Chris Ronan: Hello everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I’m Chris Ronan, a.k.a. Rock Chalk, one of the staff here at HQ. This is our podcast coming to you from Seattle, where summer has finally arrived. It does not rain here as much during summer. You may have heard it rains all the time in Seattle. That’s not entirely true. It pretty much rains all the time between October and April. Like, every day it rains at least a little bit during those months. So what happens is… And I only learned this recently because I moved here three years ago. What happens is the rain just suddenly stops sometime in late May and when that happens, you just have to start doing everything you want to do outdoors non-stop between late May and October when the rain finally returns. Because the weather is just amazing during the summer here. So I and a lot of my colleagues here at HQ, we’ve been out doing a lot of caching in recent days and we hope you have been too. For this episode of Inside Geocaching HQ, we are answering questions from the geocaching bloggers and podcasters of the world. They ask the questions for the show, I went around the office to find the right people to answer those questions. We have covered some very interesting subjects, so let’s get right to it.

CR: We have a question from DarrylW4 of the GeoGearHeads podcast. You can find him at geogearheads.com along with his partner, The Bad Cop. And here is Darryl’s question:

DarrylW4: We know it’s always been a battle to keep a good, free version of geocaching.com versus the full-featured premium experience, but recently I’ve been hearing more stories about cachers that have had to cut back on their caching, either financial reasons or just lack of time. And in many cases these people are telling me that, “Yeah, we like to go caching occasionally.” But especially now that the new app, the former intro app, doesn’t allow them access to a lot of the cooler caches without paying for it, they’ve stopped caching at all. One situation is a fairly active cacher I used to know got tied up with some family things and on occasion they’d go out and do the vacation or a weekend trip somewhere, do some geocaching. And since they can no longer do earth caches and some of the cooler puzzle caches and stuff like that that they liked to do though the app, they just decided, you know, it’s not worth it anymore. They archived and adopted their caches and there is one less person caching. Well, in this case it was four people but, you know, [chuckle] one less group of cachers out there that did have some cool caches, particularly earth caches out there. And I was curious to see if there’s any plans to kind of roll that back and make it more accessible to cachers who can’t or won’t pay the $30 a year for the premium membership.

CR: Thank you, Darryl. So to answer that question, we go straight to the top. Bryan Roth is the president and CEO of Geocaching HQ. Bryan, we kinda talked about this a little bit on a podcast a few months ago and it’s a question that a lot of people are interested in, and it’s something that I know that you have been thinking a lot about and the team here has been thinking a lot about.

Bryan Roth: Hey Chris, that’s true, and first of all it’s good to be back on the Geocaching HQ podcast. Thank you Darryl for the question. I guess I would start by saying that it makes me sad to hear that people are stopping geocaching for any reason. I know that sentiment is shared by a lot of us here at HQ. One of the things I can say is that over the past few months, since we spoke in March, we’ve had a number of conversations around that topic here. At the same time we’ve spent a lot of time working to add features and functionality to that app. So for those of you who have been using it, I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few improvements over the last few months. We’re really excited about that. We have quite a few more improvements on the horizon and we really can’t wait to give those to the community. So the short answer is: Yes, we are actively looking into how we might address this.

BR: Our goal is to find the right balance between charging for features so that we can support the company and giving everything away for free. As much as we would like to open the app and let everybody have unlimited access to all geocaches at no charge, we wouldn’t stay in business too long as a bootstrapped company. So really quickly, for those of you who don’t know, Geocaching HQ is not a funded company. We have not taken VC funding or private equity funding or anything like that. The revenue that comes from the community is the revenue that we use to support the company to pay our bills, to pay our employees, to provide benefits, etcetera, etcetera. So not making any money isn’t really an option. And I know a lot of people have ideas, “Oh we should sell ads or sell our customers’ data,” and things like that. And we do some advertising. We have no interest in selling our customers’ data to anybody because we don’t think that that’s the right thing to do.

BR: And so what we’ve chosen to do is try to charge for the tools that we produce to make geocaching easier to play. Historically we’ve got the website for those people who want to go play puzzle caches and multi-stage caches, and earth caches. You can go to the website and you can continue to do that for free. Use your dedicated GPS device like a Garmin, there are other mobile applications that provide GPS navigation functionality. It’s not that you can’t play, you can play. At the same time the goal is to allow other partners as well as ourselves to build better tools for the geocaching community, and for API partners they’re allowed to charge for those applications and people can pay for additional functionality. When it comes to our mobile application our goal was to build a best of breed tool, and I thing we’re getting closer and closer every day to having the best tool out there for geocaching, but also we have to find ways to leverage that tool to generate revenue.

BR: So for those people who really appreciate it and enjoy it and are geocaching actively, our ask is that they consider becoming premium members. And at the same time, we would really like to have a balance between paid features and free features so that it makes for a good introduction for new players, but really active players will help support the site and the ecosystem that powers geocaching. At this time what we are focused on, is we’re looking at where that line is drawn. And I think that, as I mentioned in March, we’re not comfortable with where it is now, hearing stories of people giving up geocaching because they can’t find the cache that they want in the app certainly doesn’t make anybody feel happy, myself included.

BR: We do have plans, we will be probably testing in the near term some different models of how that will work and so many users won’t see those tests. Normally they’re segmented among a small percentage of the audience and we look at what it does for engagement, new user activation, even premium membership conversion and retention. And if we can find a better line that allows more people to have more access without making it harder for us to support ongoing operations of the company, then that’s something that we’re gonna do. So I guess in closing, what I would say is, we are definitely planning to address this. We have testing coming up that we’re going to be doing with the community, and based on the results we do plan on making some changes going forward.

CR: So our next questions are from GeoJangie, who is a blogger, geocaching blogger, in North Dakota in the United States. And she has a couple of questions, and to answer those I am joined by Cindy Potter, who is the director of community here at Geocaching HQ. So Cindy, for people who don’t know what you do, what is it that keeps you busy here at HQ everyday?

Cindy Potter: Okay, well first my username is Frau Potter, I was first hired here because I speak German, so that’s why I have that name. But I oversee two teams that work with the community and also the volunteer reviewers, moderators and translators. The teams do all the email answering from the community, all the social media posts, a lot of the blog posts. And we also oversee the guidelines, so we’re part of the appeals process if someone has hidden a cache and they don’t feel like the process went well and they want to appeal the process, then they write to us and we give them an answer.

CR: Well we have three questions here from geocachingjangie.com. And I’m gonna spell that out and I think we’ll probably also have it in the notes for the show but www.geocachingjangie, that’s J-A-N-G, as in George, I-E.com. That’s all one, geocachingjangie, all one word, dot com. And so her first question is regarding geocaching education. She asks, has Geocaching HQ considered creating a “geocaching education workshop” to partner with cachers to teach geocaching in locations around the world with ideas and products from HQ?

CP: Wow, I love this question. As I said before, I’ve been here six years, and this is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I personally love this idea, we talk about it like Geocaching 101 workshops. I feel like there’s great ambassadors out in the community that know this game and really wanna teach new players. And it does feel like we could set up a system, I call it, “Train the Trainers,” where we could have perhaps some kind of an online workshop that people could take in order to qualify to become these trainers, and then maybe we have some sort of sponsorship materials that we can share with them in order to make those events go more smoothly. And maybe in the future we have a way on the website to highlight those events a little bit more easily or to send emails to new cachers to point out when those events are available in their area. Unfortunately we have a small company here and we don’t have enough people for all the fabulous ideas there are, but, yes, I do hope that we’ll be able to do this at some point. And in the meantime, I really want to say to those people that do host those workshops that we really do value that and think it’s really cool that you’re out there helping people get started with the game.

CR: Her next question is about events and it is, “What suggestions do you have to bring a large event to a state with a smaller geocaching population?” For example, where she is from, North Dakota.

CP: North Dakota? I love North Dakota. I’ve been to North Dakota. Let’s see, well first I’d like to start by saying large isn’t necessarily best. So sometimes people have this idea that mega events… That’s the status that everybody wants, right? But there are actually some events worldwide that would qualify for mega status that actually don’t want mega status ’cause they want to keep their numbers down. Now, that doesn’t answer your question but I think my point is just that we value all levels of events and don’t just favor mega events. And that’s something we, I think, need to look at more carefully in the future, too. Like, “How can we support those medium sized events a little bit more?” So for example events that maybe have 50 or 100 people and just a variety of really fun activities without all the stress of what a mega status would have.

CP: But that said, some ways to maybe look at how to do a bigger event, I would suggest, would be looking at existing examples. So an example would be the Going Caching event that takes place in Georgia every year, moves around to different locations. I haven’t had a chance to go to it, however I’ve heard from numerous lackeys that it’s probably the most fun event they’ve ever attended. And had a chance to meet the organizers at GeoWoodstock recently, and just seeing how friendly they are and how creative they are in their design, I’d say they could probably offer some tips. Some creative kind of concept or puzzling that can be done at the event can be really fun. Another idea is partnering with your tourism agency to see if they’d be interested in helping to sponsor Geocoins. So I know that some lackeys at our office, in fact you might be one of them…

CP: Likes to find those events where Geocoins are part of it and will travel quite far to take part in those events. And in many cases it’s an outside agency, not the cachers themselves that are funding the coins, but an agency that’s hoping to attract tourism. And I’d also like to say that we are not the event experts here, it’s really people in the community that make the best events. So I’m probably not the best person to ask since I’ve never organized an event that large and I’m always in awe of those that can.

CR: Well I think your point about tourism agencies and such, is really important because their job is to bring people to the city, to the town.

CP: Right.

CR: So if you can go to them and say, “Hey, we’ve got geocachers out there that might wanna come to our town and if we can just give them a little carrot to do it… ” And it might be through a geocoin that you earn and the example that I think of is the Tri-Cities Mega here in Washington State in the US, but I’ve seen it at other places too. So yeah, those are all good ideas. Her next question was about new cache types and she says, “I have a feeling someone else is bound to ask this question.” She actually was the only one [chuckle] that did for this episode, but we certainly have been asked this question many times which is, “Is there a new type of geocache in the works? For example history, virtual with new regulations, etcetera.”

CP: We do wanna make improvements to the game. I will say our focus this year is more shoring up of what we do have. Obviously, we retired the classic app and a lot of our time has been put into making sure we have all the necessary features into the free app, and also doing things on the website, updating things like the dashboard and the profile that were pretty clunky pages before. I always had trouble finding things and I’m hoping as we continue to refine this page that it will be easier for people to find things, and updating the outdated logging experience as well. But we know that’s not enough, we don’t want just the pages on the website to be easier to use, we want to have more features in the game. And so we have been talking about ideas for what other things we could add into the game. We don’t have any particular news to share, but I do want the community to know that we’re cachers too. So we have ideas and we also can solicit ideas from the community of, “What would you like to see as changes to the game?” And we welcome those ideas to be shared with us.

CR: There was another question that was asked that I’d like you to be here for, because [chuckle] you and I, we’re both involved in this quite a bit and there are actually a couple of people that asked this. And the question was basically wanting an update on challenge caches and asking if they would become a distinct cache type. It’s been a little over a year since the end of the moratorium and so people were just wanting an update on how things were going. And as you and I, and the rest of the team have been talking about it over the course of weeks… I think that what was interesting when the moratorium ended, and I don’t think that we anticipated this, was that it was gonna take about six months or so, five-six months for the community to figure out the challenge checker aspect of things. And so I think the moratorium ended around April last year, April-May, and for the first four-five months it felt like things were awesome because [chuckle] nothing was really happening. And we eventually figured out that was because the challenge checker issue was something that they were figuring out. And once they did, we started getting a better sense for how things were going.

CR: And I think you would agree Cindy, we’re still in the evaluation phase because of that. And I think we wanna get through a full “season of caching” this summer and fall, being the main part of the year when it’s really busy for us and for reviewers in most parts of the world. And then, once we get into the fall, get back with reviewers and see, “Okay, how do you feel about things and have the new guidelines alleviated the stress that you were feeling about this kind of cache? And if so, where do we go from there?”

CP: Right. And something for the community to keep in mind that it’s not so simple just to add a new icon and it can create problems in itself. You know the people out there that are icon hunters. They wanna all hide every different type of icon. They wanna find every type of icon, so we need to be ready that if we were to provide an icon that we really are proud of what it has become, because there’s going to be a lot of surge in activity. And if it’s not a pretty solid cache type, it’s gonna be very frustrating for a lot of people and we don’t want to end up grandfathering something that gets out of control. And also, I also wanna say we know why the community likes challenge caches. They really love these personal achievements and that’s something that we have a strong radar on here. Ideas are spinning about different ways that we might be able to also encourage that. Nothing yet to show, but we know that that’s something that is fun. It’s fun in other games to have some sort of achievements or badges and so, we’ll see what the future brings.

[music]

CR: Okay. So, for our next questions we have Ben Hewitt from the product team here at Geocaching HQ. And I want to start by talking about a question that we had from Oboeman who writes for the Allgauer Geocacher blog which is at www.allgaeuer-geocacher.de, and we will put his web address in the podcast notes. But he had asked about, “Can you alter the unknown icon to distinguish between unknown with a traditional and unknown with a multi in the end?” That’s kind of a similar answer to another question that came in from Patrick from the Podcache, which is a great name for a pod… Don’t you think Ben?

Ben Hewitt: I do.

CR: For a geocaching podcast, podcache.de, and he asks, “Why is it not possible to do a nano icon?” And I think the answer for both of these questions is fairly similar. So, being on the product team, I’d like to see what Ben has to say about those two questions.

BH: Yeah. I’m gonna focus on the question about a nano size. That’s something that we are well aware that the community has wanted and has been interested in adding for years. And it’s something we’ve actually discussed several times amongst the product and development and design teams at HQ. Actually to a pretty great level of detail. The short answer is, it’s not nearly as easy as it seems to just add more cache sizes. Anything is possible of course, which is why we investigated, but the technology stack that our system is built on, those cache sizes are rooted pretty deeply through a variety of services and on down to the database level. And so the last time we took a look at adding a nano cache size, we discovered, in working with our engineers, that it was gonna be weeks of work just to add that one cache size.

BH: And in our estimation, the amount of work that it required was not enough to justify just taking that on as a project by itself. That said, those are the kind of things that we keep an eye on to opportunistically loop in to a larger project. Basically where that one landed after the last discussion is like, “Hey, let’s wait until we’re working again on the cache submissions process or the cache details pages on the website. And remember that there’s an interest in having a nano cache size or possibly other cache sizes.” Because that would really be the right moment to rope in some of those other wins, is when we’re really digging down and re-architecting those systems on a larger level. It makes a lot of sense to do those things then, it doesn’t make as much sense to take on these smaller additions that would require a lot of work by themselves.

CR: Next question for Ben. We go back to DarrylW4 from the GeoGearHeads podcast and here is Darryl’s next question.

DarrylW4: We recently had a long discussion about the caches along a route function on GeoGearHeads, and part of that discussion was this is a feature that people don’t really seem to use to its fullest anymore. Probably in part because so much of the caching is done via smartphones. And I was wondering is there any plan to extend the features of the caches along a route to be usable on mobile, apps or otherwise? And how about the ability to even do lists easier so that we can grab and download the caches that are found along those route files from the mobile devices better.

BH: Darryl always has good questions. Like Darryl, I am a fan of the caches along a route feature. And like Darryl, I have often thought to myself that, “Hey, this feature is kind of hidden away and is not quite user friendly enough in terms of the functionality that we’re trying to deliver.” If you know how to use it, you can do some really awesome stuff, if you’re doing a driving trip and you jump through the hoops there. And so similar to my answer that I just gave about nanos, this is really something we’ve looked at and we’re waiting for the right moment to jump on this. Caches along a route right now is a side car to pocket queries. And if and when we take on an update to that, more likely than not it would merge in with a maps project or additional work on lists, which probably most people can tell we put a lot of work into lists in the last year, year and a half. And I don’t know exactly what that would look like but my best guess is what we would do is make it easier to create caches along a route in some sort of map experience and then, as Darryl already eluded, create a list of those which then you would get for free in the mobile app once you had created a list.

CR: Okay. So for our next question we have Ben Field, who is on the IT team here at Geocaching HQ. Ben, before we get to the actual question, since you haven’t been on the podcast before, maybe just tell people a little about what you do here at HQ.

Ben Field: Yeah, I’m the director of information technology here and along with my team we support the whole systems and network infrastructure that keeps the website and mobile applications running.

CR: Kind of an important thing?

BF: Yeah, no doubt.

CR: Okay, so our question is again from DarrylW4 from the GeoGearHeads podcast, and here it is.

DarrylW4: On a fairly recent episode of GeoGearHeads we fielded a question from RReagan, a very hypothetical situation, what would happen if geocaching.com had a catastrophe and lost their servers and all of the backups, and all the backups were bad? And his question was basically, could Project-GC and all of the GSAC databases out there be used to restore it? Definitely that’s not a situation that could or should ever happen, but it did bring up an interesting question of what is the contingency plan at geocaching.com for any of these various situations? We know that years and years ago there was a fire at the data center that took it offline, we’ve seen issues with internet services as a whole because of AWS going down. Is there any information you can share with us about these plans at geocaching.com to help bring the service back online should the worst happen? Even if it isn’t a nasty, everything goes out, but just even maybe a server issue or some kind of service issue?

BF: So I see this as really a two part question. I see the first part centered around what our course of action would be in the event of a disaster such as a total loss of the data center from mudslide, earthquake or other unwelcome scenario. And, well first of all we have offsite replication for everything that makes Geocaching run, including all the geocaches, logs, trackables, etcetera, so there should never be a scenario where we would need to recover from Project-GC or GSAC databases, etcetera. But we also have the ability to run our infrastructure elsewhere. So in the event of a disaster we’d be recovering offsite copies of all of our data to a new location which would likely be a fully cloud based, at least for an interim period, and then bringing our services back online as soon as possible.

BF: Then, for the second part of the question, I think revolved around how we recover from less critical issues such as single server or service failures. And these types of failures are common in most any web service infrastructure. There are bugs in code and services can crash, server systems have hardware failures. But the idea is to build as much redundancy into the infrastructure as possible, which is what we do as much as we can within the budget that we have. The geocaching core game elements are all supported by redundant systems, so there theoretically aren’t any single points of failure. But it’s not to say that code can’t get pushed out and an issue arises that didn’t manifest itself in test or staging, or that multiple hardware failures occur at the same time which in conjuncture could cause an outage. We’ve also seen some legacy components that haven’t properly handled a failover when a device fails. But in these types of scenarios we have a lot of skilled people here who can jump on a problem and determine the quickest path to resolution and then figure out the best way to prevent anything similar going forward.

CR: There you have it, that was Ben Field. You also heard from Bryan Roth, Ben Hewitt and Cindy Potter. Thanks to the podcasters and bloggers who asked those questions. If you have a question you would like to hear us answer on the podcast, our email address is podcast@geocaching.com, that’s podcast@geocaching.com. Keep an eye on the Geocaching blog, if you are not already. There is a lot of stuff happening these days. Our summer promotion starts soon, that’s the lost treasure of Mary Hide. Read all about that on the blog. Get ready for that, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun coming up later this summer. Thanks for listening and from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.