VerrueckteFrau

Love the new feature of posting "Visited" logs for a TB! However, we don't seem to get email notifications if somebody posts one of these "Visited" logs for one of the trackables my son or I own, neither for the Owner, nor if I "watch" it. Is this new log type not included in the email notifications for the owner or is there a settings to specifically turn them on/off?

Very happy to hear that your TB is doing great! We love TBs and love hearing success stories! Our personal success story is our son's "Percy", who was launched as part of a TB race in 2008. In less than a year he racked up almost 60.000 miles, visited 5 continents, and returned to us!!! It was utterly amazing - he left the US with a friend of ours and returned with a friend of ours, but the time in between he was truly out in the wild there. Many strokes of good luck, and a lot of really caring cachers made this possible. Our son doesn't let him run wild anymore, as he was so happy to get him back that he doesn't want to "lose" him again now, so now he's more of his personal "adventure tracker", at 90.000 miles by now. Check out his adventures here: Percy

Will that fix also address the fact that when you grab a TB from another cacher it fills in a more or less random cache name (it seems to be always a cache that the TB has visited, but not neccesessarily the latest one)? Examples for these can be found under my son's TB Percy What is rather interesting is also that the "grabbed from" logs on the main TB page get filled in with different cache names than the logs on the "View Map" page. Examples: Main page: 8/9/2009 SillyMoose grabbed Percy from Daniel besucht OmaOpa (should have been from "beabird") 3/22/2010 SillyMoose grabbed Percy from Dubai Fountain (should have been from "VerrueckteFrau) 4/7/2010 BAT1800 grabbed Percy from Dubai Fountain (should have been from "SillyMoose") Map page for the same logs: 8/9/2009 SillyMoose grabbed Percy (Travel Bug Dog Tag) from Mission Steps (Canterbury) 3/22/2010 SillyMoose grabbed Percy (Travel Bug Dog Tag) from stroll through the park 4/7/2010 BAT1800 grabbed Percy (Travel Bug Dog Tag) from stroll through the park

My son's travelbug "Percy" went on an awesome adventure, during the GONIL 2008 travel bug race (which ends next week). The rules of the race made sure that none of our family members put any mileage on this little bug, so he was truly a free-range travelbug! In less than 1 year this little train visited 5 continents, racked up 58844 miles and made it back home into my son's hands!!! How cool is that?! http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.as...32-bbca98db5981 A big thank you to all the cachers who helped Percy accomplish this astounding journey!

Hey, all the TBs that are in our local race are up-to-date right now, and I'm sure not all owners did the manual recalc - so I have hope that the problem is now fixed and the missing mileage got added automatically.

Based on what I see with some TBs I own and some I'm watching it is not retroactively calculating the mileage from time of the outage, but will calculate new mileage when the bug is dropped off in a cache now. So once the owners do a "Recalculate distance" everything should then be ok going forward.

If you click on the "View Map" for the TB, it does show the mileage for each step. So the mileage is calculated and the data is collected somewhere - but doesn't seem to make it to the TBs main page.

Yep, happened with my son's TB, too, as well as other TBs that are in the same race. No case of dipping here, just a plain dropoff. I hope this gets fixed soon!

Same problem here with one of my TBs (which is in a race) that a Czech cacher has been dipping a couple of times. Is this a problem just with dipping, or a general problem? Will this resolve when another cacher retrieves the TB?

Just stumbled on this thread and was quite embarrassed to find my name mentioned a few times here... Actually I don't have much experience with travel bug races at all, just with our local one, with is simply for most miles in a year. But from the perspective of somebody who watched the 2008 SA race with great interest after finding one of the race bugs in a cache, here are my 2 cents: When setting the rules, always remember that you are not the people who move your TBs around. Pooks is right - cachers don't read the rules. At least the vast majority don't. Therefore I would advise against very complicated rules and any rules that penalize a TB for the cacher not reading the rules (like multiple hops by one cacher counting against the TB or something like that). The goals/rules need to be easy to understand for your typical cacher who just grabs a TB from a cache and doesn't know what its mission is until he gets home and looks at the TB's page. I would recommend some very tangible goals that can be easily spotted on the TBs page. In the 2008 race, the words were great fun and something that your typical finder can handle. Maybe something like having to get a picture taken with certain objects would work. Basically it boils down to how much luck-based and how much thought-based you want the race to be. In my opinion, the more complicated the rules, the more luck-based it'll end up being, as few people will bother trying to understand the rules. Unless of course you somehow manage to keep the TBs within your own area and it's mostly the race participants who are moving bugs around, in which case the more complicated the more fun. But I don't think you could get that by setting TBs free for anyone to grab.

Congrats to DiePienaars! Thank you, Discombob, for all your work on this race - this was a lot of fun to watch, even for an outsider!! You did an outstanding job!! When will the next race be? Thank you all for the entertainment you and your TBs have provided

Hey, the race is almost over - and I for one am excited about seeing the final results soon. I'm still rooting for Pooks Chameleon to make it to #2

Glad to hear that Bug-ket resurfaced (I was just about to write the lady another nice email)! It's Stars & Stripes that's in Hong Kong, though. Good luck to both your TBs in their future travels!

Feb 29: Hey guess what!!! Its LEAP YEAR DAY To celebrate, your biggest LEAP of the year will be doubled!

Hmm, sorry to get picky again here, but ICE turned into a regular word on March 27 But I'm very glad to see that Stars&Stripes got moving again Now if only the holder of Bugket woudl keep her promise... Happy New Year everyone!

There's a little glimmer of hope for Bug-Ket. Just got an email from the in-law: "I finally managed to get hold of RaDaR 751 and she promised me she would fix it tonight. Sorry for the delay SeaOpsO"

Which ones are those? Here are things I'd do if I had a TB gathering mold in a cache: 1. Post a note on the cache page, asking the next visitor to please move this particular TB 2. Write a cache owner a really friendly email asking him/her to check on his next maintenance run to see if the TB is indeed still there and also to please move it A friend of mine had dropped my 2 racing TBs into a rarely visited cache in New Zealand, and strategy #1 caught the attention of a local cacher who moved them to a busy cache within a day! So it's always worth a try. As for the TB tracking skills - it's really more of a people tracking skill: In addition to sending a friendly note to the last logged holder you also read the logs, for the last cache and other caches that holder recently found. There's a pretty good chance that you'll find a reference to another cacher who's connected to the holder. So you contact them as well. Found the brother-in-law of the person who logged Bug-ket last that way, contacted him too. No response yet, but it's worth a try, especially as Bug-ket's last holder logged that she passed the TB on to him (and isn't caching herself anymore (no login for a few months, after only 12 Finds).

Working on it Stars & Stripes: I got the last holder's friend's sister's boyfriend checking into what happened to it.

Working on it

Awesome! Thanks for the recount, Discombob Looks like the chameleon is going strong right now, in Texas, with people who noticed that there's points to be collected for this TB

Hey, finally got my Forum login to work and can add my 2 cents myself I'm the cacher whose family helped the Pooks Chameleon along a bit (I think after DB recounts it should add up to a gain of about 216 pts instead of the 156), and all I was suggesting was that the rules that Discombob had already established in the forum should be added to the official rules page - I was not suggesting adding new rules or changing them. I am enjoying watching your race - and I sure don't envy DB the job of trying to keep all this straight and getting all those points for that many TBs all counted up On first glance, these were the changes that I spotted here the Forum that were not reflected on the Rules page: Feb 16: Besides the publised words which score points, there are 5 hidden words. These will score 50 points if achieved by luck. Feb 29: OK Earth caches and webcams are excluded Virtuals stay in, as the system allows you to log in and out of Virtuals Hey guess what!!! Its LEAP YEAR DAY To celebrate, your biggest LEAP of the year will be doubled! cool.gif Mar 27: There words were ICE, SONG, SPORT, FOREIGN, CAKE I'll add these words to the normal list, so you can still score normal word points for them but of course now I need 5 new secret words which I'll decide on now. Apr 30: Notes: I have added the 10 points for SA provinces. the 10 points can also be scored for USA and Canada states, and Australia as well - I won't be doing this for european countries, so don't ask) Your first province in Sa wont score, and neither will your 1st stae in the other countries, as you are already getting country points for that. Aug 16: So just to let you know there will be extra points at the end of the race for various acheivements, such as: - Most words found per cache - greatest distance tavelled - highest difficulty rating per cache - Longest time spent in a cache (Oh, and btw: I am one of your dreaded German cachers located in the US now, though)