Tom.dog

To echo the sentiments stated by many others in this thread, the decision to remove benchmarking from the GC website comes as a major disappointment to me. I have put a great deal of time into researching and finding benchmarks across various parts of the country, and have uploaded numerous pictures and descriptions of both commonly visited and previously unrecovered benchmarks to the geocaching website. The fact that all of this documentation will soon be deleted is nothing short of disturbing. I have stories and experiences from many of my benchmarking trips that rival or surpass those of my geocaching ventures; it is a shame that those snapshots of my and others' time spent participating in this aspect of "the geocaching experience" will be removed forever. Perhaps the greatest insult is that this constitutes the removal of the pictures and benchmark descriptions that make up what is likely the most "modern"/up-to-date database of U.S. survey marker documentation in existence. Per Ernmark and bluesnote's suggestions above, I would greatly appreciate the "deletion time" of benchmarking from GC be pushed back (12/31 seems like a reasonable date to me as well). At the very least, it'd be nice to have a hard deadline instead of "sometime after November 1, 2022 and before the end of the year." Between work and the pace of life outside of geocaching, I find it difficult to believe that I'll be able to save all of my pictures and copy my log texts before a potential November 1st deadline (and I'm probably on the shorter side of total benchmark logs with a little shy of 300 total - for those with thousands of logs, the specificity of the deadline becomes all the more important). I fully intend to move what I can over to Waymarking, but again, I am not confident that I'll be able to bring over everything I'd like to in the next 10 days. I'll jump on what Benchmark Blasterz said above - if you're a benchmark hunter, please bring your experiences, pictures, and knowledge over to Waymarking. I've been pretty part-time on the Waymarking side of things for over 13 years now since my first Waymark post, only posting or visiting every here and there when I felt inspired to. This decision by HQ may well be what pulls me into being a full-time Waymarker and part-time geocacher as opposed to it being the other way around.