lee737

Occasionally.... it depends on a few things..... 1. If I'm short of FPs to give out I might start looking for caches to retrieve them from... this hasn't been the case for a while, especially after the 20FP gift from HQ.... (see below) 2. I would then only remove them from a cache that was archived by a reviewer for non-maintenance. 3. I would only remove them from a player who seemed inactive So, if I give you an FP, and you need to archive your cache yourself, and keep geocaching, I won't take back my FP.... otherwise... I might....

This was a straight up case of a slack CO, who was 'woken up' by a NA log too it seems! I DNFd this one on my first try as a newbie, because I wasn't 'capable of reading past logs, reading clues or using a little bit of intuition to find a pretty easy cache'. I remember piggy backing my youngest at not quite 3 years of age looking for this, miles away from the cache of course....

How far out are the coords? It isn't an old cache - has a NM been posted? Sometimes a NM/NA will wake up a sleepy CO....

And how much of this will go on do you think?

Logging a find? Are we assuming attending an event will count??

This one is going to test us a bit..... but we'll have a go!

I think they are being overly conservative.... people rock climb and abseil in signposted areas for same in NPs, and are accidentally killed/injured in doing so at times..... they haven't banned that yet. Who only knows why geocaching gets the 'special' treatment??

Lucky for us I guess....

Why is that? The way I see it with virtuals is that, since we aren't placing anything there, just advice to go somewhere and take a look at something. If that area has free access for people to come and go, what is the big deal?

+1..... some of us pushed through these, but a lot won't bother....

I just grab it straight away, unless it appears the previous holder literally dropped it there the same day, then I'll leave it to the next day. If they have an issue and let me know, I'm happy for them to regrab it and log it properly. Nobody has had that issue.

Log as found. Log a Needs Maintenance log, or at the very least mention in your log that the log is wet. If you can't really sign it (they can be pretty disgusting after a while), take a photo and add to your log. If it is an ongoing problem with this cache, and there is already a NM log about this issue more than a month ago, and there has been no response from the CO, log a Needs Archived log asking a reviewer to check on things. That is what I do, some people would think it is a bit hard. The above is tempered a little for very old caches, especially if they are grandfathered in a national park around here. Otherwise, we are better off without wet/crappy caches - it isn't that hard to make a cache that doesn't get soaked. And it isn't hard to fix if it does get water affected, like if someone doesn't close the container properly. CO's who don't fix caches promptly, or at least don't pipe in to the logs about what they will do - deserve to have their caches archived, and the map free'd up for someone else.....

People who don't/won't log a DNF at other times too..... We recently went looking for a few tough hides (DNF'd them all!) - reading logs I noted several times - 'found on our third attempt' etc, 'found after returning with a hint'.... but there were non prior DNFs..... :O

I'm not sure if you'd even be allowed to have a blank cache name (I suspect not), I certainly haven't seen it, except for emoji containing names in the GPS.....

You’re right, we use them that way too, really just as a backup to the GPS…. Removing emojis does leave the text…. I can’t imagine GS fiddling with the PQ generator anytime soon though! I’ll stick to stripping them out myself….

Yep - other common outliers are the very old caches..... I only ever give them FPs if they are well maintained.... very rare.

Exactly. This can't be avoided with any rating system though.... or any great cache can soon become less great if not designed to cope with the elements, and not maintained.....

PQ's are designed for GPSr units..... they can't display the characters, and it corrupts other aspects of the display as well - ideally the PQ would be made without them. I wonder if these contribute to some of the instability I note with GPSr's at times... random crashes etc....

For the most part, FPs do tend to cluster on the better caches. Better locations and/or better containers. There will be outliers, there always is, but on the whole, FPs are a reasonable, quick way to sort caches out by quality. There are limitations of course.

+1... at least if the PQ generator would strip out all non-ASCII characters.....

I'll give it a try now....

Thanks for the tip! I'm going to use this..... addit... at least test it.... I hadn't realised it was just completed... It does seem to work fine though, with my Garmin Montana. A suggestion - could you include an option to select the replacement character with something other than a ?, even just not replacing with anything??

I had a play around with a text-editor I havem but it didn't really have a non-laborious way of removing these characters.... this website does though.... https://texttools.org/remove-emojis Testing a resultant file in my Garmin Montana, works a treat..... I might start adding this to my GPX file workflow.....

Don't you love it.... this is a little trail of caches, all with fun emojis in the cache names..... the GPS doesn't know what to do....

I wonder why people bother to give HQ favourite points!? what a waste.... Where I come from, 19% FPs is probably a pretty good cache to be honest....