OPENCACHING NORTH AMERICA

Opie finally kicked the bucket. Opencaching.com seems officially dead now.

Now if only they would freely relinquish the dotcom url to OCNA.

That would be a sign of something or other

Ding - dong, the witch is gone. I was wondering if anyone else noticed.

Manville Possum Hunters wrote:Ding - dong, the witch is gone. I was wondering if anyone else noticed.

Apparently it happened Friday August 14th and Garmin did tweet about it on the 12th. I didn't hear about it until reading it on r/geocaching yesterday. At most I used to look over there about twice a month.

Nice that the announcement came on the 12th which is OCDE's 10th anniversary and within a week our 5th.

DudleyGrunt wrote:Nice that the announcement came on the 12th which is OCDE's 10th anniversary and within a week our 5th.

Better yet, .de's 10th anniversary was the 14th, not the 12th, and they shut down on the anniversary.

I believe Garmin is in the process of buying out Groundspeak.

Manville Possum Hunters wrote:I believe Garmin is in the process of buying out Groundspeak.

The almighty Rock Chalk has responded to this theory (which I've heard espoused by several people) in the Groundspeak forums with "No. Just no".

Let's not forget Keystone's response, "Manville Possum Hunters, you've already been slapped in another thread about the silly speculation regarding Garmin." Sounds like he is still upset about me suggesting that they outsource his position to a Mud Weasel and move the HQ to Elbonia.

Really, the idea and timing of a Groundspeak sell out does seem feasible to me. It may not be Garmin that would be interested in acquiring it, but with geocaching declining after 15 years, it would make sense to me to sell off the site if I were the owners.
Nothing new is happening, other than the new message center that most users dislike. I rather like the new feature, it's great for sending answers to Earthcaches.

I'm like 99% sure Garmin rewrote the page that now appears in place of opencaching.com. I also believe it has more pictures than it used to, and now reads as follows:

Although Opencaching.com is no longer available, our devices continue to support geocaching. Several of our products come preloaded with geocaches from Geocaching.com. You can also use Geocaching.com to search and download caches directly to your Garmin device. So grab your Garmin and join in on this high-tech game of hide-and-seek being played round the world. Here’s how to get started.