Say Hello to Geocaching Challenges

Well we can say welcome to the new Geocaching Challenges.  After months of waiting and seeing what is in store we can now see the advent of the new system for handling Virtual type challenges.

What are they?

People will get them confused with challege caches.  Where there is a cache waiting at the end of the trail.  Try and meet a certain challenge and then sign the log.  However geocaching challenges are different in a few ways.  You are challanging someone to Perform an action at a particular location, or to take a photo at a particular location.  There will be a third type that groundspeak forms known as a worldwide challenge.  Perform some action anyway in the world.  (think locationless caches).

Differences you can see

The first thing that you will notice is on your profile page that your finds, hides and challeges are all broken out under your name.  And if you hover your mouse over challenges you see the challenges that you have accepted, completed and created.

It is a good idea so people can break down those things seperatly.  Some cachers do not want their finds "polluted" by the find count from the challenges. So this lets them see those numbers without them being combined

The next thing that pops is on your personal page that everyone can see.  This time you will see three numbers again, Those that you have found, trackables, and challenges completed.  Similar to the other without the caches placed, now you see trackable info.

I created a few challeges, but the bugs and the up and down of the website keeps me from writing more.

I will follow up soon with more info.

Update on Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 3:02PM by firennice

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.

Update on Saturday, August 6, 2011 at 11:02AM by firennice