I am sure some of you have been seeing the banner at the top of the Geocaching.com web site. The site is going down for some major hardware upgrades and will be down for quite a long time on Wednesday May 4. The site will go down at about noon our time and be down for four to six hours. The database server is getting some younger and more agile hamsters and there will be installation of more running cages to handle the extra troops. Record site traffic has worn out hamsters trained last year.



In addition, and more importantly, the layout of Geocaching.com will also be changing. The rotating pictures on the main page will be sailing off into the sunset, as will the left navigation menu. As with anything that changes it will take some getting used to, but the idea is to make it more easy to navigate. The reviewers have seen the site and I like what I see so far. There may be some issues though as the entire world starts to try things out. Hopefully there won't be and if there are issues hopefully they will fix them quickly.

If you would like to get a preview of the new site look, you can go to the Geocaching.com Latitude 47 Blog. They have a YouTube video there that will give you a short preview of the new site look.

http://blog.geocaching.com/201...4th-website-release/

What exactly will be down on May 4th?

• Geocaching.com - and anything that relies on it will be down as well. (e.g. iPhone and Android apps, logging in to User Voice / feedback site)
  
• User Voice / Feedback Site – unless you are already logged in
  
• Waymarking.com
  
• Wherigo.com
  
• Pocket Queries
  
• Notifications
  
• some automated payment transactions
  

What will be up:

• Knowledge Books
  
• contact@ and appeals@ - they may not be able to look anything up due to geocaching.com being down, but email can flow
  
• the forums - so people can ask why the site is down
  

Get your pocket queries done in the next two days if you want to cache on Wednesday. Hopefully the database improvements will speed things back up again and we can zip along and find some caches.

Thanks - I just watched the video & can hardly wait to see the new stuff live!

Thanks for the background info mtn-man.

It's nice to be on the "user" end of a big maintenance outage like this. I'm sure the lackeys will be working hard and feeling the pressure.

Curious to see what the new smiley icon looks like.

quote:

Originally posted by WakeboardLanier:

Curious to see what the new smiley icon looks like.

FYI, the best way to follow them today will probably be on (yeah, I know) Facebook and Twitter. Twitter will probably be the fastest updates, my guess.

http://www.facebook.com/geocachingdotcom?ref=ts

http://twitter.com/#!/GoGeocaching

I am not going to post Jeremy's personal Twitter page, but I would guess he will be tweeting as well.

Enjoying the faster response times!! Had to tweak the HTML on most of my cache pages - mostly where images were displayed.

quote:

Originally posted by WakeboardLanier:
Enjoying the faster response times!!

May have had some faster times, but something has happened in the last couple days.

Anyone know what's up??

I vote on a overload of Couch Caching with the new Challenges. Log 60 new finds every hour.. Get em while their hot.

Geocaching.com is down for the count now -- "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage".

As a loyal Groundspeak customer, I'm worried that the "Challenge" nonsense coupled with the ill-conceived "International Geocaching Day" will only drive more users to Garmin's opencaching.org.

I must admit that I looked at their site a time or two today (but I immediately cleared my temporary files and cookies, hoping I would be forgiven my transgressions).

Jim

I had not looked at opencaching until I saw Jim's post....not many caches on it but at least their website works....thoroughly disgusted with Groundspeak this weekend....greed accompanied by overexpansion has ruined many a good business....really ought to be sure they have computer capacity before launching this challenge thing and meaningless International day. They basically ruined it for those who just wanted to go find and log a geocache this weekend.

Open caching.com seems to be having problems today as well, or it could be that the site hates an iPad as well.

It looks like GC is back to normal speed.

quote:

Originally posted by biker64:

quote:

Originally posted by WakeboardLanier:
Enjoying the faster response times!!

May have had some faster times, but something has happened in the last couple days.

Anyone know what's up??

I wonder if GroundSpeak moving to a new office coupled with the Block Party is part of what was creating the problem.

I'm not sure how many were at the Block Party but there were lots of us. That number logging attendance and trackables along with the challenges for the day created a lot of traffic. If there were other events on International Caching Day, it could easily stain most any server.

quote:

Originally posted by Tarvol:
I had not looked at opencaching until I saw Jim's post....not many caches on it but at least their website works....thoroughly disgusted with Groundspeak this weekend....greed accompanied by overexpansion has ruined many a good business....really ought to be sure they have computer capacity before launching this challenge thing and meaningless International day. They basically ruined it for those who just wanted to go find and log a geocache this weekend.

Why would International Day be meaningless? I've not been a cacher all that long but it appears to me, geocachers love events and can create one at almost the drop of a hat. The Block Party was tons of fun although I will have to say that "Going Coastal" beats it hands down!