Mr.Benchmark

Just out of curiosity, why'd the one make you leave the area. If people aren't really supposed to be in that area, then perhaps a note to the CO is in order. Or perhaps the area was fine and you were simply parked in an area where you shouldn't have or something? I've been asked to leave an area by a LEO while I was caching. I was searching for a cache at the Botanical Gardens in Brussels and a LEO told me I had to leave as the park was closing for the day. I realized after I typed it that my post might have sounded judgemental like "were you doing something wrong?" Apologies to ohmelli if that is the case - it was not intended that way at all. Yeah, I've been stopped by the police several times when I was in a park late at night. Once they asked me to leave, other times they didn't. In the case where they asked me to leave, I pointed to the sign that explcitly stated that after hours hiking was allowed, and told them that I was comfortable staying there. Normally I just do as the nice officer asks - but seriously, there was a sign, a big sign, RIGHT BY THEM, that said it was OK for me to be there! They had called 2-3 cars, lol. (Sadly the city later changed the policies and now you have to make an appointment to use that park at all.)

Just out of curiosity, why'd the one make you leave the area. If people aren't really supposed to be in that area, then perhaps a note to the CO is in order. Or perhaps the area was fine and you were simply parked in an area where you shouldn't have or something?

Did you email the CO by chance? Perhaps this isn't a great location for a cache, even if it is legal. The threats to aviation right now are, unfortunately, very real, and there is just no sense attracting attention from the authorities - mostly they have better stuff to do. I considered it, but CO hasn't logged in for a while. Here's the airport exclusion zone: http://maps.google.c...e=UTF8&t=h&z=13 Painswick Park is just at the top, and the exlusion zone applies to Thorley Lane. The cache (here: http://www.geocachin...aspx?wp=GC23KF0) is located on the other side of the road. Literally just 30/40 ft away, there's a perfect place within the park and away from the main road for a cache. It's worth it to email the CO anyway - if they aren't active and no longer monitor email, well, you only wasted a little time. Likewise, you might consider emailing the local reviewer. Not to tell them "hey, this cache is a problem", just to let them know what happened. Perhaps what happened to you was a weird one-off type of event, and the next 100 finders will nave not a problem. Or maybe the cops will watch this spot heavily and cause problems for many other finders. In the latter case it's good for the reviewer to know to maybe keep an eye on the cache, especially if the CO really is absent. I would start with the CO though.

Agreed but like everything that was done at the beginning Geocaching has learned. For safety, common sense, laws and many other reasons that come up overtime. Dave buried a cache. But we learned how much damage that can do. Many rules and guidelines have evolved, some we accepted some we have not. Even some of the new sites at the beginning some cachers had joined because of the lack of some rules that now the sites learned are for a reason Since I've been critical about these ideas, without offering any suggestions myself, here's my stab at rules for this. I think that the main things that you could accomplish by limiting early hides by new players would be attempting to avoid situations that are liable to need a lot of owner maintenance and support, and are historically problematical. The types of situations I have in mind: 1. Very high difficulty / very high terrain caches as early hides. (D/T 4.5-5) I'm sorry, but your first hide should probably not be a "T5 requires boat" hide. Cacher should have one other hide in place for six months before such a hide. (Rationale: you need to show us you'll be around for a while before we let you do something that will be hard to maintain, and that nobody else will want to go out and pick up either, should you quit.) BTW, on this one, I am more willing to impose greater requirements - if you are going to hide something for an experienced cacher, shouldn't you at least demonstrate some experience yourself? 2. Hides remote from the user's home location - your first hide shouldn't be more than 10-15 miles away from your home in an urban area, and maybe 30 miles in a remote area until the cacher has had at least one other hide in place for 6 months. (The numbers I've picked are fairly liberal and arbitrary. Rationale: you need to show us you'll be around for a while before we let you do something that will be hard to maintain, and that nobody else will want to go out and pick up either, should you quit.) 3. No complex multicaches / night caches with more than 4 waypoints or covering more than 2-3 miles until the user has had one other hide in place for six months. Rationale: these types of caches with multiple waypoints tend to break for a variety of reasons, and you shouldn't hide one until you've hidden something simpler and maintained it for a time at least.) 4. Flood control - you may hide up to 100 caches of any type in the first six months of your membership, subject to the restrictions above. (Rationale: If you aren't going to hang around for a while, we don't want to clean up your ill-conceived version of the E.T. trail.) The basic idea here is you must hide at least ONE simpler cache for six months that is found at least one time before attempting something really ambitions. (Maybe it should be more like 2-3 if the first hide greatly differs from the ambitious target - i.e. you want to hide a really elaborate and difficult wilderness hide, but your first hide was an LPC at walmart.) I have absolutely no doubt that someone on this forum who's better and more experienced than me will call me out and tell me that their first hide was a T5 "requires boat" cache that inolved a long series of waypoints along a river in a kayak, that has been in play longer than I've been involved in this game, and has a gazillion favorite points. Be that as it may be, I feel pretty strongly that very complex hides are just a bad choice for a beginner, because: a. Remote locations are going to be problematical for the NM / NA system to deal with. Someone who abandons a really remote or difficult to reach cache may be leaving something that is NEVER dealt with because nobody will bother. b. All the stuff that can go wrong with a beginning hider (bad coords, etc.) are compounded by a difficult and challenging location. c. The more difficult terrain types often involve some element of risk or skill. It would be nice to give the local community a chance to get to know the hider, at least a little, before allowing them to invite folks into a potentially hazardous situation. BTW, I do not envision rules so restrictive that it would prevent someone from hiding a D3/T3 2 mile hike into the woods of a local park or nature area terminating in bad coordinates with a horrible, broken container as their first hide. Would that be really annoying? Yes. Could the community do something about it if the cacher vanished after 2 weeks? Sure. You'll also note that I don't mention how many finds someone should have before attempting to hide a cache. That is deliberate. Although I don't really believe that most beginners would conceive of hiding a power-trail or a night cache, I have seen plenty of really poorly conceived "needs boat" type caches that are hidden by enthusiastic beginners who happen to be boaters. The general idea here is that people should get at least a little experience hiding something simpler before they try hiding something that is extremely challenging, and to have minimal impact on the ability of new players to, you know, actually play the game.

What? Your original post: I don't mean to be rude, but it seems like you keep changing the subject, and I am unsure of what you want from this thread. For example: - you don't want to engage in sucking up to the local clique - but you are concerned about what others think? Huh? Is your point is just that you think it's bad that local groups of friends turn a blind eye to stuff that isn't exactly "by-the-book" because of their relationships? For stuff that violates guidelines, sure, I can see that as a problem. Puzzles that are mostly solveable only with info from the CO, or from group finds - well, unless I was having fun working the puzzle anyway, I guess I wouldn't see much point in working those. Or is your point just that some locals are annoying you, and you are just feel like complaining about it, all the while declaring you don't care for high-school type antics? I'm not trying to be rude, just unsure of what you really want, other than to express your unhappiness over the behavior of people with whom you don't care to associate?

The other problem with limiting hides by people until they've found "N" caches is that what if all the caches they find are terrible and are poor examples? The general idea - don't hide something until you've seen a few caches of different types that are nice hides to give you some idea how people approach hiding caches - is a fine idea. It's just that there isn't anybody to guide someone to good beginner caches. (I suppose lists of such caches could be created locally and kept up to date - although WHO exactly would do that, decide what goes on the list, and the drama associated with all that might be horrible. On second thought - never mind.) Of course, none of this helps the new hider learn how to use their GPSr properly to mark a waypoint, which is also one of the problems. Indeed, I'd argue that the fastest way to find "N" caches before you can hide is to run a power-trail - the not at all what the OP would want I think - since this is what he complained about. I am totally sympathetic to the complaints in this thread, and have personally experienced some caches with serious, serious problems caused by beginner mistakes. (Since I'm in a sparse area, a beginner mistake may mean a 15 mile one way drive...) I just don't think that most of the solutions offered so far will help.

Did you email the CO by chance? Perhaps this isn't a great location for a cache, even if it is legal. The threats to aviation right now are, unfortunately, very real, and there is just no sense attracting attention from the authorities - mostly they have better stuff to do.

I can see several sorts of ideas in this thread getting comingled and not in a helpful way: 1. New cachers who hide stuff badly - they don't know how to use their GPS, know decent hiding techniques, know the rules to avoid problems (private property, etc.) 2. New cachers who hide some stuff, maybe a lot of stuff, and then lose interest and abandon their stuff in the field 3. New cachers who hide ______ type of cache that I don't like. Let's try to find a rule to stop _____ by preventing new folks from hiding something I don't like. Maybe they won't hide that stuff later if they continue on. #1 - you could fix with education, a quiz, etc. These are helpful ideas I think. #2 - there is no current solution to this in the game for any cacher, new or old. None of the solutions suggested in this thread seem particularly helpful here to me, and some could be harmful. About all you could do is to try to improve the tools so that it's easier for other's to clean up after people who've quit. #3 - just give up, you can't eliminate stuff you don't like this way - it simply isn't going to happen. I think the OP's main concern was #3, unfortunately.

Disagree 100%. Sounds a bit heavy handed and aggressive to me. UNLESS, it were a high star cache and the throw down was freely accessible with no effort. Then I'd agree. But on a lamo cache with less than a couple of stars overall? Who gives a rip. I would leave the log as well...it isn't their fault I didn't get my butt out there sooner to go take care of my cache. True, but in fairness - you may not have known until much later. Sometimes people who throw down don't mention it. Sometimes they do, but obfuscate it in a lengthy "found it" log. It sure would be nice if there were a log that told you "hey, I changed your cache, maybe a lot. Maybe you should go check it." http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=293763

LOL - obviously I don't know what I think either! It is a messy and ambiguous situation! Being more serious - I really don't care about +/- one find really at all, although deletion of a log would be a mortal insult to some. I wouldn't be thrilled with cleaning up my records of finds / DNF's that would be caused by such a deletion of my log. (Especially if I'd logged the cache sometime in the past and didn't remember it well - and had to go back digging to figure out why my records were off.) Unless the cache were really spectacular, I'd be unlikely to repeat it. Personally I would not hold a grudge against the CO - life is too short and this is just a game. I feel very sure that some people would though. What I do is not blame the ones who logged the wrong one, I do ask them to change their log to read "logged by permission" and to mention that there was another cache that was not the correct one. That seems fair to me.

No real comment about premium membership: But how would a new cacher near, say, this spot: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=34.985433&lng=-95.521617 not be really unfairly penalized by the 50 cache / 3 different types rule? They'll have to cache in a 29 mile radius to get that many caches, and the puzzle cache they'll solve for type #3 involves a LOT of hiking. If nothing else, it could easily take someone a month to accomplish all this. Contrast this with say, Addison, TX: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=32.962700&lng=-96.826433 A new cacher here might have to travel as much as 1.5 miles to complete 50 caches of 3 different types. How is this even remotely fair or sensible to people in sparse areas? How would it do anything but encourage even more caches in densely populated areas, and discourage them from remote areas? You could say, I guess, "well, those people in remote areas will just have to go premium then!" but that first area I linked is NOT a wealthy area - $30/yr doesn't make much difference to me - I think it's a great deal. But for some, it makes a difference, and more to the point, how would they know whether or not they want the membership if they can't decide whether or not they like the game because they aren't allowed to fully participate?

Maybe it's their way of trying to show you that it's not about the numbers, since apparently they can't count? (I kid, I kid).

Well, why not just avoid it then? I would hope people wouldn't do that type of thing, but if they are, then just avoid the cachers hidden by people who do that. I could understand being sore if you put in a significant amount of work on what you thought was a puzzle cache, but it turns out the real skill you needed was either "prior knowledge", or possibly "mental telepathy." However, the old saying "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" comes to mind. Are these simply unavoidable? I can appreciate frustration, but to some extent, if I had a puzzle I couldn't solve, and it turned out the solution was to know the CO, well, I would just put that on my ignore list, and be happy that I at least hadn't wasted even more time on a really bad puzzle. I'm not saying you'd be wrong to be unhappy about this situation - just asking why, if you avoid high school behavior, you would let this bother you. If people want to be idiots so that they can pretend they are better than others (if that's really what is happening), then just feel sorry for them. Another way of looking at this - why are you attempting caches that you aren't enjoying? I would definitely not enjoy doing a cache that I suspected involved an unsolvable puzzle. I hate to use the old line "if you don't like 'em don't hunt 'em" - because with a traditional cache you often don't know that a destination is NOT going to be to your liking until you are there. (Unless you have mental telepathy or clairvoyance or prior knowledge...) But in this case, if the puzzle isn't any fun, why worry about it - just move on to another cache, regardless of the idiocy you suspect on the part of some clique. (Again, I hate to judge - maybe that isn't even what's happening.) Or is there some part of this that I'm not understanding?

When I find junk like this, particularly items that SHOULD NOT be in a cache (usually I find cigarettes), I remove it and add small items I'm carrying with me. If I don't have anything, I leave one or two $1 bills.

LOL - obviously I don't know what I think either! It is a messy and ambiguous situation! Being more serious - I really don't care about +/- one find really at all, although deletion of a log would be a mortal insult to some. I wouldn't be thrilled with cleaning up my records of finds / DNF's that would be caused by such a deletion of my log. (Especially if I'd logged the cache sometime in the past and didn't remember it well - and had to go back digging to figure out why my records were off.) Unless the cache were really spectacular, I'd be unlikely to repeat it. Personally I would not hold a grudge against the CO - life is too short and this is just a game. I feel very sure that some people would though.

Would you delete the log of the person who informed you - "hey, I think this is a throwdown, you might wanna check this out?" Because I always do this. And whenever I do this I let the CO know that they are welcome to delete my log, even though I'm the one letting them know about a potential problem. However, I have to be honest - that is a lie. If someone deleted my log after I warned them about a possible throwdown, I'd be annoyed and likely never look for another one of their caches again, filing it under "no good deed goes unpunished." I hold a grudge forever. (See my avatar picture - I clearly have issues.) Just food for thought for you. OK, I'm not sure I'd really hold a grudge, but unless your cache was spectacular I'd likely not return if you deleted my log on the throwdown - especially if I'm the one who warned you about it in the first place. (Realistically, I'd probably hold a grudge, too, at least for a while.) I can totally appreciate deleting the log on the person who threw down in the first place - especially if they didn't directly email you to tell you in no uncertain terms that they did this because they were sure your cache was missing, instead trying to sneak it in to a log, i.e.: "Well me and ____ were out caching on this fine day. Easy find on the cache ... blather blather blather ramble ramble ramble, couldn't find the original so left a substitute in good shape ... blah blah blah more stuff about the 170 other caches they found that day.... TNLNSL TFTC!!!!" i.e. a log that is an excellent candidate for the FI = DNF thread... Or just not saying anything, doing the throwdown, signing it, and logging TFTC.

I know this will sound cynical, but I promise that I do not mean it that way - it seems to me that the business model at Groundspeak depends on lots of caches being placed, and lots of cachers. They'd be stupid to mess with this or limit it.

What kind of a limit would you place on hides that wouldn't be likely to eliminate this game from sparsely populated areas, both sparsely populated in terms of caches, and cachers? Consider Dallas Texas: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=33.004167&lng=-96.802967 13064 records Eufaula Oklahoma http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=35.288750&lng=-95.576833 1049 records It seems to me that making a single rule limiting hides that would encompass both of these places well would be difficult. Depending on how you limited placements, you could easily arrange things so that the only people doing non-urban hides were people from densely populated urban areas. If you further *really* enforced the vacation cache rule, it seems to me that you'd make it extraordinarily difficult to place caches in remote areas at all. To my mind, the more remote areas are actually *the best* places for caches, so this would be a bad thing. BTW, I'm not trying to argue against the problem the OP stated - I definitely see his point - just worried that solutions that seem "obvious" in dense areas might not work out so well in sparse areas.

It's about 1/13th of a milli-Hubble-barn, or 1 1/3 milli-Bottlesworth. 1 milliliter = 0.0000041932071803 hogshead lol! Why can't they use a unit we all understand, like cc's?

Uh, what's a "ml" again? How many teaspoons is that? Oh, nvm, I can't remember how much a teaspoon is. I know there's some number of teaspoons in a cup, a whole bunch, right? Hmmmm maybe I need more iced tea? I like iced tea!

I think turning a 175 degree turn is acceptable under the circumstances. The situation sol seaker found, and the replacement that followed is making the best of a bad situation. I wouldn't ever think non-owner / non-prior finder replacement was ever a great outcome. Just in this case it was the best outcome in a horrible situation. I am not advocating this in general. I'd point out that UNLIKE most throwdown situations, sol seaker had some knowledge about the situation, had thought it over, and had a plan. I'll point out again that I suggested over in the suggestion forum a "non-owner" maintenance type cache log, just for situations like this. Most didn't like it because they felt it was prone to abuse. They have a point, but my point is that all this stuff happens, whether for good or bad, so documenting what really happened with a special log doesn't change one thing, it just clarifies and documents what has happened with the cache over it's history.

A cache based on RFID could be incredibly tiny.

The Moore the Merrier? Perhaps we should just rate cache sizes by volume in liters or milliliters. I'm sure everyone in the "getting started" forum would enjoy answering questions such as: "whats a ml?" "how many ml is my lock-n-lock?" "Is it 'liter' or 'litre'"? "how many liters is an ammo can" "whats a ml?" That's about the metric system and nothing to do with Moore's Law (and the pedantic will insist it is not a law to begin with). Moore's Law as it applies to geocaching will state that the number of geocaches will double every (insert period here) while shrinking in size. Yeah, I started talking about Moore's law - the continual shrink of geocaches (micros used to be crazy-small, now, they are kind of average, and we're talking about even smaller caches) coupled with the growth in the number of caches kind of feels the same. But it seemed funnier, as I went on, to joke about the generally poor understanding of the metric system in the US.

You mean like the Geocaching 101 page does (in the "What does a geocache look like?" section)? Exactly - but listing the size more directly without the use of terms like "micro", "small", "regular", "large", etc. What's a ml again, is that bigger or smaller than just a "L"?

I didn't notice that back then, but you're right. Perhaps I'm simply seeing the same guy on multiple forums? Or perhaps there is a section of "Trollin' teh interwebz 4 dummies" titled "Pompous FTW!!?" We may never know, I guess. Back on topic - I don't wonder if the system we have now - mostly the honor system except in areas where there are known restrictions - isn't for the best. For example, imagine if *every* city park decided you needed to file quarterly paperwork to have a geocache, but every walmart said "we love cachers! hide 'em here!" Perhaps people who are concerned about permission are simply protective of property rights, but I suspect many of them would not find that to be a good outcome?