What's new on Geocaching Australia

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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whitewebbs
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by whitewebbs » 31 August 18 4:33 pm

Thanks I have been noticing a few changes which look good. I seem to have lost the Tasmanian flag at the top of the page next to the map of Australia which used to take me straight to Tasmanian info eg who has hidden, found, ftf to find still, top found caches for the month and year, GC and GCA.

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caughtatwork
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by caughtatwork » 31 August 18 4:42 pm

Do you mean on the site when viewed in a browser or mobile?

It has been suppressed on the mobile version as there is no room in the header. It will come back when I work out how to fit the state flag, the games and the shop icons all into a much narrower space.

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whitewebbs
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by whitewebbs » 31 August 18 4:59 pm

caughtatwork wrote:Do you mean on the site when viewed in a browser or mobile?

It has been suppressed on the mobile version as there is no room in the header. It will come back when I work out how to fit the state flag, the games and the shop icons all into a much narrower space.
Yes it was on the mobile.

dragonZone Guardian
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by dragonZone Guardian » 09 September 18 1:38 am

Straight from the dragonZone forge are 7 new Trophies and 8 new Missions for dragonZoner players to keep an eye out for. The dragons haven’t released any new Missions for a while, but they think everyone will enjoy the challenges these new ones present.

However, first things first, the new trophies. These trophies are for finding and hiding our latest cache type, The Augmented Reality Cache.

Find an ‘Auggie’ and you’ll pick a bronze trophy
Find 10 x ‘Auggie’ and a Silver trophy worth 50 points will be your reward.
A cool 100 points will be yours after you’ve found your 100th.
And a rather neat Blaze trophy will be added to your balance after finding 1000 ‘Auggie’ caches.

On the hiding side, once you’ve hidden your first Augmented Reality cache, a Silver trophy and 50 points will come your way. Hiding 10 and a Gold trophy will be yours, and once you’ve hidden 100, another Blaze trophy and 1000 points will be added to your points balance.

Now, the Missions that have been released. These are known as ‘State Capitalist’ and there is one for each State Capital city. E.g. Brisbane Capitalist, Perth Capitalist etc.

To be awarded these Missions, your (long term) goal is to find a valid dragonZone cache (excluding Moveables) in every dragonZone within a 50klm radius of the GPO of the capital city.

As each location is unique, each capital city will have a different number of dragonZones that fall within that 50klm radius. E.g. Melbourne City 39 dragonZones with the 50klm radius, Perth has 36 while Canberra only has 15. Each of the dragonZones will be worth 100 points, however, to be awarded the Mission, you MUST find all the valid dragonZones with the 50klm radius.

So, when you find all the dragonZones with the 50klm radius of the Melbourne GPO, you’ll receive 3900 points. When you have found all the dragonZones within the 50klm radius of the Perth GPO, you’ll receive 3600 points. Meanwhile in Canberra, there will be 1500 points on offer for a cache find in each of the ACT dragonZones that lie within with the 50klm radius of their GPO. (So, no need to go over the border to reach the 50klm - it’s just every dragonZone within the ACT boundary).

To see how many dragonZones you may still need to conquer to earn this mission, check your dragonZone My Trophies page and look for you relevant ‘Capitalist’ Mission.

You can also check out the maps so you can visualise your progress in the Capitalist. i.e. https://geocaching.com.au/cacher/xxx/gr ... _challenge (where xxx is YOUR cacher name). You can also get there by clicking on your name of the top right hand side of the screen when you're logged in, then select graphs, then dragonZone Area Challenge, pick the state your interested in and then look for the map at the bottom.

Of course, when travelling to another Capital, you’ll have the opportunity to grab another of these new Missions.

Interestingly, a check of a couple of the ‘Capitalist’ areas shows that there may be one or two dragonZones that are yet to have a valid dragonZone cache published. If you see/know of one of these dragonZones, this is your chance to hide a cache for others to find….and earn yourself some karma points when cachers come looking for a cache in that dragonZone.

Please note that as the dragons aren’t really concerned with human ideology, if the GPO was to ever move from the currently calculated location, their decision would be to simply keep the status quo.

2y'stassies
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by 2y'stassies » 09 September 18 7:50 am

Thanks for the new missions they provide another challenge to add to our list. Noticed we had achieved one yesterday and are only a few finds off gaining several others. Well done and thanks to all working diligently at the forge.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Geocaching Australia » 20 September 18 12:47 am

More good news from your Developer/s...

You can now rotate an image you have loaded to your gallery when you go to edit the image information. e.g. https://geocaching.com.au/my/gallery/ and then click [Edit] to view the image and thumbnail. You can rotate 90 degrees left or right or 180 degress which will turn the image upside down. Occassionally due to browser caching the rotation may not immediately appear on the page after you done the rotation. If this happens please force refresh (CTRL-F5 or SHIFT-F5) to ensure your browser accesses the rotated image and not a cached version.

We improved the dropshadow on the images to simpify the code and reduce the data sent backwards and forwards. There may be no visible change to what you see, but this is a code improvement that helps our technical future be free from the debt of the past.

The gallery on all pages used to be displayed in a grid of 2x10 or 4x5 or 3x3. This caused issues on smaller device screens where the images would tack up against each other and no flow to a new line. Now when you view a gallery of images they will span the page from left to right using as much space as possible and then if there is not enough space they will wrap to the next line. For small mobile screens this may be a gallery only two images wide whereas on a large monitor you may see a gallery of 10 images wide.

This is all done to improve the usability of the site on mobile devices and wide screen monitors and allows you to edit your historical images to orient them correctly.

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Richary
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Richary » 20 September 18 9:47 pm

That picture rotate sounds like a nice feature as the site has traditionally occasionally mucked up what I have uploaded from the phone or the laptop, of course on the laptop pics from my decent camera doesn't have the EXIF info to show what the rotation should be. It was only ever a minor annoyance as I could edit and reload, but this will be a nice addition. Thanks.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Geocaching Australia » 04 October 18 4:04 pm

An another update from your developer/s...

Shortly Geocaching Australia will be implementing a change that will limit the number of logs that will be made available in the downloaded GPX files.

We are doing this to better limit the size of downloads generated each week where not every single log for ever is required every time a file is downloaded. Some geocaches may only attract few logs every week or so, so to provide the full set of logs each week for the last 10 years is an unnecessary burden on our bandwidth.

A GPX file from a geocache page will be unchanged and will always contains all of the logs in perpetuity.

A GPX file from a My Query will be limited to the number of logs that is specified in the query. A default of 20 has been set for all My Queries. You can amend this on a query by query basis for greater or fewer than 20 depending on your requirement.

A GPX file that is generated from any list other than a geocache page or My Query will be limited to the last 20 logs.

In all cases your own logs will also be included and do not add to the limit.

If you are looking to keep an offline copy of every log at Geocaching Australia we ask that you contact us for access to the bulk data export as the GPX file is overly verbose and unnecessarily large for this type of activity.

Geocaching Australia
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Geocaching Australia » 06 October 18 11:35 pm

More good oil from your primary developers….

You can now create a list of archived caches by a latitude and longitude search.

Head to this link, https://geocaching.com.au/find/geocache, and look for:

Search for a Geocache
Archived Caches

Enter the co-ordinates you wish to search,

Select GCA or ALL

Click Search Now

You will be presented with a list of archived caches and the URL can be copied and pasted into a forum or other site to provide direct access to the same results.

Thanks to Laighside Legends for creating this function for the wider community benefit.

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Richary
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Richary » 09 October 18 9:17 pm

Lots of great new features coming out lately, thanks heaps to the site admins, coders and the current Senate.

Sol de Lune
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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Sol de Lune » 12 October 18 4:10 pm

Geocaching Australia wrote:More good oil from your primary developers….

You can now create a list of archived caches by a latitude and longitude search.

Head to this link, https://geocaching.com.au/find/geocache, and look for:

Search for a Geocache
Archived Caches

Enter the co-ordinates you wish to search,

Select GCA or ALL

Click Search Now

You will be presented with a list of archived caches and the URL can be copied and pasted into a forum or other site to provide direct access to the same results.

Thanks to Laighside Legends for creating this function for the wider community benefit.
This is very handy for checking an area where you may have found a trig that is, for some reason, not published on the system. Simply input the co-ords where you found the trig and hit submit. Anything that has been archived in that area will come up...and who knows, the trig you have found might just be there.

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Re: What's new on Geocaching Australia

Post by Geocaching Australia » 17 October 18 11:59 pm

Another set of great updates to our system from The A Team of developers, caughtatwork and Laighside Legends…and of course we all love it when an A Team plan comes together. (Apologies to anyone under 25 who has no idea what that reference is all about!!)

Firstly, you can now select between receiving daily or weekly update emails from Geocaching Australia. So, all that good stuff you read about (like this) you can now select to receive every day or just weekly.

Look to your https://geocaching.com.au/my/settings/ page where you can select no updated, daily updates or a weekly update email. Weekly emails will be generated on Friday mornings, so you can review and be prepared for the weekend….and will no doubt give you something to read at work on Friday mornings. Personally, I like to read it everyday with my first cuppa, but that’s just me. The choice is now yours.

Second. A new Cipher, The Postcode Cipher, has been added to the Geocaching Australia toolbox. This Cipher takes Australian Postcodes for each locality (suburb) and sums the individual digits until they end up as a single number. This end result is the cipher outcome for the locality name. When using this Cipher, use the name of the locality as the key in your puzzle.

And lastly, geonames have been added as the primary source of elevation data to improve response times when logging caches but retains OSM and Google as backups in the event of the geonames service being removed or throttled. There is no visual element to this change, (so nothing to actually see here) but logging geocaches should now appear to be a little faster and elevation data a little more accurate as the geonames services times out less under stress.

We hope these new features will be helpful....watch this space for more updates.

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Corrected Co-ordinates

Post by Geocaching Australia » 29 October 18 8:28 am

A long time in the making, corrected co-ordinates are now available at Geocaching Australia.
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Corr ... oordinates

Corrected Co-ordinates are used when you wish to identify in a search or a map a difference between the original cache location as published or a new set of co-ordinates. New co-ordinates are generally used when a solution to a mystery or unknown geocache is found or a new waypoint for a multi-cache is identified. You are not restricted to just those reasons, you can add a corrected co-ordinate to any Geocaching Australia geocache.

In general:
* Proximity searches will use the corrected co-ordinates
* Distance searches will use the corrected co-ordinates
* BBOX (Bounding Box) searches will use EITHER set of co-ordinates
* MAPS will use EITHER set of co-ordinates AND will show two icons on the map (if the view box allows it)
* A corrected icon on the map will be identified by a smaller yellow icon to the top left
* Where a corrected co-ordinate exists the cache icon will display a small yellow map marker to the top left
* The cache page will show the co-ordinates and corrected co-ordinates
* The cache page will show two static map images so you can focus on one or the other
* Only Geocaching Australia geocaches can be corrected
* The co-ordinates exported to your GPX file will the corrected co-ordinates (as there is only available room for one set of co-ordinates)

You can find the link to correct co-ordinates for a geocache on the right hand navigation area of a geocache page in the "Actions" section. The link is named Corrected Co-ordinates and will take you to a new page where you can enter the corrected co-ordinates.

If you experience any issues, please report them in the "Report Site Issues Here" thread in the Geocaching Australia forums.

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Add to the current options on the map to hide unfound geocac

Post by Geocaching Australia » 21 May 19 2:21 pm

viewtopic.php?p=228003#p228003
stainless-steel-rat wrote:I would like to ask if it is possible to add to the current options on the map to hide unfound geocaches?

I know we currently have
Proximity
Hide My Finds
Hide My Caches
Show dragonZones
Show LGAs

Is there any chance we could add hide my unfound, why you ask? well after a trip to an area I had not been in I noticed that it would be helpful if you could see what dZ areas you have not found a cache in and ticking 'Show dragonZones' and 'Hide unfound' would be very useful in planning dZ zones to visit.

Would others find this useful in hunting out dragonZones they have not visited yet?

You ask; we do.

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Small, non-visible changes

Post by Geocaching Australia » 21 May 19 2:24 pm

A few small, background changes have been implemented.

Preparation for some upcoming games.
Changing the home state flags to use SVG files vs. PNG files.
API changes (the API developer group has been informed separately).
A few minor changes.

You should not see any of these, but if you notice something strange, please do a force refresh (CTRL-F5 or SHIFT-F5) and if the problem persists please report it in the "Report Site Issues Here" thread with enough information about your browser and what you were do to try and reproduce the problem for analysis.

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