies wiki, where under the UK, you'd find the UK Geocaching regions map.

https://wiki.Groundspeak.com/display/GEO/United+Kingdom#UnitedKingdom-ukmap

 

Trying to provide a link to the correct page of the wiki from the cache report form after coords have been entered would be quite complex.

Also, few world regions have such specialized geocaching regions.

As a UK hider, you face another issue, which is being *quite* careful about E and W longitude. The report form will now likely automatically assign West longitude to anything new you submit. You might hide on both sides of Prime.

 

As a reviewer, I can tell you that correcting location info is not time consuming.

Some reviewers will simply make the correction,and explain via log to the cache page that they have.

Many will not make any edits to cache pages.

Edited March 22, 2016 by palmetto