Changes regarding management of your cache status 30-Jun-08

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caughtatwork
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Changes regarding management of your cache status 30-Jun-08

Post by caughtatwork » 19 June 08 9:19 pm

From the evening of Monday 30-Jun-2008 an important change will be made with regard to the way that you will manage the status of your cache at Geocaching Australia.

Currently the status of your cache (Draft, Available, Unavailable, Future, Archived) is set and changed by editing your cache page and setting the applicable status.

From the announced date, changing the status of your cache will all be accomplished using new log types.

There will be 6 new log types available from the evening on 30-Jun-2008. Published, Retracted, Disabled, Enabled, Archived and Unarchived.

From the announcement date, when you create a new cache and save your listing it will automatically be saved with a status of Draft. This means that you can continue to edit your cache description, etc. without the cache being made available to the general community. When you are happy with your cache listing, you make your final save. You then go back to the cache listing and proceed to the "log this cache" section (found on the right hand side navigation bar).

As a cache owner, you will see the 6 new log types listed.

Published
To release your cache to the general community, use the Publish log type.
Geocaching Australia has a unique function which enables you to list a cache and have it automatically made available to the community at a given future point in time. e.g. Say you are holding an event on the weekend and that today is Wednesday. If you place the date of Saturday as the "hidden" date on your cache and use the Publish log type, the cache will be marked in the database to only become available at 00:00:01 on that future date. i.e. You don't have to wait up until Saturday morning to publish the cache. The system will do that automatically for you. If the "hidden" date is today or earlier, when you use the Publish log, it will become available immediately.

Unpublished
If you find that you want to "unpublish" your cache, use the Retract log type.
This will place the cache back into Draft mode and will not be available for anyone to see. Please note that if you have "found" logs on your cache listing, they will NO LONGER appear in the finders list of caches found. If you subsequently Publish the cache again, these found logs will automatically reappear. Use the Retract log judiciously. It is intended for you to Retract the listing very shortly after you Published it in the event that you discover a disastrous mistake in your listing.

Disabled
If you want to mark your cache as "temporarily unavailable" use the Disabled log type.
This ensures that people aren't chasing down caches that may be off line for maintenance reasons.

Enabled
If you want to mark your caches as available after being "temporary unavailable" use the Enabled log type.
This puts the listing back into the system available and ready for finding again.

Archived
If you want to archive your cache listing, use the Archive log type.
Pretty simple use really. Use this if your cache is dead and you aren't going to replace it.

Unarchived
Sometimes you archive a cache and then it gets found again (haven't well all done maintenance and failed to find our own cache, but someone else does?). You can use the Unarchived log to reactivate your cache listing back from the dead.

The log types are the same ones that external programs such as GSAK are already prepared to handle, so GPX files created from Geocaching Australia will continue to work with your external programs.

You are free to edit the log type or delete the log entirely. This will NOT undo the change to the cache status.

e.g. If you submit an Archive log type and then edit the log and change to it a Disabled or delete the Archived log, the cache will remain archived. As the order of logs is important in setting the status of the cache, we can never be certain that you are editing or changing the latest log so we leave the cache status as is and ask you to submit a new log type to make the appropriate change. You will be provided with a warning should you change a log type or delete a log which had a action associated with it.

The new logs will facilitate better tracking and management of the status of your cache, not only within the database at Geocaching Australia, but also for users of external programs such as GSAK. The move to using logs to manage the status of your cache also better facilitates the workflow though the GCA website by having all actions not related to the content of your cache listing in the same manner. Finally it provides an amount of traceability for people who look back into the history of any given cache in that they can see when it was set to disabled, renabled, archived, etc.

We hope you understand the change and we welcome any feedback of the changes now or when they are released.

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