Introducing Geocaching Challenges - Sort Of
Well someone threw it out on the forums, so I thought I would throw a little bone out here. This new geocaching.com update added some of the backbone for the challenges/virtual system, and some forum discussion is going on about it.
http://www.geocaching.com/my/challenges.aspx
I know they have spoken about it at a couple of events, but I really do not know what has been discussed. Without knowing what can and cannot be discussed I will stop my personal discussions here.
Here is a clip from Jeremy Irish:
In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process).
To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward.
Some points:
- It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point.
- Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though.
- It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc.
- We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices.
So that is what I have to share. Some who went to Mega Events might want to share info that you have heard.
My GUESS as to the release. End of the month, I would also think at the same time all the phone apps will be upgraded to them as well.