Not Evinc(iv)e
You might have noticed it: I changed the coordinates checker for all my mystery caches.
At first, I used Evince, the somewhat de facto standard for coordinates checking. I wasn’t very happy about it. The main reason is that it’s a tool with a high frustration level for both the cache owner as the person who is trying to solve the mystery. These are the reasons why:
- Coordinates entry suffers from the same disease as the gc.com site: the default is a N/W coordinate. I can’t tell how many times I forgot to change it to N/E with all that entails. One can’t blame it on the alphabet. As far as I know, the E comes first.
So it must be deliberate, as if the other 3/4 of the world is a colony of the country/countries on the N/W part. Why can’t one make things more user friendly? It’s no mean feat to make this dependant from the IP address. The niggler among you will say that this isn’t 100% fail-safe either (since your hosting provider can have an IP address outside your country or quarter, etc.) but it’ll be more useful than the current situation. - One needs to wait 10 minutes between each attempt with a limited number of attempts a day. It don’t see the reason why these limitations exist. There are approximately 2.8 million unique coordinates in a radius of 1.6 km/1 mile so if one wants to do the effort to check them all, why bother? Automating stuff should be difficult anyway with the built-in CAPTCHA checks.
So I started to look for some alternatives:
- Geocaching Coordinates Checker by Cache New Mexico has also the N/W defaults
- The Metacaching.NL checker is only available in Dutch and has only a N/E test
- Geochecker.com is multilingual, makes the LAN/LOT dependant of the language chosen and has some basic statistics. I had almost selected this one until il imperiestro and freggie started to use another checker: GeoCheck
GeoCheck is the most ideal coordinates checker for me (so far). It is multilingual, there is no limit on the number of attempts and has the ability to let you enter the coordinates in one field (eg. N 50° 49.603 E 004° 49.179). This prevents the hurdle of the entering the wrong quarter. If you prefer entering the coordinates in six fields, it’ll set the correct quarters for you. Too bad it doesn’t do that for a cache owner when entering the cache coordinates.
Besides this, it has some other nice features:
- A custom response page can be defined, which can include text, images, additional waypoints. All coordinates can be downloaded as GPS/LOC files or sent directly to Garmin GPS receivers.
- Cache owners have a (Google) map with the defined solution (with fuzzy-factor if defined), waypoints and all the attempted coordinates from the users.
- One account can have multiple caches. A dashboard is provided where you see the number of attempts, how many succeeded and how many failed for each cache. You can also edit the caches, add waypoints, sub-coordinates, view the Google Map, view statistic, etc.
- The stats page will provide a list of attempted coordinates, the time of the attempt, distance from the correct coordinates, nationality of the person behind the attempt, the number of attempts by each user, etc.
- An RSS feed lets you track the number of correct and incorrect attempts and visitors outside a browser
You see that things don’t need to be austerely as one gives the impression to be. I didn’t need more to get convinced and changed all Evince checks with GeoCheck. That includes my newly created LA Kubo (GC20XK3). Despite being a mystery, it’s easy to solve. No pitfalls, rocket science, etc. this time. I hope one enjoys it as I did whilst making it.
