MOCKBA

yes, yes. What is the game, JoGPS? Eeverybody is playing a different game variation here. When Grounspeak will close accounts of those who don't log all of their visits online, then perhaps we'll get an authoritative answer as to which styles of the game are admissible and which aren't. Given the rate with which Jeremy and his ilk crack down on everything different and everybody different lately, the banning of cachers who wouldn't log online is about to happen too. Actually CO Admin you are welcome to ban me right now

Hedberg, Firstly I wasn't positive if your info was about some stats sites, or about Buxley's Waypoint. If the latter is indeed true, then is this info posted anywhere? Of course when CO Admin mentioned that Buxley's was "having technical difficulties on their end" and refused to answer my specific questions, then the Admin's silence seemed more eloquent than any words. But I wonder if it is already time for mourning, and for revenge? Has the death certificate for Buxley's been finalized? Add'l info still appreciated!

Legal problems, any other problems originating with Groundspeak, or bona fide tech problems of the other site?

Yeah, right. I could imagine all of us individually would put much greater load on the servers doing the same kinds things as Buxley's, but often w/o the skills, on our own over and over again. Well, one more reason not to geocache in other states and on the road. As if the proliferation of guardrail and lamppost caches wasn't an invitiation to give up already.

It looks like Buxley's stopped adding new cache info a few weeks back. Sabotaged by Groundspeak, or any more benign reason? I looked for markwells but didn't find any more clues...

Yeah. For starters, ban night caches, which guide you to the location with the help of a flashlight or a blacklight. Then anything which requires compass navigation. The list of creative ideas to be supressed goes on.

I don't think it's really so good news. When they finally come up with their system of rules and permissions, it'd probably require every future cache to have an annual permit with steep registration and renewal fees, with restrictions still outlawing caches in most of their area, and with a bond posting requirement... In any case it's good to see CO's mood brighten, so thanks commissioners at least for that.

LOL make your future event caches members only ... that will teach 'em. It's funny though that it's you who's complaining here ... about server overload and insufficient revenue and ingrateful users. Lighten up! I was just trying to warn the topic starter against stepping into a potential minefield, that's it. ====================================== As to the merits of member rewards and the shortcomings of Groundspeak's business plan... it's been discussed ad nauseum elswehere, why do it again, a markwell will do.

Wow, we seem to have plenty of caches in the neighborhood - 20 unfound in 2.1 miles! A few unavailable, and I've been to 6 out of 20, but not strictly speaking cache hunting. It's just, there were interesting gamepieces or prizes inside those caches, so we went for the swag rather than for the caching experience. I mean I already know the neighborhood fairly well even without caching, and none of the 20 offers exciting mental or physical challenges either, so why spend any more time here?

If you consciously wanna jump into a contentious and divisive issue, that's up to you. You may or may not get some flak for it. IMO you'll probably deserve it, since you lump yourself with those who call us non-paying members riff-raff, thieves, and/or vandals. But I suppose you've given it a consideration. You should also consider that your cache will never be listed by Buxley's Waypoint, not even after you open it in a month, and thus those cachers who use Buxley's maps as a primary resource may never even notice that you've hidden something. with all respect Jo ... you make a clear and loud statement by your hides and your posts. So, try being consistent & let others to speak up too. But if you don't wanna hear any criticism, then you should change your ways or shut up and stop complaining.

and indeed, mafia a-la geocaching.com should be played with proper terminology. Call 'em "Admins" and elimination is called "Archival", and here we go

Well apparently this wasn't true. I found the bug again since I wanted to double-check if I overlooked any important instructions on its laminated tagsheet. So: the laminated tag just says things like 'move me along, have fun' and nothing whatsoever about remote caches. So while I am planning to leave in a not-so-remote cache this time ... I log it again in and out of the Royal Treasure - Top of Utah cache to restore the mileage ... in less than 2 minutes, I receive a log deletion notice from the owner. Again. Pray tell me, how did I manage to piss you off now? And if you really want to re-release it yet again, why do you allow others to log its moves?

I don't get it, Jeremy. Did he buy the product from Groundspeak or from its competitor ? Anyway. I play with two competing travellers, and I'm glad to announce that one more competing travelling gamepiece was born today, a Russian-speaking froggie traveller The id number is etched on "her" green body, so in this sense, there is no tag to complain about

... but, A2Z, what's level-5 in it? Any more puzzle layers after you find the rings? Or they are hidden in a very sneaky manner?

Many areas have more then one reviewer, plus they are sometimes sick or on vacation and have other reviewers covering for them. How would the website know which reviewer to email a note to? It's always fun to see Mopar ready-to-pounce at my next shot at this site's flaws. Since my "THREE NO's" principles are against asking for improvements or suggesting improvements, you leave me in a bit awkward position Anyways here's my rough understanding of approver's queues: The queues are likely organized through a database table by date, region, and current handler if there is one (presumably this value is NULL when it's freshly submitted). Each individual approver's queue is a combination of not-yet-assigned caches (NULL approver) and the caches where approver is assigned to be THIS ONE (i.e. the follow-ups). These queues are typically way overgrown, i.e. there is no ready mechanism to do bulk cleanup of the old queue entries. Therefore, once your submission grows stale, it may end up in a pile of old queue entries, and away from attention. Once an approver is assigned, a cache report goes out of default queues of other approvers, although they could still retrieve and modify it on a case-by-case basis. (I don't believe that there is a general mechanism for re-assigning approvers for follow-ups when the original approver is on vacation. It is probably done either case-by-case, or by ad-hoc queries). This just to say that the database generally knows who to send the communications about the queued cache reports. One of the relevant DATE fields may also be updated when a new Nore to Approver is submitted, effectively bumping a report to the top of a queue.

You don't know? And who proudly hunted the WICCA (sp?) cache? (Of course, not everybody knows that college chicks can't be into 8-bit theater, you just can't blame 'em ) Back on topic, it never ceases to amaze me how people want to share their real-life identities, and to trust other to do the same. How old is evrybody and where they work and live and real names of every friend and family... C'mon it's the Cyberspace and you haven't got the best map of its bad neighborhoods. You may have you realspace a*s burned that way, and most certainly, everybody out there may be a female, and not even of a human species.

It is easy to check elswehere in the forums, in an unlikely case if I recall it wrong. But AFAIK leaving a new Note to Approver isn't an effective way to follow-up to approver's questions. That's 'cuz the Note is e-mailed to yourself but not to the approver, for whatever oversight of this feature's designers. To reach the approver, use Groundspeak e-mail. Copy to yourself to keep records. You may mention the Notes to Approver in your e-mail, but in themselves, the Notes won't do the notification. Also, at the Profile page of the Approver, check when he/she last logged in to the site. The poor chaps take vacations or caching trips sometimes, which may leave the rank-and-file worrrying about response times for no good reason.

What stuffed mascot? My GeoPooch is a real creature, a female BTW (and ISO small males), with her very own geocaching account and a few finds, but no hides yet. She is mostly active in the local cache games, whenever the rules and penalties preclude me from doing weird moves through my human account. But only at cache locations where the dogs are legal

Nice question. Sounds like you've been pondering this cache of mine, huh? As far as I can tell, Universal Transverse Mercator is a map projection. I.e. the actual shape of the bumpy skin of our planet is projected onto a series of flat sheets of paper, which together form a "zone". Within the zone, you can attach one sheet to another, and the junction of the sheets will always have a perfect match of features on either side. To achieve this, all the bumpiness of the actual Earth surface is essentially squished. The flat-sheet xy coords are the UTM values, but the z coord is expressed on the map not with respect to the "flat sheet", but with respect to the underlying NAD27 elipsoid. You are correct that the distances between higher-elevation points would be typically slightly underestimated in an UTM representation (for a 10,000 ft elevation, the error will be on the order of 1/20th of 1%). But this fades in comparison to distortions in the center or the corners of a UTM zone (i.e. where the difference between elipsoid and flat sheet, which you can visualize as an "elevation" of the flat surface, is the greatest). Your best-fit flat surface would have negative elevations down in the center of a zone, but it would stick out quite a bit at certain position on the edges. The regular UTM zones are 6 degrees "wide" and 8 degrees "tall", which means that you plane of projection may be tens of thousands feet above or below the elipsoid, with the relative distance distortions of up to a quarter of one percent. (Think 1-cos(4degrees)). So any effect of altitude generally fades in comparison to this. Which still leaves UTM pretty good for artillerists (who originally commissioned the system), or for triangulation over a few miles of Earth surface. If you want to be extremely precise (e.g. measuring annual growth of the mountains), or if you want to cover greater distances (e.g. launching ballistic missiles), then the UTM is not sufficiently precise for you.

Ask Vacman about a cache which has a used joint in it & was sent to jail. Some interesting images on disposable camera there, too. I had plenty of curious muggle logs in my cache logbooks, too: A treatise on TV waves controlling human brains. A discourse on the state of the Nation. A multi-page plea for help from a lost hiker, intimidated by the terrain, complete with emergency cell phones (she survived the ordeal OK, but since she moved the cache into plain sight, it ended up very short on swag by the time I returned for a maintenance check-up). A geocoin move note by a muggle - also a rarity, I guess. Lastly, the shortest log, from an exhausted climber as I can guess: "F* this SH*".

Thanks, mtn-man, interesting link. Not that if proves much with about Wily's submission... 'cuz it isn't local to AZ (by definition), and not even a virtual. If a locationless would supercede virts and strip them of any WOW factor, then we could never see any highpoint virts approved. And of course Mica is a perfect counterexample. BTW I should have qualified that I didn't know for a fact if Wily's particular fire tower was unique, in its own wide geographical area. If it wasn't, then he could have dug a bit deeper in history, in case if there is something unique about his target object. Was it the oldest? The tallest? Any stories about it? My point is, demonstrate it to the approvers first. It's much harder to argue after it's been denied. Even harder after a forums spat. OT BTW Wily - I just found another Orthocenter cache by your San Diego fan, TucsonThompsen. Very nice terrain variation

Wily, I think you write-up should have included these links, and also state that there aren't any lookout tower virts within so many hundred miles, therefore this one is unique. A few weeks back, I got a designated wilderness virt approved - which was essentially a view cache, plus a specific GPS target. I wrote in detail just why this view is unique ( you could see the biggest killer avalanche path in our mountains, all of it, and such kind of a view hasn't been used in a virt anywhere around). Just to underscore the procedure which worked for me: write the description with the gildelines in mind. Be explicit: it can't be a trad because the area is off limits. It can't be an offset/multi because the wider area is off limits too. It is a specific GPS target because ... It is unique because ...

Yeah, here we go. Logging problems, upkeeping and placing new caches no longer counts as "investing back". I guess we should also pay cash to Grounspeak if we don't want to be accused of "stealing from the game". BTW I don't need clueless helpless newbies. We have plenty of great newbies here, who may need meaningful help just like all of us sometimes too, but they don't need patronizing / babysitting. I also would like to ask fellow geocachers to maintain some semblance of order and organization when lobbying local land managers. If every individual member will rush to ranger's ofiices and park and rec depts, just to prove the he / she also cares about investing back into the passtime, the results would be the most counterproductive. Please, please, leave it to your local chapters! It is a very important activity and it should be conducted by the ones with good skills, good support, good ideas, and with formal credentials

Oh. Please don't. I already apologized there for cross-posting very sketchy details into this thread and thus essentially inviting some posters from this forum to attack our guys, before they even got a chance to rethink their words. And the cacher who cringed about CCC in our local forum also apologized and deleted his passage. So everything is back to norm and a fresh dose of flack may be unhelpful. I have a good deal of respect to CCC BTW, although haven't had luck to meet her yet. At least we got something positive out of my near-troll ... i.e. very interesting messages from Carleen about the technology and organization and psychology behind the new record - Thanks!

Attach an altoids container to the plaque with a rubber band. It probably wouldn't last, but that's OK. Once it is gone, temporarily allow the finders to log it virtually. It will only cost you a few rubber bands and empty film canisters a year, at most, to keep it. It will only cost me another slap-on-a-wrist PM from CO Admin, at most, to suggest it.