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My current thinking is that there is not one “all-purpose” GPS out there that is best for everything… so I have quite a few GPS units. (Maybe I have this mindset as an excuse to buy more electronic toys? )
For in vehicle navigation: Want a large color screen, detailed maps with services, autorouting, and turn prompts. If it can talk to you and tell you what to do and where to go, all the better. Something like a Garmin StreetPilot or Quest would be ideal.
For geocaching: Want something small, lightweight, waterproof, and able to take abuse. Want it to be hard to lose (a bright color or strapped to your wrist), and if does get lost or destroyed, you won’t shed any tears. Also want it to be able to hold a lock under tree cover. Maps are usually not needed, and once you aren’t using maps a color screen isn’t important. I use a Foretrex 101 (similar features to a Geko), and possibly carry Garmin 12 and/or 60c units as back up for really heavy tree cover.
Bottom line: Your Geko is probably more than adequate for geocaching once you are parked, but upgrading to something with autorouting maps to get you to the caches when driving would definitely be worth it.
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Originally posted by Team Deejay:
Does anyone have a record of all the caches nominated for COTM that have did not win?
Yes, we actually do keep information on all the caches that were nominated, as well as the number of votes for each cache, who voted, their comments, etc. We have this information stretching back to the start of the “new” COTM system which was put in place in February 2003.
Maybe we need a to use this data to put together a list of “honorable mentions”… caches that have been nominated but have not yet won. Maybe to keep the list managable we should only list those caches nominated in the past 12 months?
I really like Marc’s idea of allowing people a simple “thumbs up” vote when they find a cache that they like.
However, I always envisioned taking it a step farther… to allow people to create “top ten” or “favorites” lists of various flavors. We could have all kinds of different list types: “overall favorite WI cache”, “most challenging multicache”, “best cache in NW Wisconsin”, etc. Each member could add their own selections to as many or as few of these lists as possible. There would probably have to be a limit on the number of selections one could add to a particular list to keep the results from being diluted (you wouldn’t want to allow someone to add every cache they find to the best overall cache list)…
An overall ranking for a cache could be developed based on the number of top ten/favorites lists it appears in.
What I’m hearing is:
– Should NOT have a rating system
– Should allow people to somehow select or enumerate a small number of caches they like or that they feel are special in some way
– Need to have a way to “even the playing field” so that good caches all areas of the state get recognized
– Need to have different categories to allow caches unique in certain ways to be recognized
– Need to be able to aggregate the selections of all members to produce a master list or listsPlease keep the ideas coming!
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Originally posted by Team Deejay:
Hate to be a wet blanket on this, but I checked out this site and they are approximately 3 months behind, probably indicating they stopped downloading data in November.
Thanks for pointing out that this site is busted… well that removes that particular option from the table. Anyone happen to know if an alternative to this site has popped up in the past couple months? Maybe the WGA should create something and sell stats to other clubs as a fundraiser!?
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Originally posted by Team Deejay:
That said, the features on this site are really first rate. If we decide to create our own site, we could do a lot worse than to emulate their features.
Unfortunately some of these features are probably what got it shut down or blocked by geocaching.com. To get more information than Brew provides, you really have to look beyond the user profile pages and at the list of finds and hides for a user and then at the cache pages themselves. This “spidering” process can really cause a lot of requests to be generated and chew up a lot of bandwidth, so it is not surprising they were noticed and blocked.
If geocaching.com would just change the “My Finds” pocket query feature to allow it to be scheduled and emailed to a different address we’d be able to provide these detailed stats. Members would set up their My Finds pocket query to be sent to say [email protected], and each time a query arrived it would be parsed and used to update the stats database. We could provide the option for people to manually upload the My Finds GPX file, but it would not be as useful…
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 02-28-2006).]
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Originally posted by marc_54140:
I do not have the technical know-how to create such a site.
As I told Marc on Saturday, I do have the technical ability to take this on but…
I think the Board should solicit input from members and then answer the following questions:
1. Should the WGA put cacher statistics on the WGA site? Reasons not to include a) it could appear the organization is promoting/glorifying the numbers game b) it could make Groundspeak mad and it is technically in violation of their Terms of Use.
(Note that collecting cacher statistics is different than the recent logs in that you must be logged in as a user in order to see the user profile pages. So this information is not wholly public. Whose account should we use when collecting this information?)
2. If yes to #1, do we contact Groundspeak to try to get official approval to do this, or do we try to fly it under the radar? I would think that eventually they will catch on to what we are doing… plus if we don’t have written permission we’d be violating another of the Terms of Use:
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You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site for any purpose without our express written permission.
3. If yes to #1, is this going to be an opt in or opt out system? If it is an opt in system and many people decide not to display their statistics in the list, then the ranking could become irrelevant. However just grabbing a cacher’s data/information without their permission and displaying it seems to violate even more conditions of the Terms of Use. Also, do we allow non-members (out of state cachers who have finds in Wisconsin) to be listed?
Note that if we are certain House of Brew is down for the count, I’d be willing to work on a replacement whether it appears on the WGA site or not. (Of course, this would only be after I complete the work on the new WGA site I’ve already signed up for…)
The other option is to pay to have our statistics collected by the cachestats.made.nu site. So far, this site plus the Grand High Pobah site, other state statistics sites, have not been shut down by geocaching.com. But if you read the this notice on cachestats.made.nu, you’ll see that several restrictions have been placed on their site… basically limiting how fast they can request new data from geocaching.com and preventing “spidering” operations. Plus, it appears that their system is completely busted for new members (which all of us would be) according to this note:
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New members are most affected by this change as the system no longer has any mechanism to locate logs that were entered prior to the member being included in the stats system.
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 02-27-2006).]
Doh! I missed it in the General forum too. The wzbt thread I mentioned was the previous version of the stats list which was retired/removed when Mark put his together.
I believe (but I’d have to check the server logs to verify this) that it was deleted by wzbt03 just before we restricted deletions. Because he started the topic, it had the ability to remove it (and all the replies posted).
A search shows it was in the General forum with the title “WZBT03’s State & Country Stats (7/05)”… I think this is right.
I will see if there is any way of recovering it, but based on past experience usually we cannot. If we would have caught it right away, we could have restored it from a backup. Assuming it cannot be recovered, someone could start another topic and try to reconstruct the list.
On a related note, in the future the WGA website will allow you to enter these statistics in a database. So please continue to keep track of those states and counties!
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Originally posted by greyhounder:
Just out of curiousity — how many active WGA members voted in this election?
100 active members cast 347 votes in the election.
Congratulations to the new Board members. It was definitely a close race, and I think all of the candidates were in the “final four” at one time or another. Watching it unfold had me on the edge of my seat… there was more drama and more plot twists than your typical soap opera.
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Originally posted by HulaGirl87:
I renewed my membership on February 1st. Today I tried to vote and now my membership is missing from the list. What is going on?
For some reason your membership renewal failed. I have manually renewed your membership so you should now be able to vote in the BOD election.
If anyone else experiences a problem renewing their membership, please post it here or contact me directly.
02/10/2006 at 11:19 pm in reply to: Cast Your Votes In The 2006 Board of Directors Election #1738780quote:
Originally posted by kbraband:
A status report on the election…
So far, 68 members have voted for their choices to fill the 4 board positions up for election. If you’re a WGA member and you haven’t yet voted, there’s still time. You have until midnight Feb. 12.
Bump. You have until the end of this weekend to get your votes in. So far, 88 members have voted, an increase of ~10 members over last year.
We will double check all the votes and announce the new Board members on Monday, Feb. 13.
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Originally posted by Cathunter:
A large portion of teams in the member list signed in once in past years never to return, yet are still listed there. As cool as it might be to think that we have “1000” members, it would be a false statement.
Hopefully in the future the member list will coincide with each member enrolling or renewing their membership. If they do not renew, they should be removed from the rolls.
We are only at 440 members when the expired members are removed… so we’ve still got a ways to go before we hit the 1000 member milestone.
Actually the membership list was never supposed to list the expired members. However the query used to generate the list was missing one important filter criteria (not sure if this was my doing or Alan’s), and this caused the expired members to also appear.
It is all fixed now, so the membership list displays an accurate count and only lists active members.
Great story… they did a good job of accurately explaining both the hiding and placing aspects. I’ve already got questions about the story from several folks at work today, so non-cachers seem to have found it interesting.
Let’s see how many new folks get into the sport based on the story. Unfortunately I think they only mentioned the geocaching.com website address once, so if you weren’t really paying attention (and I guess can’t/don’t know how to use a search engine) it may not be clear where to go to find the cache listings.
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Originally posted by Cheesehead Dave:
Yeah, who was that guy?
I think he starred in that movie “50 First Dates”. The plot is something like this: guy takes girl geocaching on first date, guy doesn’t get a second date (I wonder why?), repeat 49 more times with a different girl. Of course, once in great while it works but that is not shown.
In any case, it added nothing to the news story and the guy looked like a stalker.
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Originally posted by Cache_boppin_BunnyFuFu:
Any chance of rigging up Spell check?? LOL Ok, that’s pushing it I guess. Hey.. a bad speller HAS to ask!!
There are a couple spell check add-ons for phpBB (the forum software that we are switching to). The best one is this SpellingCow thing, that unfortunately requires a $25 per year payment to get rid of the ads it normally displays, or $500 if we want to actually run the spell check code on our server.
Maybe we should go back and find all the misspellings in the forums and charge the offenders a nickel or quarter for each error? We’d probably raise the money we need with lots to spare…
I’ll play around with the various options available for the forums, but personally I’m going to stick with creating my posts in a word processor with a real spell checker and grammar checker.
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Originally posted by Cheesehead Dave:
I’ve been updating my COTM Bookmark List and I noticed there was no COTM in April of 2003. Was there no voting that month for some reason or has it been accidentally excluded from the COTM page?
A little WGA website history lesson. In late April 2003, a hard drive crash followed by a hacker intrusion forced the WGA website to be down for a couple days as Alan and I worked to rebuild the server. Unfortunately, the hard drive in another machine that contained the only backup of the WGA site also died before we could copy it back to the rebuilt server, meaning we had no recent backup (you should always have more than 1 backup!).
We lost 2 to 3 weeks worth of data, including COTM votes. Because of this data loss, we decided to not award a COTM for April 2003.
Currently, we do a daily backup of the data on the WGA site to another server, and then this other server gets backed up to tape daily… so we should never lose more than 24 hours worth of data as long as one of the two backups survives.
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