CheekyBrit

This isn't something that Irks me, but could hardcore troll/irk others, I will never do this: Daft distances travelled from posted coordinates for a cache. So Puzzle caches need to have their final within 2 miles of the posted coordinates but could a troll have intermediate stages further away? If so it could be a pricey journey internationally back and forth across countries. A multi cache or letterbox cache at the moment doesn't have that 2 mile distance rule as far as I can research so you could totally do that long distance punishment across countries. This wouldn't be so bad as part of a teamwork cache but is still a special type of evil.

I see good points from both sides on this one. It'd rather frustrate the games history to split mystery caches into two types (people who've completed challenges involving numbers of mystery caches compromised, for example). But it would increase visual convenience and help avoid the premature logging of challenges. I'm glad I'm not HQ having to manage that decision. I'll be happy to play the game either way it goes. If I were a gambling man, I'd imagine the challenge attribute is their best effort to compromise and that is what we'll have going ahead.

Another view of it in the field.

This birdhouse swings open to reveal a sheriff key puzzle guarding the altoids tin cache. GC8WY8J good nimble hands required

If they were to ever have an option to display an unknown cache at the physical location on the map, it would have to be user provided solution coordinates, not the ones in the system by the cache owner. Otherwise people could claim they found a cache and then walk to the suddenly provided solution coordinates.

So there are work arounds like other apps, using the website, but back to the original question, is it counter productive? We need to consider the goals. We the users love the features and would like all non premium caches shown but there is a bigger goal to keep geocaching alive and that needs HQ funded, writing code, overseeing, and making extra events like - wonders of the world - memory lane - mystery at the museum... Sure it'd be nice if our newly indoctrinated friends could see everything but i'm sure we'd see a significant decline in premium memberships and the budget for HQ would get really tight (layoffs maybe?). IMHO I would prefer all D/T ratings shown but I understand. It sure beats having ads everywhere since there are so many workarounds. So for the goal of keeping geocaching alive and funded I do not think it is counter productive, even though I dislike it.

I thought of the blue switch as a classification term. Green switches often refer to companies becoming economical and carbon neutral. I always thought the "blue" switch refers to the releasing of technology, turning on that technology with regard to the public's eye. Why blue? Outside of the matrix trilogy blue seems to be the primary media depicted color of computer based technology, possibly thanks to windows using blue a lot.

Quality, not quantity. Love it. I agree, some of my best days I only found a cache or two. My current goal is to build those sorts of caches.

One option would be to have a spot within the forum (maybe this thread) where people can list totally illegal challenges that cannot even fit within 'optional cache' guidelines, especially ones that have a highscore element, and people could post within here. It wouldn't count as a find or have any impact on your numbers, but you could do some fun stuff... Then you could have complicated challenges that function almost as a gameshow or board game, like geocaching Yahtzee using the five digit minutes of coordinates....

Again, nothing stopping a CO from creating a checker. A reviewer may not allow it to be listed in the description, but you can still create it. (unless you can't get a scripter to make it, or PGC tells them they can't even make it, which I highly doubt) I cannot find the rule of "no online checkers for optional challenges" in the guidelines and am trying to understand it. I totally get not having an absurd online checker plugged into any old traditional cache. It drains the processing time at PGC and opens peculiar doors. Though searching for that rule, I came across a suggested workaround by rragan four years ago on the PCG forum: https://project-gc.com/forum/read?11,5580,5603,printview He suggested, "the unchallenge would be in the description of a simpler acceptable challenge which would have to have a normal checker. Unchallenge checkers would be built just like normal checkers but could use checks not allowed by GC challenge rules. The base challenge would have to be qualified before the associated Unchallenge could be claimed. Claiming would be done by writing a log note showing the output of the Unchallenge checker." Would rragan's idea work with this 'no online checker for optional challenges' rule?

Audible gasp! I had no idea. I can't find that in the challenge cache guidelines on https://www.geocaching.com/help/index.php?pg=kb.chapter&id=127&pgid=206 but perhaps it is somewhere else with more comprehensive rules. So picture I created this hypothetical easy and lamesauce challenge: Find a micro cache, then at some time in the future find a small cache, then regular and finally a large size cache. (This would only be requiring temporal order but allowing non contiguousness with other caches found inbetween and no time limit or time proximity restriction). If I understand you right, even that easy challenge wouldn't work because it's based on the order of the logs?

That's too funny. I chuckled on that one for a while. I am a first responder as a required qualification for one of my jobs as an outdoor instructor doing field trips since a lot of places we go we are 50+ miles from medical care, but I carry that training mostly in case I find someone injured while outdoors. But you have sparked my curiosity so I looked it up: In S.E. Idaho, anyone requiring funeral care that isn't already connected with a funeral home gets assigned to the 'funeral home of the month' on a rotating basis across the various ones in the state so if someone tried to conflict those interests, it wouldn't work very often for them thankfully. It'd have to be someone with no assigned funeral home AND be during the month of their funeral home's assignment. That was off topic and that full answer should hopefully satisfy that side conversation. Back to the good stuff, availability in winter!

SOLVED! Barefootjeff's link to approved hosting sites is great, but pulling the gif from google drive to your cache page needs some tweaking. This is how. 1) Upload your gif to google drive and set sharing so anyone can view A) With gif open, top right there will be three white dots for 'more actions', click them and open up 'share'. The bottom box shows 'get link'. Within there click the blue text "change" and select "anyone with the link". C) To the right, open up the dropdown box and ensure 'viewer' is selected instead of commenter or editor. D) Copy the link, though it needs some work. 2) To adjust the link, paste the link you just copied so you can make edits. It will look something like this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KftZsgelK-CGpoWDRsEB3ezCCyYZP5Wf/view?usp=sharing Whatever you have after drive.google.com and before the long string of numbers and letters, remove it and replace it with "/uc?id=" Also chop off the end portion including the forward slash, "/view?usp=sharing" in my case. In my example I'm left with https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1KftZsgelK-CGpoWDRsEB3ezCCyYZP5Wf This doesn't end with .gif, but worked for me. 3) Insert it using the same HTML you would normally, <img src="link entered here" > and you're good to go.

You can definitely tell my explanation is a patchwork. It is snippets of my explanation to the math community trying to find help. No luck there, didnt get traction or attention. Mustakorppi's definition is MUCH better and is what you'd expect to find on the cache page. Main modification would be keeping finds in order. (The next link in the chain has to have been found later, though it can be months later and with other finds in between.) The challenge checker is indeed the hardest part. I have started trying to learn LUA for exactly this challenge.

Conceptually I understand the idea. It would take an awful lot of computing and would need some efficient code. Now I just need to figure out how to do that. Would this be done in LUA?

Quite a few. The one i'm contorting to make publishable is breaking my brain. Let me tell you about my bigger better challenge, inspired by the game of the same name where you start with a penny and trade with people for bigger and better things. I've been working on a type of sorting I've never seen before and don't know if it has ever been done. I'm not sure if it is best solved with lua coding only, set theory, logical 'if then' statements, or some sort of numerical analysis. I'm terrible at all of them and don't even know the toolkit needed to crack this nut. We're looking at the sequence the geocaches were found as the backbone, they might as well be numbered one up to 'n'. Other columns are size, cache type, terrain and difficulty. The idea is to cherry pick caches you have found to make the longest chain in order where each next link in the chain is bigger or better than the last. If you pick a size small cache in your chain, every link below must be small or larger. Same with the others, no regressing. Here is a short snippet of a live dataset of mine I'm looking at: Sequence size cache type difficulty terrain 293 1 5 1 1.5 294 3 2 2.5 1.5 295 1 6 2.5 1.5 296 1 3 1.5 1.5 297 3 1 1.5 1.5 300 4 2 1.5 1.5 301 2 6 2 2.5 303 5 2 1.5 1.5 305 3 2 3 3 306 1 3 2 2.5 307 3 2 2.5 1.5 308 3 2 5 1.5 309 1 2 1.5 1.5 310 1 2 3 5 The longest chain I can pick out is three long (297, 300, 303) or (297, 307, 308) and it took me a while by hand to be sure. That was just fourteen rows. The thousand plus rows the challenge checker would need to process to see if someone has a chain of 'x' links long yet make it pretty hard and I'm trying to automate the process to not just find a chain, but the longest guaranteed. Traditional, multi cache, mystery cache, letterbox cache, and Wherigo cache are the available types. We'd need to skip virtual, webcam, earth, and event caches since they have no size. My current chain is about 19 long with room to grow. What do you think? Has this been done before? Am I starkers mad? Either way I would love to hear your thoughts on how to solve this.

Perfect. You totally shouldn't be worried and neither should anybody. There's so many aspects to the game, chart filling is just another side to it and some people never look at or think of it. I think that the diversely varied gameplay is part of the brilliance of geocaching; you find your niche and make it your own.

Nobody has mentioned streaks yet. If revisits became doctrine it would kerfuffle the current balance of streaks. Glad i'm not in HQ's challenging shoes laying down the rules. I'd be happy either way but i'm convinced it'll remain single find only per GC code per user account.

Ive had my share of those. I actually cut my hand on a beer bottle shard in the snow digging by hand last week. Never did find that cache. I'm a first responder and an undertaker so the blood was no issue, kept everything sanitary and all that jazz.

You two are making me feel great. Love feedback especially when I did something right rather than messed up. Though i'm still pondering how to compare counties to see how many in the fizzy grid each has. Any thoughts?

I built some fizzy grid challenges in Bannock county as a part of some interactive geoart project GC8X0WP. I contemplated making them restricted to caches within Bannock county and waiting till I had built the remaining 4 missing spots on the fizzy grid but opted away from it. Until I showed up, the county was missing 20 or so spaces on the grid and for a lot of DT combinations there is only a single cache in Bannock county. Restricting to areas is great but IMHO there should be several options on most spots in the fizzy grid. Im sure there are counties that fulfill that but in my area it'd have to be an Idaho wide challenge to be realistic. Our high terrain and difficulties are brutal.

Avoiding that debate (because i'm not brave enough to tackle it) but thinking of how to calculate the most caches found in a day excluding three cache monties, could someone build a challenge for x caches outside of state of Nevada in one day? That'd exclude Nevada's ET highway. You could also see who has the most with The top caching days tool on project-gc but selecting every state except Nevada. That only works for caches within the states and doesn't handle other power trails being done with the 3 cache monty. It also doesn't impact using challenge caches signed over the previous years but logged that day. With that filter excluding Nevada it looks like Macgyverandflo has the most in a day with a whopping and suspicious 3595 with the runner up way back at 3092 in a day. I have only found a mere 32 in a day and that was for the brilliant 'day of hell challenge' GC3RKQ4.

Loosely connected - some cache containers would be damaged by the cold. My semaphore diffusal pair GC88TVK have outer combination padlocks that I didnt think would hold up to the weather since they are at ground level and Pocatello's weather would cover them. Last winter I contacted the reviewer and disabled for 3 months and brought them home for maintenance. But this year i'm leaving them out to see if they can handle it.

Are there any counties that host caches covering all 81 combinations of terrain and difficulty (a full matrix)? YES! Multnomah county in Oregon, for example. But finding them is tough. Is there a way to compare counties and see how much of the DT matrix each of them offer? The fantastic 'Map DT Matrix' tool on project-gc gets you a pretty good idea if you run it with a newer account (I use my sister in law's who has 2 finds), but that tool stops after 1000 caches and doesn't show a full picture. This isnt what it was designed for after all. But why? I'm curious mostly. Also, i'm trying to make the gameboard as good as possible, working to make my home county offer as much as possible. It is fun to try and build up our small town to offer more diversity than full cities. (I make sure my caches are all accurately rated. If I have a terrain 5, it is a rappelling cache or equivalent.)

I confess, I do have an agenda to put out rare D/Ts, but they are accurately rated. Some and that kinda ruins it. I've had an event that was elevated in the trees thanks to a set up of angles slacklines and a tree tent, and had a trail maintenance CITO with multiple miles covered with rugged terrain in the mountains. Those two events made sense with higher terrain ratings but many do not. My shameful agenda is to tailor my home county to have everything someone could want - all types, all D/Ts, gadget caches, teamwork caches, rock climbing... this only works if the caches match the description, so my rock climbing hides at terrain 5 literally require rappelling equipment. It means my highly rated caches dont get much traffic at all but those who do find it get an absolute adventure.