What3words and Geocaching Toolbox, etc.

[+fizzymagic]

What3words recently enacted a change to their api such that conversion from w3w words to lat/lon coordinates is no longer free.  As a result, the converter at the geocaching toolbox site (and probably others I don't know about) does not work any more, probably forever unless somebody decides to cough up the considerable fee (likely several hundred dollars per month for the volume of conversion they do).

 

You can still get the conversion done one at a time using the w3w website itself.  Put in the w3w address and then click on "share" and then "customize share settings."  Choose Degrees Decimal Minutes.  The site will force you create an account to save that setting.  I am unsure how geocaching.com will deal with this requirement; they seem to accept it for jigidi and a few other places.  If the issue is not resolved relatively soon, I may take all my w3w cache final locations and either put the w3w into Certitude as a keyword or convert to some other way of getting the coordinates from my puzzles that currently use w3w.

 

It's very annoying.

[+egroeg]

11 hours ago, HHL said:

Use OLC (Open Location Code) (Click here) instead. It's way better than w3w.

 

You might be overlooking an important characteristic of What3Words.  There are many alternate coordinate sysytems but What3Words is the only one I know that uses common English words to get cache coords.  This readily lends itself to creating puzzles where you determine the 3 words to be used.

Yes, you can create puzzles to get the random numbers and letters used in an Open Location Code string.  But there are many forms of fun word puzzles, too.

[+x7Kevin]

I just had to figure this out last night for a puzzle, I thought it was a glitch but this is good to know. At the very least I wish they didn't hide the coordinates on the actual W3W site in the settings like that. I feel like I'm pretty tech literate and it took me a minute to figure it out. 

[+baer2006]

15 hours ago, egroeg said:

But there are many forms of fun word puzzles, too.

If the solution to your puzzle is a word, I recommend to use the "keyword" option of the Certitude geochecker.

[+twoofnine]

On 9/14/2024 at 7:45 AM, fizzymagic said:

What3words recently enacted a change to their api such that conversion from w3w words to lat/lon coordinates is no longer free. 

I assume that conversion FROM Lat/Lon has also been removed, which is more than annoying! I have come across puzzles that require you to input Lat/Lon to get the three words. I don't think there is any getting around this now.

[+arisoft]

On 9/14/2024 at 9:45 AM, fizzymagic said:

You can still get the conversion done one at a time using the w3w website itself.  Put in the w3w address and then click on "share" and then "customize share settings."  Choose Degrees Decimal Minutes.  The site will force you create an account to save that setting.  I am unsure how geocaching.com will deal with this requirement; they seem to accept it for jigidi and a few other places. 

 

For me, the w3w site shows all coordinate formats without an account and no need to change properties either. I see that only API has changed, not the site.

 

Jigidi works also without an account. Situation seems the same for both of them.

[+Dasindog]

That's a bummer.  I've done a couple of these caches.  This is a fun way to define coordinates.  Sad to see the continued monetization of information on the internet - shame on them.  The toolbox folk should remove the dead link.  Hope the Royal Observatory Greenwich doesn't get wind of this.  Just imagine if they decided to charge people every time the Prime Meridian was used to locate a place on earth.

[+RCH65]

19 minutes ago, Dasindog said:

That's a bummer.  I've done a couple of these caches.  This is a fun way to define coordinates.  Sad to see the continued monetization of information on the internet - shame on them.  The toolbox folk should remove the dead link.  Hope the Royal Observatory Greenwich doesn't get wind of this.  Just imagine if they decided to charge people every time the Prime Meridian was used to locate a place on earth.

 

Well, that was foreseeable (sooner or later). At some point they have to earn money. They are hardly paid by taxes.

[+arisoft]

1 hour ago, Dasindog said:

That's a bummer.  I've done a couple of these caches.  This is a fun way to define coordinates.

 

It seems to be usable anyway. Just some 3rd party tools are missing, not the actual one.