[Request] Revisiting Notifications for simplification

[+Mineral2]

I think most of us use notifications to be notified of new caches in our area, and to do that, we have to set up a notification for each type of cache. For me, that's 7 notifications. And for those of us that visit and cache regularly in more than one location have to set up notifications for each area that we visit. That's up to another 7 notifications per location greater than 50 miles away. And if we want to change the parameters of the notifications, we have to open each one - one at a time - and go through multiple clicks to change and save. Its tedious.

Perhaps we can revisit how notifications work so that we have the option to set up rules that apply to multiple cache types in a single notification, reducing the number we have to maintain and keep track of.

[+dprovan]

This is an obvious suggestion for a reasonable feature. I don't mean to minimize your post, but it's been suggested many times in the past. But, now that I think of it, not recently, so even knowing it's often requested, I appreciate you bringing it up again.

 

OK, so I do agree this is one of those feature that's so obvious, one wonders why the cache type wasn't a check box instead of a pull down selection to begin with. But having said that, the bug -- er, "missing feature" -- has endeared itself to me over the years. I'm too lazy to put in notifications for all 7 types, so I only have the ones I'm most interested. Once in a while, I'm pleasantly surprised when, for other reasons, I'm going to be in an area that I expect to be all cached out, but when I look at the map, I find a stray letterbox or EarthCache that's been waiting for a couple months for me to notice it. I've also gotten very use to having notifications for traditional caches have a smaller radius while still getting puzzle cache notifications for the whole area. So, having gotten use to things the way they are, when this feature is finally added, I might not use it even though I recognize it as a good idea. I apologize to the developers for saying that I don't think this was intentional, but I have to admit that the current somewhat clumsy interface has pushed me to set up my notifications in a way that turns out better, for me, than the way I thought I wanted them.

[+capoaira]

I agree with the thread owner. It is very annoying to set up 10 (or 7 for vacation (no events)) notifications.

[+hzoi]

I have nine different notifications set up - one per type for traditional, multi, letterbox, mystery, Wherigo, earthcache, virtual, event, and CITO. (Used to be the virtual was only set up to notify for archive or unarchive, but now it has publish as well.)

 

I move every two years or so.  And every time I do, I have to separately edit nine different notifications.

 

So, yes, I too would like to see this helpful old feature updated to be more helpful.

[+hzoi]

22 hours ago, capoaira said:

I agree with the thread owner. It is very annoying to set up 10 (or 7 for vacation (no events)) notifications.

 

Out of curiosity, what's your 10th type? Mega?

[+dprovan]

4 hours ago, hzoi said:

I move every two years or so.  And every time I do, I have to separately edit nine different notifications.

Well, except that would be trivial if the notification page accepted coordinates as a single string. If the notification interface wasn't so clumsy, your nine notification edits would take 20 seconds: copy-paste-paste-paste-paste.

 

Oh, dear, I wish I hadn't thought of that. The fact that they haven't supported a single field for coordinate entry after all this time makes it seem very unlikely they'd change the way the cache type is set, doesn't it?

[+capoaira]

21 hours ago, hzoi said:

 

Out of curiosity, what's your 10th type? Mega?

Community Celebration Event

[+Mineral2]

More reasons to combine cache types in notifications since some cache types are limited.