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Ok, to the best of my meager ability, I’ve determined that the “Favorites” on GC.com are not included in GPX files (so can’t be leveraged in GSAK) and are not searchable in PQs.
I’m thinking it would be cool to look for caches in any given area that have received “favorite” points and ignore the ones that have not – this may help reduce the time and energy wasted on the uninteresting caches to get the most out of the interesting ones. I know it’s not fool proof but it would be a fair indicator.
I’m sure other’s have thought of this and have made an effort to collect that data to leverage in GSAK or something – can anyone offer any advice?
Thanks 🙂
PS – in the great and ever lasting debate about interesting vs uninteresting caches, it seems that a reward system might be a good motivator. You know how ebay users have that colored star by their name to indicate the range of transactions they’ve participated in? On GC.com, along with the number of finds in parenthesis, it would be cool to see a star, colored based on ranges of their average “favorite” rating they’ve been awarded on their hidden caches. Sure – it could become a popularity contest, but the better COs should be popular.
In the age of “guard rail, place a cache”, when I travel to an area I plug the area into my search and go after those listed as favorites.
I’ve only found a few hundred but I have now decided to be more selective in what I search for.
Do a search by area (limit the radius) and then click on the Favorites column to sort by number of votes.
Favorites will be added to the GPX files when GS gets around to it. I can almost guarantee that the code is already written for GSAK and it will be released the next day.
Ohhhh – rockin’ cool! Thanks, Brian! I don’t typically use that page when searching but I see what you mean. It’s SOMETHING anyway 🙂 Thanks for the tip!
PS, I like your new avatar 🙂
In this case, I would recommend you utilize the Feedback feature on gc.com to add votes to the topic suggesting adding favorites to the GPX format. The more votes it gets, the more likely it will get moved to the top of the list.
Also interestingly, if you are using an Android to cache and use the gc.com hated program C:Geo, Favorites are listed prominently in the search column. I just think it is interesting that C:Geo was able to implement this quicker than gc.com.
Back to the original question, how to seek out more “favorited” caches while traveling? Here is what I do:
I use the method that TBC mentioned to identify caches with a lot of favorite votes, make a bookmark list of the ones that look interesting, and load these and only these on to my car gps. (I use a Nuvi.) Then I use the Nuvi to route me from interesting cache to interesting cache.
But I also load all of the unfound caches in the area of travel into my handheld gps, either with a regular PQ or with a route PQ, so that I can stop and do other “non favorite” caches that I may be in the area of. In that way, I give preference to looking for favorited caches, and get a pretty good percentage of interesting hides, but also can stop and pick up anything along the way, as time and interest allows.
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Cool – thanks for the feedback, guys! 🙂
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