-CJ-

In Moscow, Russia we have really few caches. There are about 220 hides within the 3 hours drive. Most of our caches are less than 1 years old. There's a small and rather low-active community. See, our situations are quite different. What is good for your local geocaching atmosphere may influence the game badly around here. For instance, the idea of putting 5 years as a maximum cache life term sounds not so good.

In our days when I'm asked about whether someone needs to buy a handheld GPSr or may use only smartphone to try geocaching I used to answer: "Try your smartphone first and after a while you'll know better". Many people already have GPS devices in their pockets.

There's one container hidden at E and another one at M. The whole route has been one multi-step. The trick was that I (being the CO) allowed cachers to stop at E in winter (if they wanted to) and log the cache as found as soon as they sign the logbook in the E container. I think that I could E1 to start the second cache. However this would a) require another trip to the cache, expose the area where E is placed.

All stages are physical hides. To make things clear, the cache already exists with all stages and both container placed. The cache has lived a long life at the national Russian website. I'm thinking about how to transfer it properly to geocaching.com. Puzzle cache is not an option because of distances between points. From what I see, making two caches of one looks not really good. Would add even more headache. Perhaps I have to try the approach described in my previous posting and if that doesn't work with our reviewer - just forget about this seasonal difference and make one multi-step cache.

A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F -> G -> H -> I -> J -> K -> L -> M The two containers are in E and M. "In summer season you must sign the logbook at point M to log this cache as found. In winter season you must sign the logbook in point E to log this cache as found (though you're welcome to walk the whole route if you like/can)". Does this approach violate any guidelines?

How can I do this? I think I cannot just place the "winter" cache "on top" of the first half of the "summer cache" because of the saturation limit. I doubt I can place two caches "one by one"; there would be no issues with the first ("winter") cache but what coordinates should I publish for the second ("summer") cache then? What type of cache should they both be - taking into account that distances are greater then commonly required for mysteries?

Need to look through it more carefully. Looks like mystery type isn't for me since there are miles and miles of walking in my case. No. The distance between E and M is too big for a logical shortcut. Moreover, I don't want people to get to the very same final point in winter - this will look like they got a sort of discount for the same product In fact, the intermediate container is smaller than the final one, there usually are less items inside and most probably not that interesting. I think I could but I wish to know how to organize all this in a best way at the website when submitting my cache.

My question is about a real cache that I'm thinking about to publish at geocaching.com. This quest is multi-stage implemented a classical scheme for this type of geocaches: find a micro container at Step 1 - solve a small puzzle - get coordinates for Step 2 - get to Step 2 - solve a puzzle - (and so on). The cache is located in woods, distances are not so big but puzzles make cachers to choose wrong ways often. So, an average adult with some geocaching experience is able to do the cache in 2-3 days. So far there seem to be no problems about publishing this at geocaching.com. The trouble is with our rather cold and snowy climate. The whole route is so long that I initially offered cachers to choose between "full" and "light" variants of my cache. The "light" variant was indended to be most suitable in winter when doing the whole route through the deep snow and looking for microcaches in such circumstances brings more stars to D/T. For those who chose the "light" variant I placed a standard sized container in the middle of the "large" route. So, winter players could log the cache as found after they completed first half of the route and signed the logbook in the "intermediate" container. In summer this wasn't an option. Can I do anything of this sort at geocaching.com? If yes, how it should be implemented? Right now I can see that I could offer an all-season "light" cache as the legitimate variant and make the rest of the route a bonus. This isn't exactly what I want however.

Thank you all for sharing your opinions and ideas. I think we better avoid translating and using the term "hitchhiker" at whole.

I've usually done maintenance (including but not limited to adding new logbooks/logsheets) for geocaches that needed it. I used to leave old/full logbooks in containers in any situations. Nanos have always been headache because of lack of space inside them. I think I'm going to change my practice and leave old logbooks in containers only if there's enough space inside. Chances are higher for me to participate if container is good, its hiding place is nice, the CO seems active/responsive and/or the cache is in the country (more time needed to do a maintenance visit). Chances are little or zero if container was initially crappy (I mean, the CO himself chose such a crappy container, not that it was replaced by some visitor), its hiding place is awful, the CO seems to abandon his cache and/or the cache is within a city centre.

That's rather proportional to the amount of wet containers. I guess you're right. But IMHO this is not enough as a reason to repeat this fact in every thread about cache maintenance. You see, people start talking negative language like this - "don't ever maintain any cache that you don't own". With such approach one doesn't make any difference between a responsible CO and a lazy CO who doesn't care about his cache. In this thread the idea was to put a kind of repairing kits in some containers in the area. I don't see any evil propaganda of poor COs in the original idea. It's just a free offer of some stuff that can be useful for cache maintenance for those enthusiasts who wish to help. How to motivate these enthusiasts properly so their assistance is fruitful to the game at whole and not supporting poor COs - that's the general task of education. I understand your example with 35mm film containers. I've used such containers too for years and the climate in our country is really demanding to hiding practice.

No. I was thinking about the idea which can still be seen in the very first post. It was different from what you're talking about. There are too many words about poorly maintained caches and lazy COs around here.

Maybe not a special cache type but an attribute?

The idea is great if both destinations are of similar activity level. Makes little sense to built such a pair in central Moscow and central London: too many people ready to go for the box in the UK capital will be waiting for anyone willing to help them here. There are some smaller places with funny names in the US however that could be considered for such partnership caches. Moscow in Idaho or Kremlin in Oklahoma, for example

Remember there always will be people who will say you provided poor/inaccurate coordinates for your cache. This doesn't depend on any GPS accuracy. It's inside someone's heads We've got one guy here that used to announce that COs coordinates are poor and give his own coordinates as the perfect variant. In last two cases (urban caches) the difference was 9m and 7m. The background is that the guy has often complained in public about this or that cache being published "improperly": poor coordinates, vague hints, titles too long, descriptions formatted in some bad way, additional waypoints missing, inaccurate difficulty and/or terrain levels, etc. He appears to be a "cache cop" as people often call these individuals around here. So, if the OP question is related to such story of criticism I would suggest considering the described scenario. When someone announces online that "my kung-fu is better than yours" we typically don't know what GPS device he has nad how he used it. "Improper coordinates" may be the result of his own poor measurements. And I seriously doubt that we can talk about some range to be "acceptable". Sometimes 10 metres off coordinates make me sad. In other situations 20m seem to be pretty good. (Let's say, enough to find a cache).

I think that having no Earthcaches in airports in big cities is easily explained by the fact that you usually cannot see much interesting (in sense of geology) while staying within the perimeter of the airport.

Thank you wmpastor for referring my English as good. I hope to improve it actually. Yes, I know the non-geocaching meaning of the word. I also know a shorter alternative - "hitcher" (after that scary movie that gave so much advertisement to Rutger Hauer Anyway, my idea is that "hitchhiker" (in it's geocaching meaning) is probably one of those terms that were suggested long ago but haven't been used as widely as it was expected. Such words tend to change its original meaning because they aren't really popular in communications. After a while different people have (slightly) different explanations for such words. This is what actually happened to "hitchhiker" I think. They even explain it differently at geocaching.com! For example, in the glossary it is "an item that is placed in a cache, and has instructions to travel to other caches. Sometimes they have logbooks attached so you can log their travels. A Travel Bug is an example of a hitchhiker". In "Geocaching 101" they gave the word a different meaning: "A Travel Bug is a trackable tag attached to an item that geocachers call a "hitchhiker." Looks like the term became outdated. So, it would be not a good idea for us to try to "promote" this word in our language when translating various educational materials. Thank you all for your replies.

In our community (where English is a second or even third language for everyone) we've never used the word "hitchhiker" (neither its translation/equivalent). An item with an attached tag has usually been called a travel bug. We never needed any special term for this item I think. I wonder what kind of word is "hitchhiker". Is it used really often, in oral communications, e.g. people say "hitchhiker" when they talk to each other during events, etc.? Or is it used mostly in written form in educational materials and in this forum? What can you say - from your own (your community) experience? The question is important to me because we've worked on translation of different educational materials on geocaching and "hitchhiker" doesn't sound much good in Russian (and isn't used at all) so we're undecided with this term.

Great idea.

Yawn. I'm already premium. Does anyone know the answer?

Sorry, but your experience is different. I could ask questions like "Did you live in Krasnoyarsk" or "Is English your first language" but it seems that our discussion will never end then After all, I believe that the approach is not really good in its core. "I think something is going wrong around here. Let's impose new limitations to the whole game to solve the problem. Good fellas will survive in any conditions like we did ... years ago". I prefer to invest in education rather then rely on limitations. BTW, I also started in 2002 (though not at geocaching.com)

I feel you're trying to say that struggle against such behaviour in your area is more important than things I talked about. Well, at least people here know that there are votes against the waiting period proposal.

As it was earlier, a basic member could view both premium and non-premium caches on the map. Non-premium caches could be seen at all zoom levels, premium caches - at some zoom levels. One of my colleagues asked if this approach was changed by Groundspeak recently. We checked the map. Being signed in as a basic member I cannot see premium caches on the map at all, whatever zoom level I use. I hope it's a bug. Having those premium caches on the map Groundspeak could advertise basic members to join the community and get premium accounts. By removing these caches from the map they did just the opposite, I think. Also, basic members got another obstacle on their way as COs. They had cache saturation visualised on the map - now they haven't. Is it a bug?

This photo was taken in Ireland in November. Pretty warm country comparing to our standards Well, seriously, in Russia you have - thick snow carpet - it's more difficult to place caches, - temperature is sometimes too low to spend much time outdoors, - daylight too short.

Apart from not thinking about the developing countries/regions, I wonder how the proposals like that waiting period corresponds to the presumption of innocence. 1. I found 10 lame caches in my city this month. Some of them had been placed by newbies. 2. Let's make all newbies throughout the world (whoever they are) responsible for this. Another question is why people think that keeping someone out of part of the game for a couple of months will make this person a better CO. I can understand those who say "find 20 caches first, then you can place your own cache". They probably believe that seeing 20 caches makes a person more experienced. With that waiting period I cannot understand the idea. "Sit still for three months and your experience will grow dramatically". What experience does this term guarantee? Do you suggest to organize a kind of "geocaching exams" after this waiting period? My kids have no their own accounts at geocaching.com, they just play with me. One day they will probably want to register new accounts. They have long-term experience of finding and placing caches. Will they also face the "waiting period"?