Need Help With Smart Phone and Geocaching.com
I have a HTC Touch Diamond smart phone. Until the last few changes at geocaching.com, everything worked fine. I could go to a website and log a find without any issues. After some recent maintenance changes it became troublesome when submitting a log. The “submit” button has to be in a particular place on the screen. If it isn’t, when I touch the submit button it may send me to one of the links off of that page, usually advertising, even though it was the submit button that I was touching. Since the most recent changes, I cannot use the decrypt button for the clue on any webpage. It just says “Javascript error”. Not such a problem with one or two word clues but a major problem for the long winded ones.
I have been emailing the folks a groundspeak but they are of no help at all. I keep trying to explain what is happening but I am getting nowhere.
I am wondering if any of the ” techies” out there in geocaching land might know what I could possibly try.
Until about the past three “down for maintenance” episodes, everything worked just fine . So, to my mind it is something at their end, but for the life of me, I cannot get them to tell me what that was so that it can be fixed. They said today that their site isn’t compatible with all smart phones. Well, mine was compatible!
Can’t help you there, I use a BlackBerry.
I did a little research this morning but where I don’t use a device like that I can’t say how useful it will be.
First thing I found was a conversation on the official GSP forum but the whole thing was in German so I used Google Translate to get some info. Here’s the link. http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=245769&hl=diamond
Translated, they talked a lot about using something called CacheBox to cache with the phone. You may want to look and see if you can find a 3rd party app that allows you to get cache info. From what I can see, you can download your PQ data into your phone and use it for help. Not sure about online logging.
If you’re simply using the web browser and hitting the website for info, you might try installing a completely different browser on your device and using it to access geocaching.com. Since GSP made changes to their site, it’s feasible that perhaps some of the code they use is not friendly to the browser you have on your phone. Here’s a link to a write up about several other browsers which I believe work with your phone’s OS.
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/pages/survey-of-web-browsers-for-windows-mobile.aspx
Hope that helps.
Thanks Zor.
Definitely some of what they have been doing has been the cause. Everything was working just fine prior to the most recent changes. The last change they made is the worst one bacause that is the one that made it impossible to decrypt the clues. I tried using Internet Explorer and the same thing happened: Javascript Error.
I will check out what you suggested but don’t hold out much hope.
I may be a bit late but they indeed changed the way the clues are decrypted. “Back then”, when you would decrypt a hint, the webpage would refresh after clicking on the link and the decrypted hint would be displayed. Now, it’s a Javascript function that runs and the page is not refreshed at all.
Could it be that the browser on your phone doesn’t fully support Javascript or it’s turned off ? If you tried with Internet Explorer, normally Javascript is on by default on that browser so i’m not sure what could be done.
A work around that could work would be by adding &decrypt=y to the cache page manually, and then accessing that page. The code seems still there to decrypt the hint via the querystring, like it was done before.
You can try accessing the following cache, i manually added the &decrypt=y at the end of the original cache URL.
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=ac546110-7375-460b-a98a-c39a242e3863&decrypt=y
I don’t know if it will be helpfull at all but I taught I could share it.