-CJ-

I used to do this regularly in my region. When I'm about to place a cache far from my home location our local reviewer may ask for some working and reliable maintenance plan, right? This plan may involve some local who is able to respond to NM requests. Not necessarily myself. This is just an example. Maintenance (as I understand it from geocaching.com rules and practice and explanations within this forum) isn't limited to my personal obligation to go and replace e.g. a wet logbook immediately when I'm told to do this. It's a bit wider and more flexible. I respect your approach that your don't want anyone to do any maintenance for your geocaches. What you're saying however is "folks, don't ever maintain caches that you don't own". Thus, it seems that my respect is not mutual Community members used to help each other to maintain geocaches, it usually depends on different factors, I can even post a message asking people e.g. to add a pencil to my geocache if I forgot to put it in, this won't be a tragedy or huge violation of traditions, so why not? Please be lenient and let me accept a little help from my friends What I call "radical" is to use an extremely strong word "thief" to describe a geocacher who tried to help you in a way that may be unexpected, unliked by you or even unacceptable by rules/traditions of the game. A geocache thief it someone who intentionally steals geocaches trying to make harm to the cache, or the owner or the game at whole. We here (sadly) have some experience with such thieves. So I see distinct difference between these types of behaviour. Calling anyone's a thief sounds a bit... radical to my ear.

I agree. There are two different situations however: when a new logsheet cannot be added (mostly nanos) and when (as you mentioned) the logbook is totally wet and even can make some harm to other contents of the container. So I did in some cases. Last time a microcache was obviously muggled and (failing to contact the CO at once) I placed a small container in different location not far away and sent coordinates/description to the CO. From my point of view COs could be more active in communication with the geocaching community. I mean that if CO knows about some problem he/she may leave a note in cache log like "Please wait until I maintain it" or "Please replace the full logbook with a new one and send me a scan of the old one" or "Please contact me in advance if you're about to visit this cache". This could be helpful. I suppose that to be responsible for a CO doesn't only mean to be ready to rush to any cache and repair it. It's also about being ready to communicate with cache seekers, to find local maintainers, at last to let other geocacher to adopt the cache. Interesting. Will watch the movie again

Despite a newbies' intentions, you call it an act of theft. This opinion was already made public but even if it wasn't (and wasn't related to any specific situation) it's not just about publicity. It's about personal understanding how geocaching is played in practice. COs are different. Most are happy when I help them to do little maintenance for their geocaches. Some don't care. Some say that it's not a good practice and it's better to post a NM message. Your position is the most radical I've heard. I usually don't know COs of caches that I'm going to visit and I definitely don't wan't anyone to think of me as a thieve. At the same time I see no sense in travelling to some remote location, finding a cache, discovering a wet/unusable logbook and leaving the place being not able to sign the logbook and log the cache as found. In theory, the best option would be to write COs of "problematic" questions that I'm thinking of going to and as if they need any assistance with maintenance. And probably write down COs phone numbers.

What if I'm a newbie who saw a problem and wished to help the CO and the following visitors? Would you blame me as thief or hostage taker in public afterwards?

I'm not one of these people you mentioned but I'm from the community where one can sometimes hear such rumours (geocaching.com is a "pay-and-play" service, etc.) IMHO the reasons are quite simple. 1) People don't have experience of playing geocaching outside their local community, they just repeat what they've been told long ago. 2) They have put much efforts in the development of their community and wish to see more positive contrast between their work and geocaching.com. "They take money and we don't!" 3) Some people are just jealous. ("You say their site has some nice functionality? Right, they can do this because they invested megabucks in the development". I recently had a conversation with one geocacher who looked deeply insulted by Groundspeak. The reason was that he didn't know English and geocaching.com lacked Russian interface. The guy was absolutely convinced that since there were some membership fees Groundspeak was a corporation which must provide comfortable service (including translations to different languages, Russian too). I tried to explain that it is a community related issue: if we need Russian translation we should take care about it (become volunteers and do this job) but I doubt that he understood me. I think that he still believes that Groundspeak is poor in its business since he's not satisfied. Anyway, I would say none of geocaching websites is free of charge. It's not just about whether one has free access to cache coordinates or not. Geocaching is a database of geocaches, all made by cache owners who spent much efforts on their publication and maintenance. If we summarized these efforts we could see that they were rather expensive. It's especially clear in areas like Russia where we lack geocaches to find and have to work hard on placing new ones. For myself geocaching has always been mostly an investment of time and money. So I'm not pleased when someone says: "Our game must stay free of charge, not like geocaching.com!" Luckily, it's not really a huge problem in many cases: when people start playing geocaching they usually forget about "capitalists" and simply enjoy the game

Good for you

I see. Thank you all for replies. Was much impressed with video. As for my last question, it happens there's similar discussion in the next thread, I won't duplicate it.

5 geocaches per hour within a month.

AFAIK there is no team account support at geocaching.com. If John, Paul, George and Ringo already have their own accounts at the website and used to play alone but want to create a team they cannot just "combine" their accounts in any way but have to register a new one. Let it be "The Beatles". Now John goes geocaching, finds a cache, logs it at the site with "The Beatles" account. Is it practiced (and/or stipulated by any rules?) to stop at this point? I mean, "The Beatles" has its statistics increased by one find, and individual accounts haven't? Or do John, Paul, George and Ringo feel comfortable at geocaching.com to leave their personal "found it" logs in this case?

My geocaching colleagues and me have discussed a couple of times how it was possible to log so many caches as found in one day as some players do. OK, good roads, good weather, plenty of free time, long powertrails with a distance of .1 miles between caches, good organization of a trip, I can understand this. Nevertheless, some simple calculations show that a person logged e.g. about 5 geocaches per hour. (Once I saw a profile of a cacher who did one cache in about 3-5 minutes). How is it possible? The only idea that came into our minds was that such people actually are large geocaching teams (families?) and that each team member goes outside alone, finds a cache and signs its logbook on behalf of the whole team. Is it so? Are there any other explanations?

"Was here around noon, 23 Nov 2002. Approached the cache from the Yamuga railway station on foot without any problems, chose another route to return to the same station. It was an easy find. Great place for those who like to have a rest enjoying nature, a river and a beautiful pine forest. Although there were too many people. Took one of those green frogs (one with an ice axe), left a CD-RW. Thanks for the cache". The toy frog was very much alike the Geocaching symbol Sadly, I don't remember what happened to it later. The cache is still alive.

The issue is well known in our area and many people here do believe that making additional tracks helps. I would say that tracks matter (and their quantity as well) but the most important is whether your tracks look suspicious/interesting to muggles or not. It's much like a stealth technique. E.g. if there's a standalone monument in a snowy park and tracks lead there from a path I would say that this don't seem unusual. Someone just wished to look at the monument at a closer distance. People feed birds, walk with their dogs, play snowballs, do many things that are of less or no interest to others. Would I follow some man's tracks that lead from a remote parking lot to bushes round the corner of a building that looks abandoned? I would probably not However, I recently failed to find one urban micro cache that was located behind a small billboard standing about 5 meters away from pavements. The billboard was clean, no information on it, and I would have to pass a small fence to reach the cache. I though that would look too unusual and suspicious for muggles (heavy traffic around) so I decided to return when it will be not snowy (perhaps at night). As for geocachers, I would say no "additional tracks" or anything of this kind will prevent an experienced geocacher from understanding the situation

I'm talking not about obvious spoiler photos of geocache hides but about photos of containers. Personally I have nothing against a photo of a standard 2l plastic box somewhere in woods since both size and material are usually known from the cache description. I also know there are COs that used to give full descriptions ("A 5 cm bison tube with a tiny magnet, all painted in black") and it's up to them I believe. But if a CO doesn't do this than he may think that less details mean more fun when searching for his/her cache, right? I've seen photos of nanos and micros attached to logs and when this happened with the geocaches that I owned I sometimes (not every time however) deleted such photos as spoilers. Does anyone share my attitude? Do COs usually care? If you do, have you done anything to try to prevent cache hunters from uploading such photos to the site?

And that was a good answer, LOne_R, thank you. I just doubt that all 40 geocachers knew this specific situation as good as you. Perhaps they (as you said) didn't want to raise noise but I would say it's possible that people simply don't care. They're happy with their "I found it!" and leave everything else to COs. Perhaps if (in this case) there was not even a wet logbook there would be less visitors but more NMs. Am I right? It's very important to me to understand general style of playing the game because (as it was already said) geocaching has been played a bit differently here. I would probably be upset with a visitor posting a NA or NM message to any of my geocaches and even posting a photo of a soaked logbook; after this conversation I will most probably still be upset but now I see more reasonable motives behind such actions, so thank you again.

A1: - I forgot a pen so I didn't sign the logbook but I marked this cache as found. A2: - My pen wasn't working but... A3: - The logbook was full but... A4: - It was wet... A5: - I failed to open the rusty lid... A6: - I failed to get the container out of its hiding place because it was frozen... A7: - ...or because someone was approaching... A8: - I found a pile of burned plastic that once was a container... A9: - I found the hiding place, the box has gone, so I took a photo of myself... A10: - It was too dark / It was raining heavily / My kids were crying ... ... etc. Meeting with such logs/requests (as a CO) I feel that these people kindly offer me to choose between a) becoming a bastard who doesn't believe good people, deletes logs and is naturally against real fun of the game, or supporting the idea that caches may be logged as found without fulfilling one of the main conditions of the game - to sign logbooks and that Groundspeak policy may be omitted "in certain conditions". It is not between a CO and a cache hunter (as some people used to say) because it's usually public. The less problematic I believe would be for a cache hunter not to mark the cache as found. After all, it could be your 1,349 geocache. Will it really be so painful to have "only" 1,348 finds?

Altough there are not so many geocaches in "my area" I believe I will never log them all. Some of them just seem not interesting. I'd better place my own geocache in some place that is definitely worth visiting.

This is why I'm trying to learn as much useful from these forums as I can without being afraid of looking as a newbie For instance, I understood quite clearly the idea that Then what do you think - why it hasn't happen in almost two years and after more than 40 visits?

Thank you, I respect your arguements. Just wish that there would be less photos of ruined containers at whole And I see any repairings and cache replacement as a community service - also with hopes that if I do this for a visited cache maybe someone will help to repair my cache some time

Thank you all for your quick and useful answers. In pure theory I cannot show photos and tell stories even to my close friends: who can guarantee that one day some of them won't travel to Ireland and use my remembered photo as a spoiler? From what I've been told here I conclude that if I - write my text in Russian, - don't mention codes, names, COs, - strip geotagging from photos, this will eliminate any real chances for a cheater. Well, I also see it is not enough because it's an issue of ethics so I have to ask permission from COs. This would be polite, of course, but would also ruin the idea. It would not only take much time and leave me without some percentage of responses, it's pretty clear that some people will not be happy to hear that spoilers to their caches are published wherever on the net. Period. I could also split the stories about geocaches from the stories about places of interest, geographical names, dates, routes, so that geocaches would be abstract. This will make the text much less colourful and (sadly) doesn't solve the problem described above. In this circumstances I think the best solution for a story teller would be to replace spoilers with some more or less similar but fictional details. E.g. a large city park in Dublin may be changed to a small park in Cork, a stone wall of a mansion (at some photo) described as one of a local pub, etc. - so the spoilers will be gone. After all, it is not a chronological story "how I spent my vacations" but an attempt to show how a cache can be hidden, what containers people use here and there, and so on.

So, this is case is specific and your photo must be mostly for a local reviewer, if I understood you correctly. Yes, we here do have similar people that don't care much about their geocaches and under such circumstances I would also think twice before doing any maintenance (frankly, I would most probably avoid visiting such poor geocaches, especially if I have a good choice of other hides around there). If I am so close to the CO that I know not only his geocaching practice but even about his broken leg I think I will simply call/email him and ask what I can do for his cache. In most cases I know nothing (or very little) about COs. Isn't is more reasonable for a cache hunter to do what seems to be better for the cache, for himself (who likes to sign wet logbooks? ) and for the following hunters without thinking about personalities whom he actually doesn't know? Don't you think that taking a photo of a unusable wet logbook and posting it to the cache log takes more time of yours (and definitely more time of the CO) than replacing it?

Oh, I see. Thank you. I read logs that you linked to. E.g. GCP0H6: Lone_R wrote "Just a baggie. The container is gone" (20 Nov, 2012). There are two cachers after that date with "Found it" logs and no comments. At 30 Nov, 2011 the sharps wrote his NM note: "Cache is in a ziplock, no hard container". In March 2011 the CO wrote his maintenance log: "I left a temporary cache bag..." Thus, more than 40 geocachers (since March 2011) knew that there was no container in place they were going to visit. This lasted for almost two years. According to the last photo the logbook eventually gone wet is now in undreadable condition. Some people may have problems writing in it, I believe. The questions: wouldn't it be easier for any of cache visitors just to put a new container there? I think this could save time and nerves, keep the logbook alive, and all this at a little cost.

Could you please provide an example or two of such situation?

I've traveled a bit in Europe, mostly in Ireland, visited some great sites and would like to share my experience with Russian readers. In our country geocachers don't know much about how the game is played around the world so it could be also a bit of "geocaching education". There's no need to mention cache codes and I could easily avoid writing cache names. In some situations I'd like to add photos of e.g. a container or a camouflage technique. I would also like to describe beautiful surroundings / places of interest. The text will be in Russian only and not widely distributed (mostly at my personal non-commercial webpage). I seriously doubt that anyone who will load the page _and_ can read Russian _and_ is interested in this reading will use this indirect data as spoilers to go to Ireland and hunt for these very caches. However, I'm not sure if there's any practice/traditions/rules on that matter. I consider that I should probably contact COs to find out if they have any objections though it will definitely take much time, disturb many people, and I cannot imagine that I will have to translate my texts in English so COs could review it. At the same time, I'm not sure about whether Groundspeak has any limitations/conditions for such publicatons or not and if they are seen as abuse. I would appreciate any suggestions/thoughts/knowledge.

IMHO all repairs are good and should be done if possible. For replacement and moreover moving the cache into some other hiding place I would contact the CO first and offer help. Some COs will probably do nothing and then I agree with you. Others may be very responsive, friendly and willing to do maintenance but (for some reasons) cannot do it right now . If I can, why should I just pass by? This is mostly important for geocaches far from civilization. Maybe they feel themselves a little bit uncomfortable by doing no help where it was so easy to do. On the other hand, they may think that if COs are responsible for their caches, it's up to COs to check the caches regularly - so there's no need to write about their condition. +1

If you have any geocaching-related questions please feel free to contact me directly by email cj -at- neocaching.ru or in this forum.