Active Captain

[Anonymous]

I just spent 4 days on the ICW and reviewed the latest information on Active Captain and all I found was information 1 year or more older. I looked at other areas of the ICW and found the same old data. Also much of the information is about areas that are off the channels. Does anyone use Active Captain? I obtained more information on hazards from other boaters traveling the ICW and locals at places where I stopped. What have others experienced?

 

[Will-C]

Since Active Captain relies on boater reports and most east coasters up north don't really start their boating season until after memorial day. So last year data might be all the input that was available. But you would think that the snow birds coming back north this spring from Florida would have reported any drastic changes in condtions. Most of the better water way guides send out updates from time to time. We use Coastal Explorer software which gets it's charts and active captain updates all the time. I would take the time to do two things. First report items of importance during your boating travels on the active captain site. Second get in contact with the powers to be at active captain (Jeff) and see what they have to say. They value our input, they are good people and they moniter this site from time to time.
D.D.

 

[ActiveCaptain]

I just spent 4 days on the ICW and reviewed the latest information on Active Captain and all I found was information 1 year or more older.

Oh come on. I just went from Florida to the Chesapeake along the ICW. Independent of the 30 or so updates to hazards that I made, most of the shoaling and other major hazards were all touched by one or more people in April 2012 or later. I used all of those updates myself in my own cruising - drawing 6' on the ICW today is pretty tough but with the fantastic info available, I never saw less than 8.5'.

Marina and anchorage reviews are coming in by the thousands. About the only thing that we're pretty mediocre at is fuel prices - something that will start to get my attention in 2013 as we release some new capabilities.

Our server use has skyrocketed. For the first time in 6 years, I had to upgrade the server this week doubling the memory and disk storage space available.

I have a feeling there is more going on here than just a casual question about ActiveCaptain use... :?

 

[20dauntless]

Jeff, have you explored the possibility of integrating Active Captain with traditional guidebook data? For example, a user could click on a marina/anchorage/etc and the data from a traditional guidebook would pop up as well as the comments from users. Guidebook publishers could sell their data within an Active Captain app, even subscriptions could work and might provide steadier revenue. Just a thought....

 

[Anonymous]

Jeffery, I guess it must have shoaled in after you passed or you were not monitoring the depth finder very well...

 

[thataway]

Naptime,
Jeff has spent thousands of hours of his time making Active Captain work for all of us. Having known Jeff for a numbr of years, I can assure you that he moniters the depth finder extremely carefully. He is also very careful in his navigation--perhaps more so than some others. Where else will you find a comment from the developer of such a fantistic appilication reply to your complaint in less than 24 hours?

How many updates did you put in as you cruised? How far did you cruise?


It would be extremely helpful if you stated exactly where you cruised, exactly what errors you found, then corrected them.

Dauntlless, The information on the East Coast adn Gulf is better than the West Coast--where you boat. Most of the time the information is more useful than the paid ads in the "cruising guides....There is much more information in Active Captain than most cruising guides, unless you are looking for hiking trails and waterfalls.

 

[ActiveCaptain]

Jeff, have you explored the possibility of integrating Active Captain with traditional guidebook data?

I've had multiple face-to-face meetings with McGraw-Hill about doing something similar. I've looked at all of the content available from the traditional guidebooks. In the end, I don't think either capability makes sense.

My feeling is the the normal guidebooks have become so biased in their writing that you don't really get real information. Instead they try to push you to visiting a particular area. When you get there, surprise - there are one or more of their large advertisers there. I totally don't want to get involved with that in any way.

There are basically two types of traditional guidebook information that we could integrate better - background info about a particular area and event information about things happening at places at particular times. The event information is right up our alley. It's the perfect thing to integrate and we'll be doing that more in the future. It's harder than it seems because there is no general event database where "things" that are happening can be databased. There's surely a need to produce that for boating related towns.

The background type of information is handled pretty well by Wikipedia today. Pick any town, any geography, any region, and look it up in Wikipedia. In general, it does a pretty good job - often much better than the guidebooks with ways to go deeper (history, climate, population, etc). It wouldn't be hard to integrate into our data in a live way. I'd like to do it offline so that the background information is with you without needing connectivity. Or perhaps it'll keep all the Wikipedia info offline against a few routes you'll be traveling on.

My hope is to see traditional guidebooks go out of publication, especially the ones that serve up biased content misleading us boaters. I believe that those guidebooks will be looked back upon as the way we used to go cruising. They won't be around for much longer.

 

[ActiveCaptain]

I can assure you that he moniters the depth finder extremely carefully.

Having just redone every piece of electronics in our boat in February, I can guarantee that the depth sounders were closely watched. And yes, sounder(s) - we have two of them mounted 12' across from one another. That provides an incredible tool for finding channels since it can easily and reliably find differences of a couple of inches between sides. In places like Little Mud River in Georgia or the various cuts in South Carolina I carefully went side to side to find where the deeper water was located. When the different hazards weren't current, I updated them. In general, I used the data in the hazards way more than I added to it because it was pretty unusual to find a hazard with info that was more than a month old.

How many updates did you put in as you cruised? How far did you cruise?

Mr. Naptime joined ActiveCaptain on 4/10/2012. He logged onto the website a total of 3 times accessing a total of 12 markers and 0 reviews. He quite obviously has Navimatics Charts & Tides and synchronized it a total of 4 times and probably accessed the data offline (as most people do today).

Mr. Naptime has contributed 0 updates, created 0 markers, written 0 reviews, and has a total of 0 points.

 

[Captains Cat]

Methinks naptime may have been napping...

Jeff, thanks for the great job you do for us!

Charlie

 

[Will-C]

As far as free things go I would say Active Captain has been an all time winner with us! In March we cruised from Ft. Pierce Fl to Key West about 350 miles. With hiding out from the wind for a few days it took 13 days. This area has a lot of bridges with timed openings not to mention more than it's share of shallow water. I mentioned this before we use Coastal Explorer software that is interfaced with Active Captain. It's a joy to use the same program for nav and to see bridge heights, opening times, with real reveiws on marinas,anchorages all from other boaters. Everything about my use of Active Captain has been positive. I have done some input in the way of reviews on marinas. I use Active Captain is a planning tool and an in route tool to help you make decisions should things in route change. Off channel info is particularly important if the services you require might not be on the ICW. The off channel areas are of particular interest to those of us not afraid to get off the beaten path. Plus all this,plus it's is easy to use. We use the distance measuring tool for planning the length of our cruising days. Thanks Jeff for all you have done for boaters and the industry in general. Whats that saying? If you are not part of the solution you must be part of the problem.
D.D.

 

[20dauntless]

Thanks Jeff! It's great to have a developer that interacts with the users of their product. I guess we're spoiled in the northwest by the Douglass series of guidebooks that don't have any advertising (at least as far as I can tell). There doesn't seem to be as much info on Active Captain north of the Broughtons as there is in the more heavily traveled areas to the south, but I'll try to add what I can this summer.

 

[Da Nag]

How many updates did you put in as you cruised? How far did you cruise?

Mr. Naptime joined ActiveCaptain on 4/10/2012. He logged onto the website a total of 3 times accessing a total of 12 markers and 0 reviews. He quite obviously has Navimatics Charts & Tides and synchronized it a total of 4 times and probably accessed the data offline (as most people do today).

Mr. Naptime has contributed 0 updates, created 0 markers, written 0 reviews, and has a total of 0 points.

Based on many glowing reviews here from trusted members, I don't doubt the accolades thrown your way for ActiveCaptain. I'm sure it's a great resource.

What I do find troubling is your post above. Publicly posting user data you have collected at ActiveCaptain is not only incredibly bad form, but appears to go against your own privacy policy.

How do you justify such actions? Of course, if naptime approved your posting of his/her activity at your site (something not mentioned) I'll certainly retract the above criticism.

 

[ActiveCaptain]

Publicly posting user data you have collected at ActiveCaptain is not only incredibly bad form, but appears to go against your own privacy policy

We take privacy very seriously. We don't disclose email addresses, names associated with any account, or other private information. But in the crowd-source world of data, the actions you perform and the input you make are not private. How could it be? The very act of writing a review couldn't be displayed by anyone else on the system through your concern. The whole point of crowd-sourcing is to provide information to others and while your identification is private, the actions you make are not.

One of the big issues with crowd-sourcing is providing an ability where you, the reader, can evaluate the credibility and experience of the person leaving information. Every piece of information attributed to a particular person on ActiveCaptain provides their captain name and the number of points they have. Clicking on the captain name provides additional information all put together to help you evaluate the data that you'll likely make your own decisions from.

Mr Naptime uses the same name here as on ActiveCaptain with the same homeport - a decision he made which limits his own privacy.

Are you as concerned that C-Brats shows the number of posts you made, the date you joined, or other information about you on every post you submit?

 

[ActiveCaptain]

There doesn't seem to be as much info on Active Captain north of the Broughtons as there is in the more heavily traveled areas to the south, but I'll try to add what I can this summer.

We're doing OK in the PNW. We've got a ton of anchorages and really good information. Marinas are starting to update their own information and there are some hazards (wicked current in some passages up there!).

There's definitely a critical mass that's needed to fill out a particular area. As you get to less populated/traveled spots, it just takes longer. We think the model is right though. There are additional things coming that will provide even more benefits and speed up the process a little too. I'm far from done developing it all.

 

[Will-C]

I did not see any sensitive private info disclosed,shared or sold to spammers. No worse than pop up ads that appear on the C-Brat site that must have something to do with info sharing. In the context of things I thought it that the Active Captain post was surprising reserved after what appeared to me to an unfounded comments with not a lot of details about a free service. Just my opinion.
D.D.

 

[Da Nag]

Mr Naptime uses the same name here as on ActiveCaptain with the same homeport - a decision he made which limits his own privacy.

I just created an Active Captain account, and noticed the following - feel free to comment on and/or correct my observations. Having spent less than 10 minutes at the site, it's certainly possible some of the following is not 100% accurate.

- I can find no way to track down a Captain other than finding a review they posted, then clicking on the link next to their name. So, finding out anything about a Captain appears to be limited to stumbling upon a review they wrote, then clicking on their name.

- Once doing the above, none of the items listed under a Captain's "Personal Details" are public - the "Share this category with other captains" option is not checked. So by default, you specifically make this user data private. And yet, you chose to post this data from naptime's profile in a public forum.

- Regardless of the settings above, nothing related to any Captain is publicly viewable - you must be registered at the site to view any Captain details.

- Some of the naptime's details you posted - "He logged onto the website a total of 3 times accessing a total of 12 markers and 0 reviews" - doesn't appear to be viewable anywhere, with no option for the user to make such details public.

Were your disclosures a major invasion of naptime's privacy? That's not my call - privacy is a personal issue. However, you certainly appear to have taken liberties with his/her data that are not available to anyone else. That is what concerns me.

Are you as concerned that C-Brats shows the number of posts you made, the date you joined, or other information about you on every post you submit?

Nope. But the difference is, we've never claimed that info is private. Nor have we posted details about any member that are hidden from public view, i.e. when/how often they've accessed the site, what they've looked at while here, etc.

 

[Da Nag]

I did not see any sensitive private info disclosed...

"Sensitive" is not your call - it's not your personal data.

In the context of things I thought it that the Active Captain post was surprising reserved after what appeared to me to an unfounded comments with not a lot of details about a free service. Just my opinion.

And, here's my opinion - worth every bit as much as your's...

I saw the original post in a completely different light. A user was simply reporting what he noticed with the site/application - and while not a positive review, he left open the possibility that others had different experiences ("What have others experienced?")

naptime may have been incorrect in his observations about the product - I don't know. And again - I'm not blind to the fact that Active Captain gets rave reviews, nor am I discounting what appears to be significant work on Jeff's part in building/supporting/improving the product.

What I am suggesting (opinion mode on), is that Jeff's tone could have been less confrontational, and that he took liberties with data from naptime's personal use of his site to defend what he saw as an unwarranted attack on his hard work.

 

[ActiveCaptain]

....Jeff's tone could have been less confrontational, and that he took liberties with data from naptime's personal use of his site to defend what he saw as an unwarranted attack on his hard work.

I'm sorry you found my response to be confrontational. I was born in NY, NY. I think of it as being direct and to the point so as not to waste time.

I presented relevant facts to back up a debate about the quality of ActiveCaptain. Some feel that those facts were improper apparently after spending a few moments on the site for the first time. They're allowed to have that opinion. The fact is that we have a privacy policy and I completely adhered to it (I wrote it by the way).

I've said more than enough about the data we collect, why we collect it, and how we strongly protect privacy. I'm done with that discussion. If you fear that using ActiveCaptain will somehow violate some personal privacy, please don't use it.

 

[Will-C]

For me the poster in question's second post is where I don't see anything worth defending. He uses no facts just does smart remark to the effect it must have shoaled over. That is what made for my second response in the thread. For me (my opinion mode on) it was the posters lack of facts to present his case while he must have known his second post surely was going to get some sort of response. Why not contact Active Captain directly and let then answer his questions concerns directly? From my experience answers seem to come pretty fast. I mean if you really want a sandwich why not ask the chef? Active Captain's disclosure of the use of the site I thought was relevent to help with everyone's assessment of relevance and validity of the posters comments. Others had asked about the amount of information the poster had provided to active captain about the items of importance that he had discovered which appeared to be zero. I think everyone has a pretty good handle on the situation now. It will interesting if anyone elso shares your privacy concerns in thinking Active Captain stepped over the line.
D.D.

 

[starcrafttom]

Those that know me know I am a "up front " :wink: kind of guy but even I found Active captains remarks to be a bit on the defensive side and lacking on the teaching moment.

oh come on now

You and your site would have been better served if you had addressed the posted concerns and not called him crazy or lazy ( not your word but definitely your message) . Maybe learning what and how he was using your site would have been a better approach. Then helping him use the site to better his cruising.

As for the information about the poster being posted here on someone else's site? Just wrong from the start and should not have happened even if it was legally correct. My first rule is "Even if you can does not mean you should" As a Realtor I have easy and quick access to all sorts of public info of c-brats members. Amounts borrowed for homes, amounts homes sold for, how much money is owed . But none of that info is appropriate for posting here anymore then how many times some one posted at active captain, or contributed to active captain.

We are all missing the point of Naptimes post. He was looking for other to commit on how they use active captain and if they trust the info posted there. He may not have even been aware that Active captain was a member here. to be attacked the way he was and have his info from another site shared here makes this site look bad. That's pretty poor behavior no matter how you slice it. And yes that's coming from me and I am known for my bad behavior at time, that should tell you something if I thinks its rude.

Naptime, Looks like you post here a bit and I hope you do so in the future.

Active- no so much....