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mikemtn

By mikemtn
in General geocaching topics

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briansnat

+briansnat

Posted
Posted

I just checked it out. It's an awesome site. I was so blown away by its ease of use, complete database and format that I registered right away.Bye-bye GC.COM and all your restrictive rules!

 

Hey, what's all that crap about terms of service? Waaaait a minute. What are the owners, a bunch of Nazis?

 

"You can't make a man by standing a sheep on his hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position, you can make a crowd of men" - Max Beerbohm

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Planet

+Planet

Posted
Posted

I looked at it briefly, really briefly. It looks like the new site for the I'm packing my toys and going somehwere else former gc.commers to gather. Good luck and have fun, watch that door! I knew it was only a matter of time with the rash of geocaching publicity lately before someone else would try to cache in on it. I actually thought maybe Magellan was trying to start their own caching site with that contest they botche...I mean had. As for me, I like it here. No need to change.

 

I'm loyal to the frog! big_smile.gif

 

Planet

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briansnat

+briansnat

Posted
Posted

Well there is no site and I doubt there ever will be one. At this point its just a message board and few people with big ideas and no money. If there were a need for 3 geocaching websites, there would be. When I started this sport, there were 3. One has already bit the dust and the other is hardly worth visiting.

 

"You can't make a man by standing a sheep on his hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position, you can make a crowd of men" - Max Beerbohm

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Pantalaimon

Pantalaimon

Posted
Posted

I was wondering what your post meant. For those who still are lost with regards to this thread, replace the "geo" in geocaching.com with "open."

 

Think my post will be re-routed, deleted, or edited? (This is a multiple choice question, not a yes or no question.)

 

Pan

 

Here there be tigers. - My response when asked by a fellow Geocacher to describe the attitude of the forums.

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southdeltan

+southdeltan

Posted
Posted

Geocaching.com practically has a monopoly when it comes to listing. I'm not sure how many caches are listed at the older alternative site (The one with the N) but I'd guestimate that if you removed duplicate listings gc.com probably has over 95% of caches listed here.

 

If you read the first page of the 'new' alternative site (the one with the O) you'll see that they are still in the PLANNING stages. I beleive they are aiming for an open-source listing system - so anybody who want's to list can use their data freely and easily. They also said that cache-listing would come after other features were implemented. It may be a while for it to get off of it's feet.

 

It may not amount to anything - but right now they are planning stuff.

 

I don't see any site surpassing gc.com unless they make a critical business mistake (IE, Apple computer, Coca-cola [remember 'New coke'?]).

 

The existance of this site is not surprising. I keep seeing the 'If you don't like it, leave' attitude on these forums. Of course there was always the N site... but it's layout is terrible and there are a lot of problems there (including the fact that some of the things ppl don't like about gc.com are the same over there)

 

I'm not planning on going anywhere, but maybe some competition will help geocaching.com add more innovations.

 

sd

 

"Man can counterfeit everything except silence". - William Faulkner

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woodsters

+woodsters

Posted
Posted

To me it appears they are trying to incorporate a database sharing system. They also say non-profit, or at least is what I gather from it. But my question is why do something like that, that is non profit. I'm sure Jeremy and crew would say it's a full time job as it is.

 

Geocaching.com is better of the choices as far as funtionality, database and etc. That's why they have done well. I enocurage anyone who think they run "neck in neck" with them. It's what free enterprise is all about. It only makes things better for us. The consumer normally gets more that way.

 

It wil lbe hard for someone to come in as strong as Geocaching.com is right now, unless they have an Uncle Bill Gates.

 

Brian

 

As long as you're going to think anyway, think big. -Donald Trump

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Kealia

+Kealia

Posted
Posted

What the heck, I'll chime in too. Looked at both OTHER sites and have no intentions of leaving. (Just to be clear, I wasn't going to leave if they had great sites, plans, etc.).

Just curious as to what's going on.

 

If people excercise their right to leave, so be it. I choose to stay because I'm happy here and will continue to supoprt the site through my Premium membership and merchandise. In fact, I'm waiting for my delivery today...... icon_biggrin.gif

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Stunod

+Stunod

Posted
Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Woodsters Outdoors:

They also say non-profit, or at least is what I gather from it. But my question is why do something like that, that is non profit. I'm sure Jeremy and crew would say it's a full time job as it is.

 

Non-profit doesn't mean that there are no paid employees.

 

stunod_sig.gif

"Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

Eamus Catuli AC145895

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southdeltan

+southdeltan

Posted
Posted

Before you read anymore - let me preface this by saying I'm not for or against any site. I'm just offering opinions on why I think this has occured. A few people say they don't understand why there's a need for other sites, etc. (I don't necessarily mean Woodsters, I'm just responding to his message).

 

quote:
Originally posted by Woodsters Outdoors:

To me it appears they are trying to incorporate a database sharing system. They also say non-profit, or at least is what I gather from it. But my question is why do something like that, that is non profit. I'm sure Jeremy and crew would say it's a full time job as it is.

 

There are a lot of reasons they're doing this. Geocaching is not about money, but it COULD be argued that geocaching.com is about money. I know that most people realize it takes money to run this website but lots of different things have occured over the few years this website has been in place to displease a lot of people.

There are lots of reasons people are suspicious about the intentions of the website - but that's to be expected with anything, lots of people are naturaly suspicious.

 

Open source will allow anybody who wants to add features or is displeased with the system to easily make changes and draw data from a pre-existing pool. It would be illegal for any new site to 'mine' data from gc.com - but not from a website that welcomes the practice.

 

You can think of it as Microsoft vs Linux.

 

quote:

It wil lbe hard for someone to come in as strong as Geocaching.com is right now, unless they have an Uncle Bill Gates.

 

Geocaching.com started as a small site with a few dozen caches, if I recall. Over time features were added, sometimes in response to competitors and/or related websites (The geocache map pages, for example). It would be foolish to try to be everything a developed company is from the beginning. Developing slowly is the way to go.

 

sd

 

"Man can counterfeit everything except silence". - William Faulkner

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ju66l3r

ju66l3r

Posted
Posted

Something to note about the differences and what it means to geocaching (the game, not the site):

 

geocaching.com is free (as in beer), but is not free (as in speech). There are restrictions on what can be said in the forums (BEYOND civility controls, I mean), for example. But the data available at geocaching.com is not available to others who might want to provide a new/different interface. Of course, that provides Groundspeak with the assurance that any attention the sport gets will be attention for them as well.

 

Instead, what open-sourcing (and I'm not even talking about Free Software) provides is a template for everyone to work from. If you have the talent or desire to create something wholy new or work towards a goal with others, then you can develop your own interface and use it. Often, a very strong version will be developed and most people will use that, but others will have options as well. Want a leaderboard? You can develop it. Want a compass-directional search, someone might code it for you and themselves...and so on.

 

geocaching.com could easily survive in an open-source environment. They have a huge user-base, others would code complimentary tools for the site, and they themselves would probably benefit from the abilities of others to enhance features that the entire user-base would want deep-rooted into the system. They could still charge for certain features and still sell all sorts of go-withs. That isn't disallowed by open-source (read about RedHat as a Linux provider).

 

It all depends on the tack you choose to take and I don't admonish Groundspeak for their chosen path, but there have been times where I am discouraged by their decisions. Hopefully the open-caching solution will take off well and I'm very certain that we'll ALL be the better for it, whether we login here or elsewhere.

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SamLowrey

+SamLowrey

Posted
Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Stunod:

 

Non-profit doesn't mean that there are no paid employees.

 

I remember seeing something where salaries for those at non-profits are way higher than the traditional company. I often wondered if, to qualify as a "non-profit" an organization could not merely split up its "profits" among its employees at the end of the year.

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woodsters

+woodsters

Posted
Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Stunod:

quote:
Originally posted by Woodsters Outdoors:

They also say non-profit, or at least is what I gather from it. But my question is why do something like that, that is non profit. I'm sure Jeremy and crew would say it's a full time job as it is.

 

Non-profit doesn't mean that there are no paid employees.

 

http://208.55.63.109/images/stunod_sig.gif

_"Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson_

__Eamus Catuli AC145895__

 

hmm well ok...then my site is non-profit then...my salary is $1,000,000. Hopefully my site will make enough to pay my salary...lol

 

Brian

 

As long as you're going to think anyway, think big. -Donald Trump

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SamLowrey

+SamLowrey

Posted
Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Snoogans:

I'm registered too, but I'm not going anywhere. I will support geocaching in what ever form it takes.

 

I agree with locking a couple of threads that were locked over there. Is Boblog a doof or what? The egg thing???PaaaLease... icon_rolleyes.gif

 

Snicon_razz.gificon_razz.gifgans

http://www.texasgeocaching.com Sacred cows make the best hamburger....Mark Twain.

 

 

Maybe he is the eggman.

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Swagger

Swagger

Posted
Posted

Most of what I'm seeing here is talk about patronizing either one site or "the other". Some are talking in terms of loyalty, some in terms of being dis/pleased with gc.com and/or their policies and practices, etc.

 

Whatever your position, do you really feel that your caching persona can only "live" on one site? If one site has features A,B and C, and another has B,C and D, and you're interested in using features A and D, why not use both sites?

 

Personally, I welcome the potential competition. Not just for new features, but it'll give Groundspeak a reason to start listening to their customers and sticking to their own self-imposed deadlines (revival of locationless, maps, etc).

 

I believe that GC.com is doing a lot of things right. The aesthetic quality of the site is top notch (as opposed to the "N" site), and there's some pretty good functionality available. I don't believe it's complete, however, and TPTB aren't willing to implement some of the things that could help to complete it (IMHO). Individually, those of us that weren't completely content here and wanted/were willing to do something about it couldn't. Collectively, we can.

 

quote:
Well there is no site and I doubt there ever will be one. At this point its just a message board and few people with big ideas and no money.

As for the "big ideas and no money," here's a list of some other "big ideas" that came into existance with "no money":

 

SpamAssassin (anti-spam software)

MailScanner (e-mail protection/filtering software)

ClamAV (open-source antivirus that rivals the commercial products)

PHP (one of the most popular scripting languages on the 'net)

OpenSSL (for making websites secure)

and of course, Linux.

 

There's hundreds, if not thousands more worth mentioning, but these were the first that came to mind.

 

I guarantee that your life has been affected by at least half of these products - these forums run on a linux server running Apache (open source web server), PHP, perl (another open source scripting language) and OpenSSL.

 

My point is that big ideas with no money doesn't necessarily mean failure. One of the things that make open source software so great is that anyone can contribute to it, so not only do you have the workload distributed across a larger base of developers, but you don't have to pay those developers (they donate their spare time) and you get the creativity of all those people to come up with otherwise unimplemented features.

 

quote:
If there were a need for 3 geocaching websites, there would be.

quote:
Well, I checked it out and they do have a forum and a.....uh....well, they have a really nice forum. I kinda like where I'm at.

Where are new sites supposed come from? Are they supposed to spring into existance all of the sudden, with a complete featureset and a database full of caches? At least try to keep yourself grounded in reality... icon_rolleyes.gif

 

quote:
Isn't the geocaching.com site really the center of the game?

 

Seems there's plenty of room for more messageboards, but you still need to come to geocaching.com to get the info on the caches.

That's today. The other site is looking at tomorrow.

 

quote:
I enocurage anyone who think they run "neck in neck" with them. It's what free enterprise is all about. It only makes things better for us. The consumer normally gets more that way.

Woodsters gets it.

 

quote:
It wil lbe hard for someone to come in as strong as Geocaching.com is right now, unless they have an Uncle Bill Gates.

It's not about the money - it's about the caches. GC.com has the cache listings right now and that's their ace in the hole. Their site, while impressive, doesn't have any functionality that couldn't be reproduced.

 

I'll close by saying that I like the frog and will continue my premium membership. Heck, I'm a rolling advertisement for them in my Jeep with the GC.com license plate frame and the hat I usually wear. I'm just glad that there's a concerted effort to provide an organized and well thought out alternative with some features that have been requested and rejected on GC.com.

 

--

Pehmva!

 

Random quote:

sigimage.php

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Scoobie10

+Scoobie10

Posted
Posted

quote:
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I checked it out and they do have a forum and a.....uh....well, they have a really nice forum. I kinda like where I'm at.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Where are new sites supposed come from? Are they supposed to spring into existance all of the sudden, with a complete featureset and a database full of caches? At least try to keep yourself grounded in reality...

 

 

Cruzin',

I would first like to state that I agree with you on almost everything you said however,I am very grounded in reality. My post was nothing more than a little jab in the ribs to people who rushed out and tossed up a "website in progress" for the sake of having a "website in progress". 99.99% of the time, if you want to have a site that preforms a specific function like finding caches, the designers will wait until their site can at least preform THAT one function prior to going live. This is clearly someone who is not happy with gc.com and is trying another direction. I say, more power to them! Maybe they will offer the options I would like to see and if gc.com isn't offering those options at that time then I will use another site in conjunction. My point is this; It's silly to register a name and put up a site that doesn't do anything but promise that there will be something there in the future. At it's core, it doesn't even preform the one function it's proclaiming it's there for. They should have waited until the site actually DID something. There are plenty of forums out there for them to discuss how to do it.

 

Like I said, I'm very grounded. I was just poking a little fun.

 

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Scoobie

 

A day without sunshine is like.....NIGHT!

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ju66l3r

ju66l3r

Posted
Posted

quote:
99.99% of the time, if you want to have a site that preforms a specific function like finding caches, the designers will wait until their site can at least preform THAT one function prior to going live. My point is this; It's silly to register a name and put up a site that doesn't do anything but promise that there will be something there in the future. At it's core, it doesn't even preform the one function it's proclaiming it's there for. They should have waited until the site actually DID something. There are plenty of forums out there for them to discuss how to do it.

 

Actually, the creation of an open source project is usually the acquisition of an already available software package and the start of a SourceForge page to begin gathering the people interested in modifying the preexisting software and distributing the code.

 

There isn't really an available software package (since no one can directly hook into the geocaching.com dataset)...so this is a webpage to begin gathering the people interested and discussing what can be done to work on some code.

 

Unlike a company or organization's webpage, where you won't go live until it's v1.0, an open source project goes live immeadiately and v1.0 comes about when enough work is done. At its core, it actually is providing the functions it was setup to do. The next step will be to start the pages that those who are not interested in helping can view to figure out how long it will be before there's a finalized product (i.e. a workflow page).

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Scoobie10

+Scoobie10

Posted
Posted

Since I know nothing about programming and the creation of an open open source project I'll just have to assume that you are correct. And, since it sounds like you know quite a bit about this topic, that will be easy to do. My only thinking here it that the new site didn't seem to have any idea how it was going to function and meet it's goals at all when it first went online which is what my entire point was about.

 

If I'm way off base here, my apologies.

 

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Scoobie

 

A day without sunshine is like.....NIGHT!

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sept1c_tank

+sept1c_tank

Posted
Posted

I have no intentions of abandoning Groundspeak. This site is (maybe not perfect) the only site that offers a complete, worldwide geocaching experience.

 

I am registered at the new place. It should be very informative (if not entertaining) to watch it develop.

 

If you think geocaching.com is experiencing growing pains, watch the other site. What the "open" site will experience in future weeks will come at a great price. Kinda like forming a new democratic society. Everyone will want to have a say as to what the final product should look like.

 

I wish the "open" site success in what ever they are trying to accomplish. But I plan to hang around here and call this my site. <Jeremy cringes> icon_wink.gif

 

ingeo-button2.gifbad_boy_a.gifpuke.gif

 

==============="If it feels good...do it"================

 

**(the other 9 out of 10 voices in my head say: "Don't do it.")**

 

.

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ju66l3r

ju66l3r

Posted
Posted

quote:
Originally posted by sept1c_tank:

I have no intentions of abandoning Groundspeak.

Neither do I.
quote:
This site is (maybe not perfect) the _only site_ that offers a complete, worldwide geocaching experience.

 

Currently...

 

quote:

If you think geocaching.com is experiencing growing pains, watch the other site. What the "open" site will experience in future weeks will come at a great price. Kinda like forming a new democratic society. Everyone will want to have a say as to what the final product should look like.

 

The interesting thing about Open Source software is that everyone does have a say in what the final product(s) will look like. Don't like the way something is headed? Build a new branch! Not good enough to actually code it yourself? Convince someone who can that it's worth their time! (not hard to do at all, trust me, programmers are game for just about any challenge you try to throw at them) The only "leader" the site will need is a sort of maintenance worker to be sure that the software used to track branches and project heads is kept up correctly by the system.

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