tb-rescue.com is going down It would be nice if project-gc could offer the service

Question

http://www.tb-rescue.com/  is  closing at the end of the month,  You could go to their site and put in a rescue

request for  TB's  stuck in caches  for a long time,   When you sign up  you can offer to watch a area

and if a rescue mission pops up in your area it would email you  there was a tb that needed to be rescued

Tb rescue request are displayed on a map as well , and keeps track if someone has excepted  the rescue request,  and gave out points as rewards  for completion

It would be nice if someone could take over this service

Comments

Ditto on the rescue service for TBs. I have utilized numerous times and have responded to as well. I found out the hard way when I went to add a new mission and saw the page of doom instead! This niche can be quite useful. On a sidebar, I like the Geokrety trackable location map... GC does not have for TBs.

Answer 1

This is not really in our scope, but we see and understand the need, and it's very sad to hear that TB-Rescue has closed (seems to be closed now).

We will definitely keep this under consideration, and I have this topic bookmarked as a reminder to myself.

The case you present sounds fairly easy to implement actually, at least in my initial thoughts. I also notice that they  had a site call TB-Run. Since we don't have experience with any of the sites, it would be interesting to hear what they did more, including TB-Run. We have of course known about the sites, but we don't do much trackables.

There are some technical details I would like to look into. Like if we can use the Geocaching Live API to know who owns a trackable. To me, it sounds reasonable that only the owner of a trackable can start a rescue mission for example.

Comments

He's keeping the http://www.tb-run.com/ site going , it's for TB races, You can start a race and other can join.   both sites must use the API  to get the trackable info
your user name on the sites had to match  so it would correctly  allow you to choose your TB's .  Each day the tb-run site polls geocaching.com  for info on the tb's in all the races ,  and updates the race stats,   I assume it does the same  for the rescue tb's   Keeping track of the Tb's should be pretty easy using the API  ,  You already have the mapping ability in project-gc,  You would just need a  database of rescuers so they can sign up and be able to select a  area or areas  they would want to watch,   So when someone enters a rescue request,  it would check the  current location, and check for rescuers in that area, and send them a email  saying theres a new tb waiting to be rescued,   There would also be a global map showing all tb's  with rescue requests , People can check .  A rescuer or rescuer's if there more then one would acknowledge  they will go look for it  , in return the tb owner would get a email saying someone is going to look for their tb ,  when the rescuer  completes the task, he either marks it successful  or  not  , and it emails  the  tb owner the results ,  the rescuer is also encourage  to log a note or a pick up of the TB depending on what happened.
Also if someone else picks up the TB, it emails the owner and the rescuer that it's been picked up and closes the rescue mission   Tb rescue also provided you with a html  banner  you could paste into your profile  to display  how many tb's you rescued and link back to their site.  Maybe Sascha  that ran the site might share the existing code

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We are investigating the interest on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/ProjectGC/posts/1032004233523832

Help spreading the post to increase the chances of it happening. This far we have some sketches and ideas.

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Since you seem to have some experience, you might be able to help us with some decision making.

Our idea is that one should only be able to create a rescue mission for trackables that are currently in some geocache somewhere, and that has been there for X amount of days (4 weeks for example). Does these two assumptions sound fair?

Then we have been thinking about how a rescue mission should be closed. Our idea is to auto-close it as soon as the trackable gets grabbed from the geocache it existed in when the mission was created. This is something Project-GC could do automatically, with some delay. If the delay is too long for the rescuer, he could tell the system that it should update the data. Does this sound like a fair solution as well?

All in all, three questions:
Ok to require that it's in a geocache?
Ok to not allow missions on TBs that were recently moved?
Ok to auto-close?

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Yes a rescue mission should only be allowed if it's  in a cache , and  I would put a  time required to be in the cache of a month (4 weeks)  

tb-rescue  would close a mission after  6 months if the coin was not found
at that time  you could create another  rescue mission for the same coin if you wanted
The rescue mission should also be closed if the tb is grabbed, retrieved or marked missing
I would NOT include being discovered, since some people have a proxie out there and the original may get discovered
a email should go back to the owner of any change in the mission as well
if someone excepts the mission
if it's marked missing
if it was rescued
if it was  retrieved or grabbed by someone else

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Great feedback. All in all it sounds like our thoughts are very aligned with yours and tb-rescue.com's.

If you haven't seen it, we have posted a teaser screenshot in the above mentioned Facebook-thread: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29093267/screenshot_20160201_01_a.png

We actually had an idea of making an initial release tomorrow, with part of the functionality available. Adding watch zones and missions, but with no background jobs yet. We have failed that deadline, it was more work than we expected, or we aimed to high in user experience, which took a lot of the development time.

Some of the functionality will be easier to create once we have some data. That's why  we are hoping to release a version where one can create missions and watch zones. Then we have some data to test on after that.

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Looks good,  for watch zones  , I think on tb-rescue you could select a radios 25km   50km 100 km 200 km  ect , and you could chose a couple different ones if you wanted  say if you have a summer or winter area,

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In our system one can select 1-100 km radius (or similar in miles), and have multiple zones, which easily can be enabled/disabled.

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excellent :)

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Too bad that you insist only on FB asks whether interest in TB and Coin rescue . You should point out more on your own QA and make also such surveys . FB is utilized a service of too much data otherwise .
Greeting Meybux

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meybux: The difference is the response time. The Facebook thread had around 25 shares within 2 hours, plenty of replies and so on.

A poll here would have taken at least a week to interpret the result from.

In this case, we wanted to react fast, or not at all.

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Simrebel seems to be on target... There is great potential/expansion for rescue site not only for GC system TBs and coins... geokret trackables as well in my opinion. I have a mission to post now... where can I add to database for beta work?

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Aha! I have today noticed the TB-Rescue option in the tools tab... Have submitted two. However, not sure when & how to know if it is active. Will check map and "My rescues" again later.

Answer 2

Great idea.

Gute Idee, weiterhin TB´s und Coins zu retten. Toll, dass Ihr Euch dem annehmt. Allerdings bei FB werde ich nicht abstimmen.

F-One

Comments

Dito

Die Rettung von Coins und TB muss aufrecht erhalten werden! Und bei FB mach ich auch nicht mit!