MOCKBA

Meanwhile, The Original YJTB has just been rescued from my first cache, after a 6 month break above the waterfall which the finders usually upclimb using a fixed rope. Just in time for this year's bumber crop, I suppose

An interesting stat can be calculated in this respect: a state / regional TB migration half-life ( i.e. how far back in time one has to go to find that half of TBs which used to be in the area on / after this date are no longer there).

So what? The vast majority of these problems do not detract from the fun of hunting it. Indeed, inexperience goes naturally with the virgin appeal.

Alternatively they may have joined not too long ago; or exhausted the lists of local caches of interest. I'd love to see some of the super-cachers time-course of stats. I know for a fact that our local #1, UtahJean, has very few local caches she hasn't found yet. In winters, when few new caches are placed, she must be facing real "cache starvation"... Sometimes a time-course would be a nice illustration of a personal style too. Our local #3, UtBob2, for example, has cache binges interspersed with long dry spells.

Nice post, but I have to jump in to protect my contribution, too. It's the IP world, you know. The evil idea of "Jeep Food Chain" is mine (although it's merely a derivation of Forsythe's "Barbie Food Chain" project). I think we'll use Jello for Jeeps, it's gonna be very Utah. And YJTB was first proposed in my post of May 4 2004, 04:15 PM, too. Of course it isn't really a TLA (as three-letter acronyms are known ) so the purists may shrink it to just JTB.

One suggestion for high terrain level multis: if you have more than two or three stages, it might be the best to have your stage N point to both stages N+1 and N+2. I.e. not just to the next part, but also to the following. This can go a long way to reduce both finders' frustration (one stage of 10 not found, and you are screwed!) and hiders' maintenance headaches (one stage out of 10 missing, and you gotta fix it right away!). I just spent four days completing a 7-part multi with 4,000 ft elevation gain. One stage was 40 ft off and one was 150 ft off ... each time I had to backtrack, thinking that the owner succeeded not only in showing me a great new trail, but also in setting me up in some crude and undeserved ways.

One may also take away from the community by hiding lousy caches ... IMO people really should be very willing and very able to hide. Nudging them is a bad idea. OTOH I actively try to avoid FTFs on some easier local caches, 'cause in these case, my FTF satisfaction will be counterbalanced by the feeling that I've just deprived some of the less crazy FTF hunters from their prizes. If I can't give my dog / my feet / my brain a nice workout with it, is it worth pissing somebody off?

See-toe would stand for "sieve". But since gc.com doesn't support Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet anyway, it is largely irrelevant to the Russian cachers.

They are shown at the bottom of the list, rather than at the top where you intuitively expect them (as they are the "newest").

Don't give away your secret spots if they are too easy to reach, or if people could be tempted to ride ATVs on what's meant to be a foot travel terrain. Making a hard-to-reach cache also hard-to-find is generally a bad idea. But further reducing the traffic by wrapping the coords into a multi or a puzzle is OK. Priming your new difficult cache with travellers, popular gamepieces, and NthTF prizes, and telling tales about it at events, should help to generate at least some traffic early on. Study the habits of local extreme cachers to figure out how to attract them. It is not unusual for a challenging caches to have no visits for a year or more. Minor details matter sometimes. In our area, one multi ( a four-mile hike up an abandoned jeep road in the woods, certainly not the most strenous of the caches around ) remained unvisited for over two years mostly because the area is off-limits to cacher's dogs.

All right I take it back. Just couldn't resist, after remembering the Barbie Food Chain story. Don't worry I won't flip the switch on that blender

tell this to Jeep, to avoid Moab. Altho' yes, you can get me into trouble with our association this way, especially with its Presidential candidate the JeeperDad ... but I am not sure it is worth it. Now that I see that I ain't gonna score anything in the contest ... my camera's broke, and so is my English ... I ain't even sure if I'll play at all. But SUWA might join, huh? added on EDIT: Utah is a state not like your other wimpy lowly 47, and among other weird things, we have some interesting history of getting popular toys "wrapped in tortillas and covered in salsa in a casserole dish in a lit oven" - and then winning lawsuits against enraged corporate America.

The promotion is timed to coincide with the East Coast 17-year cicade flare-up, and the hope is the same: Bring them on by the thousands, & some will survive despite the odds. But what is this TB prize Jeremy mentioned? Is it gonna be awarded to those who place the YJTBs where the jeep doesn't ... er... shine ?

anybody has any experience or desire to AI / bot-categorize the caches? By parsing out both cache description and the logs? Some possible ideas are - length of logs, possibly normalized by finder's distribution - dnf ratios and median time elapsed between finds - specific keywords and keyword combinations - finds by a group of geocachers who have found a certain seeding set of caches

Both were exceptionally good, I don't think gc.com will ever approve them with a new minder given their moratorium RK - does any of the suitors offer to make a MAP of the logged finds? This would set a new standart for locationless excellence.

BINGO! Who's gonna propose it to Jeremy? Oh, I have no doubt that Jeremy is thinking about it now. More precisely, how to implement it, and in addition to - saddle people with new placement, cache type, or page layout restrictions - make uploads and dowloads less compatible - open floodgates for archiving of caches which aren't on TPTB fav lists - well, it's hard to be creative about some new ways to annoy people with upgrade feature-bug hybrids, but I know TPTB can do it

Exactly. Reading the logs is the most discriminating way to find caches which you'd love to hunt. And the root cause of our problem lies precisely here: the more caches are placed in an area, the more difficult it is to read them all At some point it's just defeating the whole purpose of caching. I'd like to be out and enjoying the places, not reading tons of info about the places I don't care. What we need is a crude filter first, and of course studying the logs next. And no, MB, unselecting caches hidden by some geocacher is not doing the trick, especially in an unfamiliar, out-of-state area.

No it is not fine. There are too many caches to look through all of their descriptions and logs and to decide which ones I wanna hunt, if any. Even in my home area. I end up not hunting any urban or easy caches even though some of them may be very interesting, either unique spots or unique hides. And on trips away from home, I pretty much avoid caching. At most, I study a half-dozen caches in the immediate vicinity of the places we stop, just to make it into a before-breakfast jog or a rest-area leg stretcher. To take a list of the regional waypoints and to convert into the trip plan, or into a list of desirable locations to visit, would be counterproductive at best. But as Otter says, there might be a way to make the mess more searchable, at the very least to highlight the WOW cache locations.

Because I almost NEVER trade. If I didn't trade and didn't have anything to tell or to show, I just won't log it. Couldn't you compliment at least something if the cache was good and you chose to log it online? "Well hidden"? "Nice view"? "I didn't know this fill-in-the-blank was here"? "Good swag"? "You should read fill-in-the-blank entries in this logbook"?

And how does that work with caches that only get hit every 6 months or more? A cache that only gets hit that infrequently probably has some other circumstances associated with it. Remote location. Extra-special skills required. I have a feeling that the cache description and the logs would explain something like this. Last 6 logs or last 6 months, whichever gives you a larger count of logs. But a more selective, searchable type-of-cache, type-of-attraction list would be better. 'Cause people like different types of caches and in a city where the most prolific cache hunters all prefer lampposts, it is the lamppost micros which will get the highest ratings. "Top 1%" is also a better system that "would you recommend this one", 'cause even with a heavy lamppost bias, it will still give you the best and the most unusual caches of a type which you may generally dislike ... but wouldn't mind sampling its best specimens! (edit: typos)

Paying newbies and TB-friendly roadside 1/1's are Groundspeak's bread and butter. Why would gc.com ever embrace elitist caches, and risk alienating the throngs, when they've got this business model? Groundspeak may crack down on virts, or too-small-for-a-TB micros, but lame trads are sacrosanct. But even if the policies are changed .... say, www.geocaching.ru doesn't allow *any* big city caches for fear of the micro quagmire, and limits cache density by 5 mile (not 0.5! not 0.1!), and rates "interest level" instead of "terrain level" ... and they still got lame caches, and total predominance of a single not-to-creative cache type ("count spires or cupolas on a village church"), and of course plenty of disaffected cachers unhappy about their restrictions. Top 1% designation might work though. Not banning any cr*p, but giving the elitist their elistist peer recognition.

Clever is great, cruel is fine too, but ambiguous puzzle caches that have more than one possible solution - I honestly don't see the appeal. You probably don't find multi's appealing either? Just like with a multi, each step brings you closer to the solution. But unlike most multi's, you can also use the Force to get you straight to the true solution. I actually enjoyed the challenge of placing it. The true and false clues are miles apart, each in a great location, each described by the same phrase: "in plain sight at the base of the mightiest spruce, on the side facing dead or cut tree". Imagine how much effort it took to put it together. And besides, finders of the false clues score a find of a derivative cache each time when they miss, so it is pretty generous for stats-sensitive folks too

One of my caches was completed only once, and the finder called his experience 'hellatious'. It's got several nearly-identical containers in several very similar (and very picturesque) locations, each of them a valid solution of a puzzle, but all but one of them dead-end false leads. But with the bad rap it's got now, I wonder if it will attract many takers in the coming season

I maintain my caches as I am sure most of us do. So naturally I bring in some swag and some travellers and some game pieces. If I can advance the goals of a TB, I play along. And if I can't help a bug, then I just move it. And if the bug owner is obnoxiuus enough to raise a stink about it, then I will be very tempted to move it to a cache where the Sun doesn't shine. But this hasn't happened yet.

Cache description usually include words "covered" or "under" to avoid the use of the bad word "buried". And indeed nobody's using showels to hide them, right? But if a use of shovels by a finders would be a big issue, then we'd have to archive most of the caches before the beginning of the snow season In Russian geocaching BTW, hiders are required to provide virtual-style verification info for the traditional caches for the winter season, so that cachers won't be tempted to dig in the snow.