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Release Notes (Website: Enhanced Search Results)


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12 hours ago, The Snowdog said:

I see some recent screen shots that show both difficulty and terrain. But I only see difficulty. If I click on the three dots I can switch to terrain. But click on the dots again and difficulty is no longer an option!

I can confirm this bug. As a workaround, you can make your browser window smaller until only Geocache name, Distance, and Terrain are shown, click the dots and switch to Difficulty, and change the window back to the original size again.

 

12 hours ago, The Snowdog said:

How do I get both D/T back on the screen?

I think the only options are to make the browser wider or to zoom out.

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I really don’t like this update. I used to look at all my geocache finds in date order and now can’t seem to do that. Even with a large screen I can’t get all the columns to display. If I’ve been out with a caching friend and we have logged some each on the way round it’s handy to compare lists I can’t now look at all my finds in date order and all theirs in date order. I can’t work out what order my list is showing in at all, seems very random. Can’t get a screen where I can find d/t listing on one screen with out filtering it’s all very cumbersome. Columns leave too much space between them. Prefer and need the old version!

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On 2/20/2022 at 2:12 PM, igator210 said:

So a chronological order of when I found caches is no longer possible? "Last Found" isn't the same as "Found By Me".

 

I'm trying to see all the caches I found in December, on the day I found them, and I can't figure out how to do it now. It shouldn't be this difficult.

This is what I want too!

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On 2/26/2022 at 4:07 AM, Team Canary said:


removed from the boxes but they left a work around. “&note=2”

 

I confirm.

 

I use to modify coordinates for solved mysteries, and add a personal note on mysteries for which I have to go onsite to solve them.

 

Then, I have this link that tells me exactly which mysteries I have to solve from home : https://www.geocaching.com/play/results/?ct=8&cc=0&hf=1&nfb=smashcfr&ho=1&asc=true&sort=distance

 

But with the "personal notes" filter disabled it does not work anymore...

 

Each time something is modified by Groundspeak something useful does not work anymore... For example the personal notes filter when searching for geocaches, or the direct link to the geocache when using draft logs...

 

It's a great idea to try to make the website always better, but it should not imply making useful functionalities disapear ! Please make them come back... If this website is correctly coded it should be easy... Thanks

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On 2/27/2022 at 8:39 AM, The Snowdog said:

And here is another outright bug. If you are viewing an archived cache and click on "View Larger Map" instead of the expected result (a map of that area) you get a DNF pop up that can not be dismissedThe only escape is to close that tab.

 

 

Untitled.png

Agree.  A map showing archived caches seems to be no longer available.  I guess one could always do a search centered on the coords of the archived cache if you need such a map.

 

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I am having a real problem with the new search. In the old search, it measured distances from my home location. Now however, it is measuring distances from the centre of Japan which is about 600 km east from my present location. Furthermore when I search based on date, it automatically shows me the oldest, rather than the newest caches. I am sure there must be a work around but I can't figure it out.

 

One feature which I do like is that it now shows which prefecture the cache is in. 

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On 2/16/2022 at 12:34 AM, onepooja said:

 

  1. Placed and found by filter chips do not honor user date format
  2. Solved/posted coordinates shows incorrect filter chip
  3. You can no longer add the first 1000 search results to a list
  4. Filter by geotours attributes occasionally shows caches without geotours icon
  5. Encoding errors in Found By username searches

Again, we appreciate your patience and passion for our game, I will keep the community updated on the status.

 

On Feb 16th you listed these topics as being "in work". I can't speak for all of them, but for topic 3 there has been no change in the last 3 weeks. I am still not able to create lists with more than 200 search results with one click.

I would appreciate some update of the status.

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Unable to map caches on Chrome.  This is a huge inconvenience.  Is there any way to get back to the previous version?

We’re sorry!

The web browser you are currently using doesn’t support WebGL, which is needed to view this map. To view a map experience that supports your browser, please use our Browse map.

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This situation really seems like the usual result of subjecting software to being updated by folks who do not actually use it and have only a tenuous idea of its genuine use.

 

Using "region" rather than State as a location filter ;makes no sense for anyone, but it is especially asinine for folks like myself who live in the NY/NJ/CT so-called "tri-State" area.  The search results for region are simultaneously under- and over-inclusive.

 

Searching by State seems like such a no-brainer, and it was formerly easy.

 

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4 hours ago, CrunchyBill said:

Using "region" rather than State as a location filter ;makes no sense for anyone

It makes sense for people living in countries not subdivided into states. But what is the problem? I just made a search for caches in New York, United States, and I got 33,185 results. Do you mean that this is not the number of caches in the state of New York? Or is the problem that it is called "Region: New York, United States"? Or something else? I have seen complaints that searching for caches in a state measures the distances to those caches from the center of the state, rather than from home or from some otherwise specified point, but I guess that's not it.

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14 minutes ago, Team Canary said:

Is there any way of petitioning for the return of the old, fully functional Search Engine?

I think the chance of that happening is slim. What we can petition for is to have as much as possible of the functionality retained in the new search, and have as few degradations of the user interface as possible.

 

When it comes to outright bugs, of which a significant number have been reported in this thread, I'm not worried. They have been recognized as bugs and are worked on, I don't think it would be a viable option to suddenly announce it was not possible to do anything about them.

 

I am worried about functionality that has been lost and where there is no statement that it is going to be reinstated. First and foremost I am thinking about the unreasonable limiting to 1,000 results when listing finds and hides. Before, when the result list was that hidious, unpaged, ever-scrolling abomination there was at least a technical reason for the limit, no one could scroll further than that. But now, when paging is thankfully back, there is no longer a reason for the limit. There is a limit, but we can not know why. I'd like to petition against that.

 

 

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2 hours ago, ChriBli said:

It makes sense for people living in countries not subdivided into states. But what is the problem? I just made a search for caches in New York, United States, and I got 33,185 results. Do you mean that this is not the number of caches in the state of New York? Or is the problem that it is called "Region: New York, United States"? Or something else? I have seen complaints that searching for caches in a state measures the distances to those caches from the center of the state, rather than from home or from some otherwise specified point, but I guess that's not it.

Here is the problem: I live less than ten miles (the default search distance from "home") from another state." So what?" I hear you say. "What" is that there is a large river between me and that other state only crossable by a handful of toll bridges. I rarely have interest in crossing any of those bridges for geocaching so the "out of my home state" caches in the search result are an annoyance that I have to pick through. For a long time there was a way to delimit the search to a specific state as well as a specific distance from home. In another part of my state  a cacher's ten mile from home search will include caches across a bay that will require crossing a toll bridge and a 100 minute drive! I know that in other parts of my country there are even more dramatic examples. I have cached by bicycle in enough countries to know that caches can be few and far between in some places in the world. That is not the point. The point is that a cacher used to be able to select a location, a distance and a state all in a single search.

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2 hours ago, Michaelcycle said:

The point is that a cacher used to be able to select a location, a distance and a state all in a single search.

 

So you're saying the issue wasn't that it's called a "region" instead of a "state". Functionally they're the same. What you're referring to is the functionality of the region/state selection...

CrunchyBill's comment sounds like he's referring to the label:

 

11 hours ago, CrunchyBill said:

Using "region" rather than State as a location filter ;makes no sense for anyone

"Region" or "State" is just a label.

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8 hours ago, Michaelcycle said:

Here is the problem: I live less than ten miles (the default search distance from "home") from another state." So what?" I hear you say. "What" is that there is a large river between me and that other state only crossable by a handful of toll bridges.

Not all region borders entail physical obstacles, I would guess that applies also to US state borders. On the other hand, there can be physical obstacles that are not associated with a certain border (region, state, county, city) at all. For instance, within a 10 mile search radius from my home, there are a lot of caches on an island in a lake. The driving distance to them is easily four times the beeline, and the route passes over a bridge (toll-free, but a drawbridge which could mean some waiting time). Of course it would be convenient for me to have those caches omitted from my search results, but that is not something I'd expect the site to cater for.

 

But I hear what you are saying. Apparently it was possible before to do a search for caches within a region (a state, for instance) and within a radius from some given point (home, for instance). Then it should be possible with the new search as well, if it is considered useful by the community, otherwise it is a regression of functionality. I can certainly agree that the measurement of distances from the region center (or whatever) when doing a regional search is pretty useless.

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On 3/1/2022 at 11:47 AM, Ocean Lovers said:

Agree.  A map showing archived caches seems to be no longer available.  I guess one could always do a search centered on the coords of the archived cache if you need such a map.

 

 

And that is what should happen automagically if you click on View Larger Map. Isn't that how it works with un-archived caches? Just a map centered on those coordinates?

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11 minutes ago, The Snowdog said:

And that is what should happen automagically if you click on View Larger Map. Isn't that how it works with un-archived caches? Just a map centered on those coordinates?

The problem is that now "view larger map" opens the search map, and that requires a search match to display the map. An archived cache will not return a search match. Before, the browse map was opened instead. Much better.

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No offense, and maybe it's just me, but I don't get what's "enhanced" with this new search ...

To be clear, I really appreciate that we at least know what state/country we're looking at again.   :)

I look for caches singly, manually, by terrain mostly, and all other information used to be right there on the same line.

 - Now it has a pain-in-the-can "three dot" thingy that only allows you to view one of what was already there (difficulty, terrain, trackables, last found, placed on) at a time.

I looked up "enhanced" JIC something's changed over the years, and it does still mean "further improve the quality or value of".

For someone still paying PM for using little, this isn't working...

 

 

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On 3/7/2022 at 12:27 PM, KRON family said:

If I only want to display regular events from my public profile, this is not possible. List includes CITO and CCE too. 

obrazek.png.0226c9b623edac87e00845e5ca4068df.png

 

Interesting. I see the same thing. If you follow the links for some of the other event types, the URL uses "types=" values of 13 (CITO), 453 (Mega), 3653 (CCE), etc., and the correct results are shown. However, the "Event Cache" link using types=6 returns all of the event types, rather than only the type=6 "Event Cache" results like it should.

 

I think I see why this is happening. On the search filters, all event types have been collapsed into the single "Event" filter. When this filter is selected, it uses "ct=6" in the URL. It seems that the meaning of cache type 6 has been redefined for the purposes of the search to represent all event types, not just the type 6 Event Caches. Rather than do this redefinition that we can see causes side-effects elsewhere, what the engineers could do is define a new cache type value that would represent to the server that all event caches should be returned, which would allow type=6 to revert to representing only Event Caches. As a side-benefit, this would also allow an improvement to the filters where the user could select the "all event types" filter that would use this new cache type value, or could specifically select one or more of the individual event types. I recently wanted to do a search for only CITO events, and it was hard to find them in the results due to the high proportion of Event Caches that were included in the results, since we can currently only filter for all event cache types.

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I also noticed another issue recently. The HTML title of the search result page is simply "Geocaching.com". When one has several tabs open, it can be easy to lose track of what one of these tabs is, since the title is so vague.

 

Ideally, the title would include some of the filter terms, along the lines of "Geocaching - Search for [keyword] in [region]". At the very least, it could be something generic but still meaningful, like "Geocaching - Search results". As some examples of how a meaningful title has been done in the past, my public profile page has the title "Geocaching > Geocache Information for User: The A-Team", or the browse map has the title "Geocaching > Geocaching Maps".

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Hello,
    Thanks for your feedback and the patience while the team is working to optimize the whitespace between columns. We have fixed these white spacing issues, and you can see the improved search result page with proper whitespace between columns with smooth and faster rendering among the elements.
    We have also added a new filter called 'Event Type' in the filter panel that will allow you to filter only events that include - Regular, CITO, Mega, and Giga events.  
Note: the limited release Community Celebration Events will show combined with Regular Events

Again, we appreciate your passion for our game, I will keep the community updated with any ongoing status or further modifications.
 

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2 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

That's great progress. It is great to see the paged approach back in action with much less whitespace. 

Now, any word on whether the 'has personal note' filter will be coming back?

 

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for?

 

I use it sort puzzles that can't be solved at home.

Edited by Team Canary
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I really like the optimized layout. This works much better than a few days ago.

 

What should the new column "Info" show? So far I have never seen search results, where this column showed anything. I hoped that this might be the column for the requested information about personal cache notes. But this seems not to be the case.

 

And unrelated to this layout topic: I am still waiting for the "Add all search results to a list" Button ^_^

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22 minutes ago, keksbande said:

What should the new column "Info" show?

  • Info: displays if a geocache is part of a GeoTour or has an active Needs Maintenance attribute.
23 minutes ago, keksbande said:

I am still waiting for the "Add all search results to a list" Button

It's there right above the search results listing, and becomes active when one or more caches is selected:

 

image.png

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19 hours ago, Team Canary said:
22 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

Now, any word on whether the 'has personal note' filter will be coming back?

 

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for?

 

Primarily, one practical application I use is for handling challenge caches. I'm tracking them all in my province, so if new ones come up, I filter for ones I haven't looked at at all - I edit coordinates of challenges I qualify for, and if I don't yet qualify I put what I still need in the personal notes. That way I can easily filter for any combination via Cachly and bookmarked searches on the web.  It was a bigger benefit when I was still going through all the listings in the province until I'd either classified them as 'qualified' or 'need qualifying'. Once that was all done, the search (filtering out those with PNs and edited coords) would return 0 results, unless new ones were published - and Ontario is HUGE.   The quirk is due to the search not providing 'published' date, only placed date. So occasionally there'd be a listing I'd miss if sorting by placed date, because it might have been placed months prior to publishing, and I'd miss it in the list. So using the PN field was a guaranteed indicator of whether I'd seen it yet or not.

 

That's just one method that *I* use the filter. Others have requested it too. Not sure why it was removed, even as a hidden filter option. It would be great to have it back.

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20 hours ago, Team Canary said:
23 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

Now, any word on whether the 'has personal note' filter will be coming back?

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for?

I've used it to indicate puzzles that I've started working on, but haven't solved.

 

Has corrected coordinates:
- I've solved it, or it's an on-site puzzle. Either way, it's ready for me to load into my device and search for.

 

Has personal cache note but no corrected coordinates:
- I've started working on it, but haven't solved it yet.

Has neither corrected coordinates nor personal cache note:
- I haven't started working on it, although I may have looked at it before.

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2 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

Not sure why it was removed, even as a hidden filter option. It would be great to have it back.

 

From what I recall from a few years ago, the Personal Cache Note feature was partially broken in such a way that the search filter didn't work well. The issue was that when someone cleared out the contents of the Note for a listing, it didn't set the value back to "null" (ie. this listing has no Note), but rather just set it to an empty string (ie. this listing has a Note, but it's empty). This meant that listings where the user had since cleared the Note still showed up in search results when this filter was used. Rather than fixing the root issue by setting empty Notes to "null", they chose to just drop the search filter.

 

At least, that's how I interpreted things. It could be that things later got changed since the last time I looked into this issue.

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57 minutes ago, Isonzo Karst said:
On 3/7/2022 at 12:30 PM, Michaelcycle said:

The point is that a cacher used to be able to select a location, a distance and a state all in a single search.

 

This is still possible by Pocket Query.  

 

I'm curious what the use case is for returning the distance from some arbitrary "midpoint" of a state or country when including a regional filter with a search. I sometimes do a search on new caches within my state to pick up any that might be interesting beyond my instant notifcation range, but I can no longer sort them by distance from home, instead the distance is taken from some desolate place in the outback where there are no roads, towns or even caches.

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7 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

 

Primarily, one practical application I use is for handling challenge caches. I'm tracking them all in my province, so if new ones come up, I filter for ones I haven't looked at at all - I edit coordinates of challenges I qualify for, and if I don't yet qualify I put what I still need in the personal notes. That way I can easily filter for any combination via Cachly and bookmarked searches on the web.  It was a bigger benefit when I was still going through all the listings in the province until I'd either classified them as 'qualified' or 'need qualifying'. Once that was all done, the search (filtering out those with PNs and edited coords) would return 0 results, unless new ones were published - and Ontario is HUGE.   The quirk is due to the search not providing 'published' date, only placed date. So occasionally there'd be a listing I'd miss if sorting by placed date, because it might have been placed months prior to publishing, and I'd miss it in the list. So using the PN field was a guaranteed indicator of whether I'd seen it yet or not.

 

That's just one method that *I* use the filter. Others have requested it too. Not sure why it was removed, even as a hidden filter option. It would be great to have it back.


I write “Unqualified Challenge” for those I don’t meet, nothing for new ones and update the coordinates on those I do. Easily seperated. 

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1 hour ago, HHL said:

Often recommended - once again:

1. Map your search result

2. Select all caches

3. Add the entire search result to a Bookmark List

 

e411f795c69f4929671f2d5026525897.png

 

Hans

 

NB: this post will be deleted with the first appearance of an idiotic "Funny" flag.

 

Unfortunately this does not do, what I want. 
If my search results in more than 500 hits, only the first 500 will be mapped. I see no chance to somehow map the rest. Is it really too much of a request to just be able to add all of them to the list and not only the first 200?

image.png.a83d00ae5c7762ef9dff25c117b89f9b.png


 

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This still doesn't work. I am working on logging some challenge caches and I needed to go back to look at my old finds. I choose "found by me" and then enter found on "7-18-2014" I select all of the filter options: D/T, cache type, cache size. Then when I hit go I get a list of cache hides that are totally out of order. They are not chronological and none of them have the date I was searching for (7-18-2014)!

 

Next I try going into my finds from my profile and I discover I can no longer search for finds earlier than 1/18/2019. So basically there's no way to go into my old finds unless I pull up the old finds page. You guys need to fix this! Its been several weeks and these tools do not work!

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On 3/10/2022 at 10:10 AM, onepooja said:

Hello,
    Thanks for your feedback and the patience while the team is working to optimize the whitespace between columns. We have fixed these white spacing issues, and you can see the improved search result page with proper whitespace between columns with smooth and faster rendering among the elements.
    We have also added a new filter called 'Event Type' in the filter panel that will allow you to filter only events that include - Regular, CITO, Mega, and Giga events.  
Note: the limited release Community Celebration Events will show combined with Regular Events

Again, we appreciate your passion for our game, I will keep the community updated with any ongoing status or further modifications.
 

 

Thanks for those changes. They're both good improvements.

 

That being said, these are improvements that didn't need to be dealt with right away. While these are greatly appreciated, even more appreciated would be fixes to some of the functionality that appears to be broken. This includes filters that don't work as expected, distances based on arbitrary locations in regions, and many other things that have been mentioned throughout this discussion.

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On 3/13/2022 at 1:24 AM, Forest-Ghost said:

Next I try going into my finds from my profile and I discover I can no longer search for finds earlier than 1/18/2019. So basically there's no way to go into my old finds unless I pull up the old finds page.

Finally someone else that sees this as a problem. I'm beginning to think that it has not dawned on most people that once the old search is retired they will not be able to see more than the last 1,000 of their OWN finds! Let alone others'.

 

In the previous incarnation of the new search, when the links were moved over from the old search, the results were presented in a long, scrolling list without pages. I can understand why that list had to be limited in length. Now the pages are back, so I can no longer understand why the limit must still be there. By all means, limit other searches, to facilitate adding to lists and such. But searching for "found by" is already different in that it returns also archived caches and adding to list and mapping are prohibited. Why not also remove the silly 1,000-items limit?

 

Maybe this is the plan and will happen. Maybe not, and that would make me very unhappy. But I would at least like to see a statement about it, and preferrably also an explanation for why the limit must stay if that is the case.

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40 minutes ago, ChriBli said:

Finally someone else that sees this as a problem. I'm beginning to think that it has not dawned on most people that once the old search is retired they will not be able to see more than the last 1,000 of their OWN finds! Let alone others'.

 

You can still see a list of all your own finds if you click on Logs in the Dashboard and select Found It, although there's limited information in there and you can't do much with it. In any case, it's part of the old code they seem intent on replacing so its days are probably numbered too.

 

Maybe HQ considers that cachers with more than 1000 finds are such a tiny minority of the total as to be not worth worrying about, although they're the ones who have been regularly paying their subs year after year or even decade after decade.

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6 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

You can still see a list of all your own finds if you click on Logs in the Dashboard and select Found It, although there's limited information in there and you can't do much with it. In any case, it's part of the old code they seem intent on replacing so its days are probably numbered too.

In addition to that, you can not get a list with Found it, Attended and Webcam Photo Taken but without Will Attend, Write Note, DNF and other logs that don't count as smileys. And the list is not paged or numbered, so it is impossible to figure out which was my find #1234, for instance. You can also not do this for someone else's logs, I believe.

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And if you have many thousands of logs it's one ENORMOUS page to download in one single HTML table. It's a data dump. Not optimal. Good if you want to sit and wait for the page to load and not crash the browser... but seriously, the paged view of ALL your own finds was the best implementation. I only ever use the "All Logs" link if I want to do a quick search for something simple way back in my logging history, where the added load time is a small price to pay for very quick text search. :P

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It has all gone very quiet here. Is this an admission of total melt down? A quick example, I search for caches found by me, number returned is a very bizarre 8200 which is way less than I have found. It does almost span my caching lifetime in terms of dates and does include some caches very far away. Come on guys just admit failure, stop inventing new features and do some proper testing and fixing please.

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