ParrotRobAndCeCe

You don't need a 4G signal at all to use your phone's GPS, much less a reliable one. You DO need 4G or WiFi for online maps, but if you preload maps, much like you would on a GPSr, you can get around that problem as well. $20-$30/yr will get you high quality Gaia maps for a year.

Very real GPS data.

That's patently false. All but the lowest-end phones out there now have fully integrated GPS receivers integrated into them. Yes, they are also capable of approximating location based on cell towers which can be useful when indoors or underground, but to say that most phones do not use "actual GPS" is absolutely not true.

OK, so with all this bickering back and forth, let me try to reset this from the beginning: "What irks you the most?" What's irking me is a geocacher that picks up a travel bug that CLEARLY has the objective/goal of the TB attached right to it, logs it online where the goal is repeated AGAIN, spends a week or two moving it to places that satisfy its goal, THEN MOVES IT FOUR THOUSAND MILES IN THE WRONG DIRECTION knowing full well that's not what the owner wants. Is that better?

Understood. But at the very least, you're not going to move it 4,000 miles from Sydney, right? In the case of the one in tracking, the finder moved it to Europe knowing full well its goal of staying stateside. That's what irks me.

OK so help me understand this then... you mentioned that you play with a GPSr and if there's no mention of the goal on the TB, you don't know it. But then you said you never release a trackable until after you "retrieve it". So... if you hold on to it long enough to "retrieve it", then you've got it long enough to read what it's objective is. The only difference is the phone user knows it in the field and you know it later when you do your retrieve logs. I'm completely not seeing how your device has anything to do with whether you choose to honor the wishes of the owner or not. The only difference I can see is if you pull a TB from a cache someplace where it's no longer possible to meet it's goal, and that's unavoidable. However.... in the (real life) example I used, this bug's goal was CLEARLY to stay in the United States, which is not a really difficult thing to do - especially when the retriever dipped it in several US caches before dragging it overseas. There's no reason to do that. It sounds like what you're basically saying is "Go ahead and give it a goal, but don't expect anyone like me to give a rat's a** what it is". All I'M saying is "Maybe you can't help it on its way to its goal, but the least you can do is not HINDER it deliberately".

I see your point, but I guess there are multiple ways of looking at it. If it has "nothing to do with me" then I wouldn't pick it up in the first place. The fact that you pick it up and put it in your pocket sort of nullifies the "nothing to do with me" argument As for not knowing what the goal is, I perfectly understand, because as you so eloquently put the fact that I'm getting old (lol), yes I DO remember the days before smartphone caching. But even then, on the rare occasions I found a trackable, I almost never re-deployed it before I logged it as "retrieved" and read about it. To each their own, I guess.

Yes, absolutely. See my reply above to Jeff.

The TB was in a baggie. In the baggie was a nice note saying where it wanted to go. It also had a checklist where one could check off the fifty states one by one should one want to. It could not have been ANY clearer what the goal was.

OK, what's irking me today is people who indiscriminately move travelers without paying attention to what their goals are or what their owners are trying to achieve. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I retrieved a travel bug from a cache in rural Ontario where it had apparently been imprisoned for about a month. I was surprised to see that it's goal was to visit as many of the UNITED STATES as possible. At the time, it had seen about ten before it got dumped off in, of all places, Canada. So after taking it to Quebec with me the next day, I brought it back stateside where it wanted to be, and subsequently hauled it to Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee, all in about a month. I released it in Tennessee hoping it could fill in its map a little more in the south. I have been following it ever since and saw it make its way to North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Then today I got an email that the Tennessee retriever dropped it off in, of all places, ENGLAND. Question: When YOU retrieve a TB, do you pay attention to what its owner wants, or do you just figure it wants to "travel" and put it wherever you like?

Yep, I'm familiar with all of those. I have a very low tolerance for, ahem, "problem users". Fortunately, my days of supporting end users directly are way behind me because I don't have the patience to deal with them anymore.

Bah. What if they ARE an idiot, though?

Yeah I'm thinking that might get me a second point.

So which is it? Here we have one mod saying you'd have been ok if you criticized the "opinion" not the person, and a second mod saying you can't do either. I mean, I'm all for law and order, but it should be applied uniformly.

eBay. There's a few up there right now for $8-$12. There's also a few on Amazon in the $15 range which would be cheaper than eBay if you are (or know) a Prime member to get free shipping. Be careful on the eBay ones because sometimes they cost more to ship than to buy. Amazon also has a lot of plastic "ammo cans", that LOOK nice, but I'm afraid to try those because they advertise water "resistant", not waterproof.

I only had one as well, and I found the old standard issue 7.62mm ammo can with intact gasket to be the gold standard . Mine was hidden in a flood plain and survived flooding every year including complete inundation in a couple of hurricanes (even Sandy, where it was completely underwater for weeks). They're readily available for under 10 bucks. Even if you have to replace a gasket, they're about $3, and I never replaced one in the ten years my cache survived.

There was indeed a lot of good information in that thread. Unfortunately, the person that brought the ball didn't like the way the game unfolded, so he took his ball, went home, and now no one can play.

I can't think of any reason the operating system would have anything to do with browser/site behavior. Have you tried the obvious stuff like clearing history/cache/cookies/SSL state/etc?

I think you're misunderstanding here. I don't think Groundspeak removed anything. I think the OP may have... um... decided the conversation wasn't something worth pursuing and took it down himself and the forum software tore down the whole thread since it's all linked to the original post. You're right, there was a lot of good information there, but also a lot of contention.

Mine had a detailed explanation - you're not allowed to say bad things about even an unnamed, potentially hypothetical user, but whatever. What's missing, though, is what the points actually mean and what actions can or will happen at different point levels.

You get them when you err on the side of telling it like it is instead of "playing nice". I'll probably get one for this post

Thank you. I kept looking for a "report" option in the message itself...

Is there a means to report abusive or harassing messages within the geocaching.com messaging system? In looking at two messages received in the last few hours and can't seem to find a way to report them. I've figured out how to block the sender and hide the penis messages, but it appears there is no way to report private abuse via message (not on the fora).

Interesting. Of the thousands of words they use, "credentials" is in my house location as well.

Stay on topic or I'm calling the forum police!