Release Notes (Website: Upcoming retirement of the old drafts pages) - February 1, 2022

[+DdA_Design]

@HHLbist du ein teil von geocaching HQ, oder ein "einfacher" user?

[+HHL]

Ich bin ein einfacher User.

[+Bl4ckH4wkGER]

The new draft page and its child pages have now been officially retired.

 

Thank you for the continued feedback in the forums and via the hotjar survey option up until this point.

 

I also wanted to close the loop on the feedback and feature requests that we received, documented, and will consider during the next iteration on the drafts page. All of these are pending further investigation and formal approval.

 

Layout

• Make the overall page design more compact (especially vertically)
• Page design should use more of page width
• Make print layout more efficient
• Add shading to every second line for better readability

Displayed information

• Have an option to open Cache Details Pages from the draft hub (players prefer to open cache listing and draft at the same time)
• Load all drafts on page load (no lazy load)
• Show the find type icon in addition to/ instead of text to allow for faster visual filtering
• Give an overview of how many logs of each type you have in your drafts
• Add sorting by cache name
• Show GC-Code, not just cache name
• Always show date & time, don’t hide time behind hover
• Indicate whether the cache is on one of my Lists

Draft data handling

• Don’t automatically delete my drafts once they are posted 
• Allow uploading past/ previously uploaded drafts again
• Adjust the upload file parser to actually remember a reference point vs it always processing the whole file
• Use multi-select for bulk logging with the same log text

Other features

• After posting the log, take me straight back to drafts, not to the Cache Details Page with a “go back to drafts” banner
• Allow editing & saving drafts on web, similar to how it is possible on the app
• Auto-save edits to the log text when players leave the drafts page

In the event of any future issues, please utilize the appropriate Forum sections, the information in the Help Center, or use the latter to contact us directly.

[+thebruce0]

9 minutes ago, Bl4ckH4wkGER said:

I also wanted to close the loop on the feedback and feature requests that we received, documented, and will consider during the next iteration on the drafts page. All of these are pending further investigation and formal approval.

 

 It's a good list, thanks for the transparency  

[+arisoft]

This is a very good list. Every option is welcome for me.

[+theyoungstone]

Hi,

 

I have blank lines into my filed notes and since last versions, when I export my field notes, the blank lines have disappeared into the drafts on geocaching.com site.

 

Regards,

[+K13]

Why would the old version be retired before the new version is properly functional?

[+geodanimal]

On 2/8/2022 at 4:30 AM, Magpie42 said:

2. once you have deleted a draft (no matter if intentionally or by accident), there is no way to get it uploaded again, at least not with the same date or type.

     What should this be good for?  Apart from the fact that gc.com needs additional server and db capacity and performance, to maintain
     a completely superfluous drafts history, why shouldn't there be a possibility to have multiple draft versions - esp. as you don't allow to edit drafts?!

     And what if a draft has been deleted by accident ...? Do you want to force the users to fake the date?!  In fact encourage users to cheat?
     Do you really want this ...?  I doubt it.

 

THIS!  I just had a couple big days of caching, with over a couple hundred finds.  I uploaded all the drafts/fieldnotes, and then before posting any logs on any of them, I suffered some uncertainty about whether I had actually included everything.  So because I wanted to make sure nothing was duplicated, I deleted everything and started over.  NOW I CANNOT UPLOAD any of my 200+ drafts.  Having to drag up each of those webpages manually to log them all is going to make me very, very frustrated.

 

Groundspeak, this is not helpful!  At the very least, there should be prominent warnings indicating that deleting a draft will result in never ever being able to use it again, even if you haven't followed through and posted a log from it!  But seriously, how boneheaded is that?!

[+Flupkion]

Im am using a selfmade linux tool to write and edit my logs.

 

When I used the old drafts upload, empty lines where preserved, in the new draft uploads it seems that empty lines are not allowed anymore. I tried to change my line endings from unix LF to DOS CRLF to no avail.

 

Are there specifications available for the format of the file to upload? So i can adapt my tool and have empty lines again.

 

[+Magpie42]

I don't like the new behavior neither (and, BTW, I don't know at least a single one who does), but perhaps they in fact want to persuade us to write shorter logs, as with just a "TFTC" you don't need empty lines at all ...?

 

However, as I don't like short logs *and* like to increase readability by adding space lines, too, (another aspect they obviously haven't taken into account), I currently add a so called "hard blank" (i. e "& nbsp ;"  resp. "ampersand nbsp semicolon" ) to my empty lines - looks a bit weird on first sight, but does the trick.