Blitz

A place to talk about the Geocaching Australia dragonZone and other games
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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 10:46 am

budgietas wrote:
24 April 21 7:34 am
That’s why I suggested gca iPhone app and changes to moveable rules, one to attract new players and one to fix a problem I can see, both have been shot down.
The app idea was not shot down. The developer, me, is simply not going to build one. You are welcome to have one built (after all why do I have do it if you wont). You are welcome to use the API which is free and open to anyone and everyone. If you want to start a GoFundMe to get one built we will happily work with the 3rd party to assist them with the API. That's not being shot down, that's empowering you to get what you want done.

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 10:49 am

budgietas wrote:
23 April 21 2:21 pm
I understand that the developers have been adding new things. Like the stickers (Why?) and the Gotta Find them all. My Gotta find them all is stalled because my nearest Augmented Reality cache is 1500 kms away.... Not really a day trip
Why stickers? Why not? They give an instant visual indication of how a geocache may appreciate the geocache rather than having to trawl logs. Not everything will be enjoyed or wanted by anyone or everyone but if the developer wants to build something, why stop them?

Your best answer to an AR cache it get someone near you to hide one. Or take a weekend and go find the one you mention. At with GC, not all caches can be everywhere and everything to everyone. By encouraging others you can help to make the game better for everyone.

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 11:00 am

budgietas wrote:
24 April 21 7:34 am
The developers are keen to put games on, but that only keeps the ones that are here active. It doesn’t attracted new players. We need a game breaking event / change that we can use to attract people. The event that did that for me at first, was the second gnome race. Not saying we need to do that again, and I understand moveables have become a problem, with big clumps, people not rehiding, and other people taking them to locations to take them out of circulation all of which is not in the spirit but within the rules. But we need something different.
What do we need that is different? Start a new thread. Propose new ways of attracting people. Then do it. Don't rely on others to do the work you suggest because there is no one. You suggest it. You do it. If you want something developed, then of course, the developers will assess the viability, but if you want to attract new people, get others hiding, get others finding, get more caches, it's up to you to do.

budgietas wrote:
24 April 21 7:34 am
Maybe you need to do a survey of gca site users. Get some feedback. See what is working and what is not. See what ideas the people have. Ignore the fairness issue, as nothing is ever going to be fair, but go for personal targets, not competition and maybe fairness is not an issue then?
Who is you? I do two things here.
1: develop the site.
2: run the shop.
Surveys are not in my bailiwick. Nor is attracting new users. Nor to impose new rules.

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 11:04 am

This is a general comment but the sentiment has been for a long, long time "this is someone else's problem".

We need money to run the site (we hope "someone" will stump up the funds).
We need more geocaches (we hope "someone" will produce marketing materials or campaigns).
We want people to stop taking movable caches to events (we hope "someone" will step in a stop that happening).
We want the site easier to navigate (we hope "someone" will read our mind and make changes).
We want decisions made about the direction of the site site (we hope "someone" will do this for us).

In simple terms, there is no "someone". That "someone" is you or no-one. I don't own the site. I don't promote the site. I don't do surveys. I don't (any more) ask what you want done.

Shifting the accountability for an improvement or change on to "someone' else means it doesn't get done.

You can bitch and moan all you want about the "rubbish in the park" or "how much crap is in the creek", but if you don't get the solution in place, it's not likely to get done. Sure councils and parks are maintained, but we have no-one that does the maintenance.

At the end of the day, complaining about something you are not willing to get involved in to solve it like hitting your head against a brick wall. It hurts until you stop.

So development of code is mine. Running the shop is mine. Anything else if on you, your mates, you teams, you clan, you community to do.

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sirius Tas
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Re: Blitz

Post by sirius Tas » 26 April 21 3:10 pm

I've looked at the graph Swimming against the tide but its way off in accuracy. E.g. there it says I have 280 dz caches to find but I know it must be triple that as trigs alone make up 275.
My unfound query for GA shows 833 unfound....whereas SATT shows 700.

What I was referring to is
https://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statis ... Tas/finds/

where the total unfound for the state is shown which includes GC....so we must know what the GA total is.....so just wondering if it could be included next to the state total.

Re hides its totally unrealistic for cachers to keep hiding caches just to satisfy games when there are already a great deal of caches unfound albeit with a higher terrain rating.
Its pretty clear that the majority of cachers are only interested in long strings of drivebys like geoart etc.

I'm not interested in placing caches just for the sake of it. I'm only going to place caches that are of interest to me and most will be a higher terrain rating.
If cachers can't be bothered to find them....then too bad.

Re moveables...its obviously too hard to control so why not get rid of them.

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 4:12 pm

sirius Tas wrote:
26 April 21 3:10 pm
I've looked at the graph Swimming against the tide but its way off in accuracy. E.g. there it says I have 280 dz caches to find but I know it must be triple that as trigs alone make up 275.
My unfound query for GA shows 833 unfound....whereas SATT shows 700.

What I was referring to is
https://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statis ... Tas/finds/

where the total unfound for the state is shown which includes GC....so we must know what the GA total is.....so just wondering if it could be included next to the state total.
Thanks. Swimming Against the Tide has been amended. There was a bug with regards multiple finds on geocaches decreasing the counts whereas it should have only been 1 per cache.
https://geocaching.com.au/cacher/statis ... Tas/finds/ has now been updated to shpw GCA and dZ. These should now match the SATT graphs.

sirius Tas wrote:
26 April 21 3:10 pm
Re hides its totally unrealistic for cachers to keep hiding caches just to satisfy games when there are already a great deal of caches unfound albeit with a higher terrain rating.
Its pretty clear that the majority of cachers are only interested in long strings of drivebys like geoart etc.

I'm not interested in placing caches just for the sake of it. I'm only going to place caches that are of interest to me and most will be a higher terrain rating.
If cachers can't be bothered to find them....then too bad.
That's your choice. Anyone who decides there aren't enough geocaches around to suit their weekly activities AND games can bear that sentiment in mind.
sirius Tas wrote:
26 April 21 3:10 pm
Re moveables...its obviously too hard to control so why not get rid of them.
Let's also get rid of mystery caches because someone doesn't like them, or multi caches or AR caches which are too few and far between. Cache types exist for various reasons, enjoyed by some, loathed by others (you have no idea the hatred I get for listing TrigPoints). We are extremely unlikely to remove geocache type unless there a good reason and so far the reasons put forward haven't met that criteria. Keeping distinct / unique moveable's as contributors to games seems to work, whether they are found in the field or en masse delivered to someone's front door.

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 26 April 21 4:17 pm

We are a site of very few rules and the fewer rules we have the better as I'm certainly not going to rules lawyer or act as arbitrator in between two people arguing. There have been no volunteers to do that either, so if there is an expectation that "someone else" will do it then there is no "someone else".

In that vein, you may not may not have seen what happened at Opencaching (the Garmin site). They didn't appoint volunteer reviewers on geocache listings. The listings were shown to the community and the community "voted" for or against the listing. That turned out to be a huge clusterfsck.

Cliques ganged up and voted against another cliques cache listings. Individuals with large "review" scores would vote against a listing and due to the weighting behind their large number of reviews that would outweigh a hundred people saying "yes". Even GC suffers from this to some extent with some of their reviewers allowing one thing for another reviewer to disallow it. Their forum is also moderated by people who have grudges. It's rare for it to happen, but when it does you can see why it's not very welcoming.

At GCA if the system allows it, you can do it. Yes, you can be a tool like a recent member whose ability to list geocaches was suspended as they took it upon themselves to be more destructive that "free spirited". The more rules we impose the less people like them and the more arguments there are.

With so few rules if you can do it, and the community doesn't uproar, then do it.

budgietas
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Re: Blitz

Post by budgietas » 29 April 21 3:47 pm

caughtatwork wrote:
26 April 21 11:04 am
This is a general comment but the sentiment has been for a long, long time "this is someone else's problem".

We need money to run the site (we hope "someone" will stump up the funds).
We need more geocaches (we hope "someone" will produce marketing materials or campaigns).
We want people to stop taking movable caches to events (we hope "someone" will step in a stop that happening).
We want the site easier to navigate (we hope "someone" will read our mind and make changes).
We want decisions made about the direction of the site site (we hope "someone" will do this for us).

In simple terms, there is no "someone". That "someone" is you or no-one. I don't own the site. I don't promote the site. I don't do surveys. I don't (any more) ask what you want done.

Shifting the accountability for an improvement or change on to "someone' else means it doesn't get done.

At the end of the day, complaining about something you are not willing to get involved in to solve it like hitting your head against a brick wall. It hurts until you stop.

So development of code is mine. Running the shop is mine. Anything else if on you, your mates, you teams, you clan, you community to do.
Hi

I have held off replying to this thread for a few days as I was pretty disappointed in the posts and wanted not to reply in an angry frame of mind.

Firstly, I want to say I am not having a complaint about your work CaughtatWork. The amount of work you have put into the site is huge and you deserve to be congratulated on the work you have done - so thank you and well done CaughtatWork, it is appreciated!

I understand your position CaughtatWork, but since the disbanding of the senate it seems there is a distinct lack of community involvement on the GCA website and to be completely honest it feels slightly autocratic, I suppose you are the only person that we can take up the site with. There is no other person / people. Why the senate was disbanded I dont want to know, and dont really want to go into. That's the past. I want the site to prosper in the future, no point bringing up the past.

There is a group of people in Tasmania that are all willing to help and pitch in, but it's hard when we are distributed and even then we dont know what will be acceptable to the site and what will not be. You can see from the recent game that Tasmanian cachers had 7 out of the top 10 positions and positions 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19 & 20 - that's 15 out of the top 20. 2ystasssies - one of the highest finders (& hiders) was 21st as well- so 16 out of 21! So we are the most active GCA state in Australia at the moment.

My suggestion of a survey was to gather ideas and suggestions to make things better. This would be a starting point for actually doing something

Is it possible to promote the survey on the site so we get the most responses possible?
Would the developers like to sign off on the questions before it goes out? I think this would be a good idea.
If the community comes up with an idea that they would like implemented on the site, that is within reason is this possible to get it done? Say if they came up with a new cache type as an example.

For those people that are craving a smiley, we could open up a locationless, which requires a password which is given to you at the end of the survey. That could help? Maybe even 100 Dragonzone points for logging that locationless?

I am happy to write the survey, collate the responses and write up a report, and provide the raw data as support, if that is acceptable.

Budgie

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caughtatwork
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Re: Blitz

Post by caughtatwork » 29 April 21 5:58 pm

budgietas wrote:
29 April 21 3:47 pm
Hi

I have held off replying to this thread for a few days as I was pretty disappointed in the posts and wanted not to reply in an angry frame of mind.

<snip>

My suggestion of a survey was to gather ideas and suggestions to make things better. This would be a starting point for actually doing something

Is it possible to promote the survey on the site so we get the most responses possible?
Would the developers like to sign off on the questions before it goes out? I think this would be a good idea.
If the community comes up with an idea that they would like implemented on the site, that is within reason is this possible to get it done? Say if they came up with a new cache type as an example.

<snip>
Budgie
Yes we can promote the survey. We have a quick and easy way to highlight "competitions", so we can certainly use that code to have a survey banner in the header.

I'm not particularly interested in "signing off" on the questions. Engage with the community to ask what they would like the survey to look like. Anything I have to "sign off " on would be influenced by what I think and you don't want that, you want the community position, unfiltered by any dev involvement.

Implementation on the site if most likely a yes, unless we can't conceive of a way to do it, but certainly if you can define the criteria for a new cache type, then yes, it can be done. This is subject to time availability. I work full time, so anything I do for the site is spare time work.

For example someone has previoulsy asked to have the various cacher graphs filtered by a My Query. So you could set up a My Query which only selects (say) TrigPoints and then the various graphs would only use the output of that query to make the graph. The challenge is whether the same My Query needs to be public to be used by others. Whether we need to exclude those which sort by "home co-ordinates" as you may not want others to see your closest unfound, etc. Whether you can use only your query or you can apply the output to someone else. e.g. If I have a query on My Unfound and you use the query is that still caughtatwork's unfound or budgietas' unfound. Challenges like those make some requests, albeit interesting requests, not worth the development effort for what may be considered a small return.

But, in the same vein, if you don't ask, you won't get and you'll never know. So by all means, get a set of questions together, check with the community as to whether you're asking the right questions, get the survey done and check back with the results.

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