rosebud55112

If you're really concerned about not feeding unappreciative cachers interested only in increasing their find count, keep it active. Archiving it will allow someone else to put a cache in that general area, one that those unappreciative cachers will use to increase their find counts. At least with yours there (assuming they've already found yours), they'll have to travel further to increase their count, and may thereby get frustrated with the game and leave.

E-Mail him again, and make sure you include your email address. Its possible that the first email got caught in a spam filter or something, and they might see the second.

But you must admit puzzles have a lot less to do with caching than power trails. If you consider power trails to be real geocaching, then yes, puzzles have absolutely nothing to do with geocaching. Of all the bad ideas puzzles are the worst. I would rather re-visit the same section of the power trails I've already done 100 times than sit around doing computer searches and other " research " for solving puzzles ......just my opinion. All the negative talk is about micro's, nano's, and PT's when its the puzzles scaring the landscape.....I know some must love them because they are everywhere. I guess I can now feel the pain of those who have complained about certain cache types. You may need to change your signature line, Bamboozle

DragonsWest-- If you ever get up to Minnesota, comne check out GC2KBQ6-The KB Challenge: Longest Streak vs. Longest Slump. It's exactly what you are looking for.

I had something along these lines happen to me once. A local puzzler was putting out a series of caches, roughly one every three days or so. The cache page had a riddle/trivia question whose answer became the password to a (apparently) randomly named website which had another puzzle on it. Solving that puzzle gave you the coords to the cache. On the morning that number, oh 5 or 6 was published, I quickly solved the riddle, then the second puzzle. Since the coords weren't too far out of my way in to work, I stopped by for the find. I was there about 25 minutes after publishing. I was surprised to find that there was only one name on the log already, it with a date of two days earlier. After I logged my find, the FTF'er sheepishly admitted that he had noticed a pattern in the location of the other websites "random" names, and found the locked website with the secondary puzzle. A couple of guesses as to the password, and he had the secondary puzzle in front of him a few days before publication. Discussion between the FTF'er, the CO and me led to this result: 1. The FTF'er has an FTF 2. I have a smiley 3. The CO changed his naming method to something truly more random. Sure, I was disappointed not to have an FTF, but He earned it--in an unorthodox way perhaps, but still. It did point out to me that there are sometimes clues not on a given puzzle cache webpage that may help find a particular cache. -rosebud55112

While you make a good suggestion, I have to admit this sounds like more than a mere implementation detail. The function now does something different. I assume they had to get rid of keyword search for some internal reason, since otherwise I would have expected them to add a "starts with" function and left the existing keyword search functioning the way everyone's come to expect. This guy's problem is just one example of why that would have been a good idea if it could have been done. Personally, I wish they'd do a regular expression search, but I'm sure that's not practical... Yeah the change in function messes up a lot of Challenge caches--at least, trying to find caches that may qualify in an area you've never been to before. I know, some people say you can solve that by banning Challenge caches, but some of us like challenges.

This looks great! I can't wait to use it! One thing that I don't think I see that might be useful, would be to have an option to ignore waypoints that are in a category you have already logged. So if I have logged a McDonalds in the past, to ask this not to locate every other McDonald in my vicinity. Of course, if the next McDonalds was also a waypoint in another category, like Freestanding Arches, and you haven't logged that yet, it should show up for that. Given that I only have one total waypoint log so far, it doesn't really affect me much at the moment, but I think that would help people trying to fill in their grid.

This time of year, I can walk to some terrain five caches.

More poopular is right. ;-)

The false scuba attribute was used on these so people could search and get the entire power trail. Clever, but poor use of the attributes, since it does mess up people like you who are trying to use the attributes correctly.

And beyond the call of doody.

This is what bugs me about the sign-alongs. When I rate a puzzle cache, I've got stars in there for the difficulty of the solve, as well as the difficulty of the hide and terrain. You get free stars when you log a cache you had nothing to do with solving. I know, the same thing happens when two people search and one finds it and they both log it, or one conquers the terrain and both log, but the puzzle thing irks me more. I tell myself other people's stats don't matter, and I'm trying to believe it, but that still just gets under my skin. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for help from the puzzle owner, and am glad to help anyone working on any of mine. That helps me know if I've got them ranked properly, if I've built it with the appropriate dead-ends/red herrings, without unknown red herrings, etc. Asking for help from another cacher is okay if you're both working on the solve--Cooperative solving is great! Asking for help from another cacher who has solved it rather than asking the CO hurts the community in the same way not logging a DNF does--it deprives the CO of info needed to properly rate/maintain the cache. And now I look hypocritical since I don't always log my DNFs.

The website just told me that they've run out. Sorry I missed this one yesterday.

I find interesting the two reactions to what people want in a puzzle GZ after solving. Some want a trip to the woods for the cache site, some want a PnG type. Of my puzzzle caches, most are PnG's, with three being more of a trek into the woods type. That's probably not too far off the ratio for caches in general around here. I've set most of my puzzle GZ's as PnG type for two reasons: I know some people are going to skip the puzzle-why should I remove a nicer GZ from a trad they may hunt?; and, since fewer beginners will solve puzzles in general, they won't be exposed to as many PnG hides. That one seems to be a losing battle, though. I guess I never really thought about people who both solve puzzles and try to avoid PnGs; how after already becoming emotionally committed to a puzzle cache they may feel let down by a simpler hide. I'm lucky to live in a metropolitan area with a lot of clever puzzle creators. Sure we get our share of Google lookups-including a few of my own-but in general the Twin Cities have plenty of well thought out, interesting puzzles, that let me exercise my mind, not just my legs before getting to GZ.

Let's see now. The OP has 15 responses in this thread. If we take the first letter in each of his posts, we get.........

So was GZ "literally nothing. Not even trees" or "a small flower/tree bed with a bulletin board"? A completely bare spot probably means a missing cache, but a flower bed with a bulletin board may have quite a few very sneaky hiding spots--depending upon cache size, etc, of course.

course, if I was told to move a cache 115 feet AND an angle, I bet I could find that puzzle cache within a few minutes as I would know its possibly 413 feet away and with the angle, that would easy. Not necessarily. First off, as you point out, it would be foolish in the reviewer gave the absolute minimum distance and direction, as your method would give up the location of a single unknown cache in an otherwise empty area. So presumedly they would go at some angle to the line between the final GZ and your proposed GZ. Also consider the situation if there are multiple Unknowns or Multicache finals nearby. Imagine two Unks roughly .18 miles way from each other. Their 'dead zones' would overlap in a sort of football-shaped area. If you proposed GZ were in that overlap, then the nearest available location would be at an angle roughly perpendicular to the line connecting those two Unknown caches, so your attempt to brute force a solution would have you searching more than .10 miles from either of those two caches. The situation becomes more complex as you add even more nearby caches, whether you know the real locations or not.

Why would someone complain about the definition of 'first' if they are not also going to be pedantic about the definition of 'find'? After all, whoever found it probably handed it to the other to sign, so the second person shouldn't get a find at all. Ignore people like this, in geocaching and elsewhere. Your life will be better for it.

It is the second most favorite cache in TN. It would be the topmost favorite cache in NC. I know of some challenges where that type of thing makes a big difference.

Cool. Love seeing the resurgence of eagles around here, and I hope to get up to Alvin's Phone Line someday. Can't claim to be a MN cacher without doing that.

I apologize if this has already been reported; I searched but did not see another thread about it. When I pull up a cache page, I get a mixture of maps in the small rectangle above the attribute listing. About 45% of it appears to be a closeup of a map with the a cache on it, although it is not the correct one. This 45% is the SW portion of the map. The remaining 55% of the map shows the correct area. This goes away if I scale the map up or down, but comes back if I rescale it to the same level as my default. I am running Firefox and have the Greasemonkey Geocaching.com extra map layers script running, with Google Maps set as default. Thank you.

Also, although perhaps related to #3, is "That was a fun challenge. Thanks for making me expand my caching experience rather than just list a bunch of caches I've already found." I seem to hover around 60 favorite points remaining, so I guess I'm adding them at a rate of about one every ten finds. Luckily, there are some cool caches around here.

GC2B38A Challenge of a Century: Safety RestArea/Wayside is located in St. Paul, MN, so if you come out our way you'll have a target for your challenge.

Since when? Since April 24th, though the new guideline language simply memorializes something that reviewers could and did do anyway. Now we have something to point to when someone says "I don't want to tell you." Wow, I didn't know that. My last couple of submissions must have been self-evident.

Since when?