GME Troubleshooting Tips

This page gives tips on how to diagnose and fix problems with the Geocaching Map Enhancements userscript.

First steps

The usual suspects...

Map selector disappears when you log in

If you are a Premium Member of Geocaching.com, the website will default to using the Google Maps API. GME needs the Leaflet Maps API in order to work. There should be a "Set Map Preferences" button that lets you switch between the two at the bottom of the pop-out panel on the left of the map. If you can't see the panel, you need to click on the grey bar on the left edge of the screen.

Map tiles load slowly or not at all

This may be a bandwidth issue with either your internet connection or the server that hosts the map tiles. You can check this by visiting the main websites for the map servers, e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ for the OSM maps, to see whether they work for you. There is normally a link in the bottom-right of the geocaching map. The usual solution is to try again later.

Map goes black or grey

The background that you see before map tiles load is normally grey, but turns black when the brightness feature is being used to dim the map (in script versions 0.5.5 and 0.5.6 it was black all the time). This is normal behaviour, but becomes more obvious on a slow connection, or when the map server is busy. You may just need to be patient and wait for the map to load.

You can also end up with a blank black or grey map because some map servers only work at certain zoom levels, or don't have the same coverage in all areas of the globe. Sometimes this is obvious ("no-photo" icons), but other times you just see plain black or grey squares. You sometimes get the same effect if you zoom in to a street map too far, when there are no streets nearby. To check for these problems, try switching to a different map source, zooming out, or panning to a different location where you think there should be coverage.

Missing or partial geocache icons

If you can see the map, but no cache icons, the most likely cause is an overloading problem with the geocaching.com web servers. Sometimes slow connections mean that not all the geocache tiles load, and you see partial icons. Try again later...

Caches disappear when you zoom in

Geocaching.com only normally works up to zoom level 18, but some map sources let you zoom in further. GME allows you to zoom as far as the map will go, but the cache icons disappear at level 19 and above. When this happens, a red warning triangle should appear at the left of the map. If you a not a Geocaching.com Premium Member, you may also find that you can see Premium Member caches when zoomed out, but not zoomed in.

GME icons not visible

If all the checks at the top of the page were OK, this normally means that GME did not run properly when the map page loaded. Possibilities include:

Get the latest version

Check that you have got the latest version of the script from OpenUserJS.org. If there is a bug, it might have been fixed already! The version number that you have installed is shown at the top of the GME configuration screen (click GME's gear icon from the main map page, or use the "Geocaching Map Enhancements" option from the "Profile" menu at the top of the screen on other parts of Geocaching.com). If the GME configuration screen isn't working, you can find the version number under "User Scripts" in the Firefox Add-ons Manager, in the "Installed Userscripts" tab in Tampermonkey's options, or in the Chrome Extensions manager (if GME was installed as a native extension, rather than via Tampermonkey).

Check the console

I'm not going to attempt a full tutorial on how to use your browser's console, but you can google for more information. You can open the console by pressing Ctrl-Shift-I in Opera, Ctrl-Shift-J in Chrome or Ctrl-Shift-K in Firefox. Each works slightly differently, but there should be a console tab that shows messages and errors generated by the web page. To use these effectively, navigate to the page that isn't working, open the console, clear the list of messages, then reload the page or try to use the function that wasn't working, and see what messages come up. It's also worth disabling GME and doing the same again, to see if any of the messages change.

Report it

If updating the script doesn't solve the problem, you could see whether anyone has reported the problem in the Geocaching Forums or on OpenUserJS. If you report a new problem, it helps if you can give as much detail as you can about what has gone wrong: what you expected to happen, what actually happened, and any error messages or visible problems you saw. Just saying "it doesn't work" doesn't help - normally it will be working for me, so you need to help me figure out how your setup is different! Which browser are you using? Are you running any other scripts or plugins? Some errors may show up in the Javascript console that can help identify problems, but Geocaching.com routinely generates a lot of errors and warnings anyway, so before reporting, try disabling the script, clearing the console, then seeing if the messages come back without GME running.

Disabling GME

How to disable GME depends on your browser:

Once you have disabled GME, it will still continue working until you refresh web page. Similarly, when you re-enable the script, you will need to refresh the page again to make it take effect.

Reseting GME Configuration

If you can see the GME configuration (gear) icon, click that, then click "Defaults".

If the GME icons are not loading, you can manually reset the configuration using the browser console. Open the console:

Type the following, being careful with the capitalisation (you may need to click on the console tab first):

delete localStorage.GME_parameters
delete localStorage.GME_custom

When you have done that, close the console and re-load the maps page.

NOTE: GME uses browser localStorage to store its configuration. This data is shared across all pages on geocaching.com, but cannot be accessed by pages from other websites. Unfortunately, is not shared between HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same website either. This currently means that changes you make to GME's configuration on the main map page (HTTPS) will not show on the rest of Geocaching.com (HTTP) and visa versa. To fully reset GME's configuration, you will have to do the above steps on both the maps page at https://www.geocaching.com/map and some other page, e.g. a trackables map.

Further information