mustakorppi

Last time I rented a car it had Apple car which made things really easy. Geocaching app on iPhone —> select the cache you want, click the car icon and select Waze —> navigate to cache using Waze on your car’s display.

Slightly going off a tangent here, but I just had a bit of an epiphany about “park & grabs”. A 1.5/1.5 micro in a park at the edge of a residential area was published in my town yesterday. The CO appears to be fairly young, with one similar hide nearby. Now a number-chasing cacher certainly could drive by, park and grab those caches, but are the caches themselves park & grab? They’re probably just places a kid that doesn’t have a car can easily get to. The caches themselves certainly don’t force anyone to park and grab them (see the photo in my latest find for evidence). They just are. So from now on, I choose to think of simple trads as Choose Your Own Adventure caches instead.

Any one of those caches is perfectly fine. But if your area has just one waterfall, does your awesome crack enigma while up in a tree puzzle have to be right there?

I see large areas that don’t have caches. Are those blocked by waypoints to caches no one visits, or is it just that no one has chosen to place a cache there? Or if we concentrate just on scenic spots, well I can’t tell much from just looking at the map of course. But am I correct in assuming there’s plenty of places with an ocean view where a cache could still be placed? Or where a cache that gets visited already is.

You are taking things out of context. My own favorite cache looks eerily similar to yours on the map https://coord.info/GC3CAZZ Also just 16 finds and it’s a year older My examples dealt with unvisited caches that block an area (either a large area or a particularly nice area) from cachers in an area that otherwise has a lot of caching going on, and I tried to avoid getting into whether a cache is good or not as that certainly isn’t up to a reviewer to decide. But personally, I completely agree. I don’t have the time and energy to hide caches like that, but I certainly like finding them.

If my cache is rarely visited by design, I’d probably have thought it out in advance and would be able to justify it. If not, of course I’d be hurt at first. But hopefully I could reflect, check my ego and see that geocaching isn’t an individual sport. More realistically, I probably wouldn’t be proud of the cache (or my choice of placement for it) in the first place. How do you get that from I don’t care about cache’s popularity, I care about effectively promoting nice locations with geocaches. The popularity of individual caches that aren’t in a nice location isn’t relevant to this. (Or I guess it is in the way that caches in bad locations make people less inclined to find caches as a means of finding nice locations, but banning power trails, LPCs etc. is another topic.) The angle isn’t that ”location could be used better for a cache” it’s that caching could be better used for the location. The waterfall is more important than the preform. Also, I have been very deliberate in not making value judgements or saying that one cache is better than another. Visitor count or frequency has very little to do with how good a cache is. Another cache being better for that location is a meaningful distinction to me at least. But I guess this quoted passage is the heart of our disagreement? You want to shield COs from anything that could be constituted as an attack on their creation, and by extension themselves, unless the CO forces the situation by ignoring guidelines and rules. I understand that consideration, and I know of COs that have flat out said they’d quit if they had to receive negative feedback (e.g. review score feature, or just negative logs). I don’t really want to hear anything negative about my own caches either, even the one I know deserves it. I think that the reason for a reviewer to contact a CO isn’t really because a rule was broken, it’s because their cache is in such a state that the negative effect it has on the caching community overrides whatever enjoyment the CO might get from owning the cache. I’m not sure but I believe the scenarios I described might do that as well. I don’t think they should ever be written down as rules (too fuzzy, too subjective). Of course. But, as you said, the very reason that creation exists was to bring cachers to a specific location and that didn’t work out. If a chef creates a dish that doesn’t bring in customers, they drop it off the menu and create something else.

It really feels like you’re going after strawmen though. I have not suggested anything. I gave three example scenarios and asked if there might grounds for any kind of reviewer action. The first and second were a situation where an inordinate amount of space in a given area is being taken by waypoints of caches not being found. You turned that into a “single cache” taking “.10 circle of space”. Even though I already explicitly acknowledged that’s not an issue. My third example was about an unpopular cache in a scenic location, and you just went off about power trails of all things. Of course people hide caches for different reasons, and the cache itself can now be the attraction. But hiding caches in a scenic location specifically to showcase the location is one of the core ideas of geocaching. I literally said two sentences before the one you quoted that they shouldn’t. You have a fairly strict idea of a reviewer’s job, and that’s good if the alternative is power tripping and deleting caches on a whim. But I ultimately don’t feel a reviewer’s job is restricted to specific listed actions. Some individual reviewers may specialize in them sure, but the whole job is simply to keep the game going. But to be clear, in this kind of scenario, I’m thinking more in terms of having a quiet word in a meet rather than going for the reviewer tools. Well, if the CO really wants people to visit those places and their current cache isn’t doing the job, shouldn’t the CO be thinking about archival anyway? Or changing the multi to use non-physical waypoints. The only situation where this is a problem is if the CO is more attached to their own cache than to the locations.

First, I’m asking for a discussion. This is a topic I’ve considered, but I haven’t really been able to decide one way or the other so I tried to write without positing an opinion. If having a discussion requires someone to play the devil’s advocate then fine. The angle I was trying for is that cachers want to find caches, they want to find them in that general area (as evidenced by surrounding caches), but they can’t do it in the place the unvisited cache is (or else it wouldn't be unvisited). If it’s a single point cache here and there, that’s part of the game. If an entire town is literally grid of physical waypoints of caches that most cachers can’t or won’t find for whatever reason, surely that is a problem for the hobby no matter how well maintained the waypoints might be. That extreme example would require deliberate maliciousness, which can be addressed as a separate matter, but is there a point between that and the odd T5/D5 that could need looking into? By asking this in this thread I assumed it to be evident, but to be clear I’m strictly talking about number of logs (finds or at least notes/DNFs from people working on the cache). I’m coming at this from the idea that you should place a cache in a location that’s worth visiting, to tell people it’s there, give them an excuse to come. Really the idea is to visit the location; the cache is just a bonus. But when a cache doesn’t get logs, it’s not really doing that. Would it really be that bad if a reviewer asked the CO to consider the issue? I’m not talking about forced archiving. Maybe the nature is frail and can’t handle the crowds a 1.5/1.5 would bring and the CO recognized that. But maybe they simply miscalculated the interest their cache would have. And to be clear, I wasn’t saying every cache in a nice spot needs to be accessible/popular. A bridge might offer a nice view, but it’s also the only place to hide a bridge climbing cache.

Ignoring remote locations for a while, is there any merit to this type of targeting of unpopular caches in otherwise busy caching areas? If the cache that has multiple physical waypoints and thus blocks a large area? If the cache blocks a large area together with other unpopular caches? That is, any single cache in the group would be fine but their combined effect blocks a large area from a large number of cachers. Is in a particularly scenic spot and is unobtainable to most cachers for a reason that isn't related to the location (e.g. a run-of-the-mill T5 tree climb near a waterfall)

Bicycle or bicycle and train (commuter pass so extra rides for caching are “free”) is how I get my daily cache. And of course I try to do my caching when I have to travel anyway (e.g. get off the train in the middle of my commute to grab a cache and continue the commute on the next train). I’m sort of planning to do a multi day cycling/caching trip next summer, but nothing concrete yet. Not super into sleeping outdoors so I’m kinda undecided about how the logistics and whether it’d involve any real money saving

If you were fine with what went on before you first saw the cookie prompt, just click ok. You are not granting any extra rights.

Benchmarks’ codes start with two letters and can be used in an url, if you want to count those.

The OP’s suggestion was that a CO could hide a special cache type that contains a QR code instead of a logbook. Logging such a cache wouldn’t strictly even require a smart phone, let alone mobile data. Of course a smartphone is the most commonly available TOTT that could do it. I have to wonder how this thread would have turned out if Garmin had even one model with a barcode scanner instead of Chirp though.

Are we talking about the same Groundspeak that’s busy making Adventure Labs a thing? Let alone historical features like NGS Benchmarks, or the three cache types only available around HQ.

How many of those don’t actually have a phone with them at all though? Even feature phones and dumb phones tend to have a camera. I’d have to go back at least 15 years for my last phone that didn’t. Back on topic, those ideologically opposed to phones could get a dedicated barcode scanner and we could have dozens of threads about how scanners have a much better battery life than phones, and are more rugged and not affected by bright sunlight...

We already have cache types that require you to take photos, we have a cache type that requires either a smart phone or very specific out of production gps, and we have attributes to indicate a need for all kinds of equipment besides basic navigation gear and a pen. No one is saying get rid of trads. That said, I don’t really see the case for QR code in logging. Seems like requiring a photo log (of a thing in the container, if you want to have a container) solves the issue with paper just as well, but is way less susceptible to mass-spoofing than a qr code.

At least the iPhone app does require your own text, and that was rightly pointed out to the op as an easy method of posting NM logs. I posted because two forum regulars contradicted this advice with misinformation. Or maybe the android app is different?

I posted a NM from the app on Monday and it let me type whatever I wanted right there in the NM log. Aren’t those canned NM logs what you get from the website using the new interface?

Yeah, but to be fair it's not like they only learned about the limitations of the app now... Does the "View larger map" link on the cache page work for a cache in this state? I know it doesn't for archived and locked caches, but not sure about locked but not archived.

Yes, I got it today after logging my find for the day. But isn’t it weird how this ongoing promotion is completely invisible in the app and almost invisible on the website?

I understand why some prefer not to look at the hint. However, I don’t understand how you don’t recognize it as a legit place to hide information. You not wanting to look there isn’t the CO’s problem. Yes it’s not ”intended” for that, but neither is HTML comments. I can agree that simply giving the coordinates directly in the hint would be a pretty bad puzzle once the novelty wears off.

I’m now 247 finds into my streak and the highest streak challenge in my country is 500 so that’s the goal. Doing that will also complete my find calendar and get me to 1000 finds total so I guess I’m set as far as stats and milestones go. Maybe try to do 11 12 13 cache types in a single day as that seems uniquely doable in 2020. Other than that, there are a few slightly hard local caches that I’d like to finally find next summer, maybe hide a few more of my own. Geocaching for me is largely an excuse to ride my bike around, but perhaps I could plan some more ambitious rides/caching trips in 2020.

The mega webcam cache type has rules already? Ok, draw an x in the sand and tell the head organiser to stand on it. Hoist it up a tree or hide it in a lamp post, a bunch of geocachers can surely figure it out. There may be regional differences at play here, but where I live someone would just grab a prepaid sim card with more than enough bandwidth at capped at €1 per day the next time they buy groceries. If your event otherwise has a professional-level online presence that is working the entire time, I don't understand how figuring out a webcam would be an issue. This isn't exactly breaking new ground. What I'm describing is a reasonably rugged low-tech, low-bandwidth set up that requires very little technical expertise and resources to provide very basic webcam functionality. It uses hardware that the event organization has a reasonable chance of already having (or being able to borrow) and software that the organization is probably already using for the event site. For trail cam-specific maintenance, you put some spare batteries in the head organiser's pocket and tell them to check the blog every now and then. If your event organization has more resources, then obviously this can be improved upon. Instead of sending emails to post blog entries, you could find a device that can upload photos it takes to ftp or it's own image hosting service. Bet there's an app for that too. So you set up auto-delete or you have the head organiser kill time by deleting old posts while they're standing on the x with the camera. The latter approach is more palatable if we're literally on a 2G trail cam set up like I described, where I'd probably set it up to be more like 1 pic per 5-10 minutes just to make sure it can finish the upload before taking another image. This is still a lot better than some existing webcam caches. Your mega event probably wants to have a site with no inappropriate ads anyway, you don't need a business account just to be ad-free at wordpress.com, you don't need to host your wordpress site at wordpress.com, and we can just switch from wordpress to something else like drupal.

A wireless trail camera operates on AA batteriees and can email a ”good enough” image over a 2G connection every few minutes. You can post to a wordpress blog by email. Strap the cam to the head organizer’s chest

I can’t really prevent the container from being muggled (or the webcam URL changing) and I can’t prevent the entire hiding spot from being destroyed (or the webcam being taken offline). Unless I own the land (or the webcam). What exactly is the meaningful difference?