Not found caches is not working

Question

Good morning,

for a week or so the "Not found caches" map/list has not worked. The menu item is greyed out. Until yesterday I got an error message when selecting it. At the moment it links to the dashboard instead of to the usual map. I assume you are aware of this but just wanted to signal it.

Best regards,

k+gw+a

Answer 1

It's working, but it's been moved to paid functions due to abuse.

Comments

But wouldn’t this be at odds with the policy not to make existing functions payable?

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Hello pinkunicorn,

Is it possible to share some more details about the abuse of that function and if there are plans to bring it back to the non paid ones?

Many thanks in advance.

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@k+gw+a: It's not a policy, it's a general idea.

All we have stated is actually that we don't have any plan to make move free content behind a paywall. From what we remember, this page and some function somewhere is the only thing we have changed on that regard, in over five years.

To be honest, from our side, we see that as quite fair.

@JURingel: There were two issues with the page one could say.

1) It was available to users who were not Premium with Geocaching.com. It was used as an alternative to new-cache-notifications. This is not okay. Therefore, the page now also requires Premium with Geocaching.com.

2) It was one of our most used pages, for no good reason. Several users used it as a pure alternative for new-cache-notifications, by having bots/scripts fetching the page, several hundreds or thousand times per day. This is against our Terms of Service and we could very well ban those accounts.

Since most/all users using bots/scripts did not even pay a membership, we felt that it was an easy solution to require a membership. If the site will be abused, it can at least be by users who pay for it.

It is still NOT okay to use bots to harvest our web though. I want to be very clear on that topic. We can take decide to take action against it at any point in time, though we hope that we can spend our time on more reasonable things.

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Thank you magma1447 for your detailed answer. Even though it's sad for a timt to time user of that function like me I can understand and state it's a reasonable decision which you made.
I will consider to sign up for a paid membership.