TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » Geocaching.com Adds New Features

Groundspeak has relaunched the Geocaching.com site after today’s highly anticipated update. The core features are in place, and obviously people are taking notice as the site is getting slammed right now traffic wise. Here’s some of the new functionality you can now play with on the site.

Maps

The most impressive of the new features is the update to the maps. You can now view a lot more information on the screen, and there is no 500 cache limit on the map anymore … in fact, there is no limit at all any more. This makes locating a cache cluster much easier, and helps to easily visualize an area you may be visiting without all that pan/zoom madness that was on the old maps. You can also easily grab a link (URL) for the map to easily share with others.

When zoomed out past 500 metres, the display will change to coloured boxes instead of icons. You can change the map type displayed easily from the usual Google Road/Satellite/Terrain and also MapQuest, Bing and event OpenStreet Map and OpenCycle.

There is also a promise of “Geocaching Social” in the future, which will most likely utilize live.geocaching.com and/or the Geocaching.com mobile apps to show where your friends are geocaching on the map.  To use the new map, you’ll need to click on the “View the Map Beta” link at the top left of the screen when you head to a map page.

Favorites


This is the implementation of the oft requested rating system for caches. Rather than go with a 1-5 rating for various attributes of the cache, Groundspeak has opted to use a system where you can mark a cache you have found as a “Favorite”

You get 1 “Favorite” point for every 10 geocaches you visit. Multiple “Found it” logs on a cache count as one visit.  On cache pages which have been marked, you will see how many people have marked that cache as a Favorite. Click on the badge and you will see who they are, and have a link to their log entry for that cache.

At the moment, Pocket Queries do not support filtering on Favorites, but it is planned for the future.

Stats


Groundspeak acquired mygeocachingprofile.com so we were expecting this change. On every cacher’s profile page there is a new tab, “Statistics“. The tab does what you’d expect and shows various stats about your caching history. One nice touch is that the oddball caches, like that Virtual in Germany or the moving cache in BC are not included when calculating the distance stats.

While you can use the mygeocachingprofile.com web page, or the FindStatsGen macro for GSAK to get a lot of these statistics (and more), the stats on the Geocaching.com site are created automatically with no need to download your MyFinds PQ and wait for the number crunching. It’s a convenient way to flip back and forth between your friends if you’re sharing a challenge cache for example the Cache a Day or Fizzy challenges.

The statistics tracked at launch include:

  • Your find rate caches/day
  • Your longest find/no find streaks
  • Your best day, month, year for number of caches found
  • Finds/month (graphed)
  • Finds for Each Day of the Year
  • Cache types/ container types  found
  • Difficulty and Terrain Matrix (for Fizzy challenges et al)
  • Farthest distances travelled to find a cache