Team D.A.R.K.

Has anyone continued any more information on this? Have any of the coin challenges or Mega events performed any surveys regarding demographics and spend for their stay (distance traveled, days in the area, total spend, age range, income/discretionary range, etc)? I'm specifically interested in economy surveys done around coin challenges or Mega events. Since the question of what are we expecting has already been brought up, we are hoping to use this information to assist local business/community leaders to participate in sponsoring an event as well as provide it to them to present to local businesses (so they can drum up additional sponsors).

Is a waste of money the whole point of discretionary income? LOL. There are probably worse things to waste your money on.

Interesting. Aren't you implying that the reason the trackables go missing is malicious? Could it be for another reason? For instance, we had a trackable that was placed in a cache, but the person was new and just made a mistake in logging it. It wasn't really a problem, thankfully they contacted us and we tweaked the log. We later met them at an event. Incredibly nice people and clearly didn't mean to "loose" that trackable. Another had a several month delay while the person who picked it up accidentally left it in their car while they were on vacation. What if it was a family with a child who was sick and dying, just for arguments, maybe the little girl who is dying from cancer. Maybe she's about 8 and she agreed to go on a trip with her family, even though she will be completely exhausted and rather uncomfortable, and they came across your trackable. The poor girl's health fails in the days that follow and they never return to caching, but they keep your trackable as a way to remember their daughter and their last outing with her. I can't speak for anyone else, but I would be fine if they kept it and I would totally understand. For a couple of coffee runs, I'd be honored for them to keep my trackable. Some will vanish, we may not know why and who knows, we may never find out. There will always be issues and problems and real life to get in the way, but we aren't required to put out trackables for this game. Limiting it to premium membership sounds a little elitist, what about a church group that wants to explore the game but doesn't have the money for a premium membership. If you want to buy a trackable and release it, there is a chance they will go far and they will have some interesting pictures and stories (for instance, http://coord.info/TB75Z9D is one of ours that very recently went to Belgium and has some very cool pics).

You can get this one on eBay - http://www.ebay.com/itm/John-Grisham-Racketeer-Geocoin-/121803127313?hash=item1c5c083a11:g:sHIAAOSwA4dWNTyC Not sure that was the intent of the give away, but there it is.

If you find this guy http://coord.info/TBA6C2, I'd love to hear about it, and it would be a while between caches.

Amazon has some interesting Machine Learning systems that they are using to find fake reviews. I wonder if a similar set up could be used here. Frankly, if the GS guys write anything in C#, they could NuGet the accord.net library and do most of it without Amazon, but someone would have to identify the fake logs to help train the system. Hmmm.

We attach TBs to Legos and release them. It's alot of fun and people seem to enjoy them. For instance, these guys have all gone to Europe: Lego Criminal (TB6NE19) Rescue Lego (TB75YX1) Lego Crewman Cory (TB75Z9D) Some, like President Business (TB78XVJ) just go straight across the county, LOL. We've also had fun with Dispicable Me minions like Spooky Stuart (TB75ZRG). My kids love it when I buy Legos for this and we call the legos that are going into the wild "goobers." My youngest likes to build the sets and I get to keep the "goobers" for geocaches. However, occasionally, he has to keep a "personal goober" that can't go into the caches.

Thanks for the info. You should also know that if a person is using the free, but official, Geocaching Intro app on iOS, there is NO way to log a trackable. So, it may also be that the trackable just isn't being logged because the person doesn't have a convenient way to ever do that. I'm sure they can do so once they get back home, if they remember or wrote down where they picked it up. Although, I keep thinking they will add that feature, they added support for the Apple Watch first, but you still can't log a trackable. Hopefully, they weren't using an iOS device, but maybe that feature is missing from the android version, too.

Remember that the free Geocaching app for iOS does NOT have any way to log or update a trackable. It may be that some (most? any?) of the visitors to the cache had no way to log the trackable, so they just didn't take it. Or they did take it, went home and entered it in their computer, but now have no way to log the drop. Or dropped it, but can't remember which one they dropped it in so that they can update things when they get home!! I guess really, you could hope that the next person that found it wasn't using the same free, but official, app. If they were they may have picked it up, thinking they would log it when they returned home. Then instead dropped it in another cache, writing a small note about it in their phone, but forgot to ever log in and update it on geocaching.com. Probably won't happen as often once they have trackables as part of the free iOS app. In the meantime, I guess good luck.

Please remember that if the person is using an iOS phone, and the free app, there is NO support for trackables at this point. Even though it has been years in development, apparently that part is not a priority. It may be that the person holding the trackable is as frustrated by this missing feature as you are in not being able to see it move!!!

Uh. So lets say G is the "Grouping" and S is the cluster size. Using the G=5, S=10 example from above, wouldn't you have to search every point within a radius (or diameter) S of every cache? Eliminate or merge overlaps and then present the data... Unless you limited it to some arbitrary point based on zip code. I can see it isn't difficult, just data intensive.

quote:Originally posted by Marky:What is "Per Site Privacy Actions" and where does it live? In IE 6(ish), go to the "Tools" menu and select "Internet Options...". On the "Privacy" tab select the "Edit..." button near the bottom. This lets you add geocaching.com to allow cookies all the time. I was guessing the problem could be with blocked cookies, but I was wrong.

Pardon me for meddling, but out of curiousity, what browser are you using? If you are using IE, have you tried adding "geocaching.com" to the Per Site Privacy Actions? Have you tried deleting all the cookies and temporary internet files?

Kudos are definately in order. I think this is a great site.

quote:Asking permission is implying that there is, or could be something wrong, illeagle, or imoral, etc. Do you want a job? Since I know you will never ask for a raise, we could get along GREAT!!!

If you are going to "My Cache Page" and assuming you have entered a ZIP code and are clicking on the Zipcode or state in the upper right, you'll have to wait for those results. Then click on "New Search" which will be near the top of the page. On this search page, you can check the box that says "Exclude hidden/found items from results"

quote:people should be more stealthy next time... unless you are white, then you dont have to worry... lol Yeah, us crazy white guys. We can do almost anything, but pop off with the N word and the ACLU, NAACP and the University of Michigan all go crazy at once. Of course, my other favorite is having my big shirt that says "WHITE-Y" on it so in case you are color blind or something or maybe just stupid, this way you'll recognize my incredibly obvious white superiority. By the way, do large hairy persian men look like they might have come from Iraq?

Do a search at Google for "favicon.ico" or just go to www.favicon.com

Actually, having thought about this a little more. It would probably be good to have about 8-10 channels (I'm guessing since I don't have full stats on what gets updated at gc.com). A person could watch as many channels as they wanted and this would limit the amount of bandwidth required. Hmmm... OK, so this is actually probably a bad idea since I think IRC servers would get mad at us for piggybacking on their bandwidth. It would be a cool idea, but in hindsight I think it would make some people mad. But, maybe Jeremy will get bored and decide to start broadcasting data changes on a UDP port and we can still pick them up and make all the statistics pages in the world with it. [This message was edited by Dawn&Richard on June 24, 2003 at 07:30 AM.]

quote:Hehe. We need to create the GeoTicker. With the GeoDAQ and individual regions on the ticker. I can't imagine it would be too difficult to broadcast changes on an IRC channel. Maybe simple one liners: >New Cache: (76335) "The AVON LADY has a SIDEKICK" at N 29:42.302 W 95:07.819. Type: Traditional. Size: Unknown. >Logged: (75392) "Dog Leash #4" at N 33:23.867 W 111:47.114 by AJ.JR on 06/23/03 - Found >Logged: (TB:1277) "Mav's Tiger" retrieved by 47Dad47 Then, someone else could create a website out of the stats for it. Someone could also create a tray icon application that notified you of new caches in selected areas (maybe you watch your house and somewhere you are travelling soon) or when one of your caches was hit or a travel bug was moved. (I'd be happy to do this). Comments???

I think that is unfortunate. Hopefully someone will educate local law enforcement about geocaching as a result. [This message was edited by Dawn&Richard on June 22, 2003 at 10:04 PM.]

I'd love to see what you've done! If you don't mind sending them to rwatson@mind.net, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you. [This message was edited by Dawn&Richard on June 17, 2003 at 09:55 PM.]

Why not just partition your area up and make multiple queries out of it?

Sorry for making it out to sound like more than it is/was. As cottingham pointed out, very logically, the printed version tends to stay. I was actually more interested in parsing it for a local db so that I could do some distance to line calculations (as in given a path between 2 cities, show all caches within x miles of the line). However, the PocketQuery stuff works perfectly for this and is easier to parse anyway.

Well, if it is just Jeremy he is doing pretty good for a one-man operation (even if he has some non-programming support, he's still doing good). Anyway, more to the point, do you think we should all post little mini-resumes with our hours of availablility, area of expertise, various sites for reference, etc to help out? Has Jeremy said anything in the past about not wanting programmatic help? etc, etc? Just wondering. Hahahaha - Just took a closer look at the GPX file. Didn't think it'd be just XML. Thanks Jeremy. [This message was edited by Dawn&Richard on June 16, 2003 at 07:00 PM.] [This message was edited by Dawn&Richard on June 16, 2003 at 07:04 PM.]