team tisri

I know this is an old thread but it came up in another thread... The combination of hardhat/vest/clipboard does suggest someone official. But a combination of a hi-vis vest and a bicycle means nothing more than someone not wanting to get run over. A bicycle is a handy prop in all sorts of ways - I had so many "mechanical issues" with my bike that required fiddling with the pedals, chain, gears, brakes etc. Surprisingly they all seemed to happen when I was in the vicinity of a cache under a bench... I've sometimes used a camera as a caching aid. A small pocket camera, with the flash set to fire with every photo, might leave people wondering just what's so interesting it's worth lots of pictures but they typically seem to figure I'm doing some sort of project. Alternatively using a fold-out screen lets you take pictures really low to the ground, which can be handy when needing to rummage around at the base of something.

This reminds me of a time I was trying to find a way to retrieve a film pot from under a park bench, in a busy park in central London, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. What I did was duck behind the bench and start poking and tickling my wife through the slats of it. Of course she squealed and giggled, which drew attention. The people who turned to look saw a young couple (as we were back then!) fooling about and ignored us. Which meant I could reach under the bench without anyone thinking anything more of it.

I once thought the vest&hardhat idea was good, but have since changed my mind. See this: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=313946&view=findpost&p=5282077 The thing is there's no law against wearing a hi-vis vest. When I'm out on the bike (which I almost always was when caching) the obvious explanation is that I want to be visible so I don't get run over.

You have more finds than me, which means I don't trust you You haven't been here as long as I have, which means you don't know what you're talking about

I think this is often true. Someone standing around trying to look inconspicuous often succeeds in doing little beyond looking very conspicuous. I remember one time I was looking for a cache in the middle of a busy roundabout. So to "blend in" I put on a yellow hi-vis vest, much like an official/inspector/worker would wear, found the cache, took off the hi-vis vest, and went on my way. Sometimes it's interesting how making yourself more visible makes you less visible. I also think a lot of the time we're worried that people are going to think we're up to no good when in fact they really couldn't care less. We don't walk around closely scrutinising what everyone else is doing, and yet we assume everyone else is watching us very closely.

Great idea. Only there could be some confusion as to whether you've done just what was required to claim the waymark, so perhaps it could have some kind of marker so seekers will know they found just what they wanted to find. Maybe a small sticker with a QR code on it that people could scan, and a special app could verify the find based on the QR code and their location. Then it could let them know they found it so they could tick it off and move on. It would even save them the trouble of typing "tftc" on their phone as everything would be automated. You could be on to something there.

Surely deleting a log if you've previously removed the cache would be entirely within guidelines. If the cache page says "the cache has been removed. Do not look for it." then anyone leaving a throwdown deserves to have their log deleted, and anyone finding the throwdown clearly didn't find the cache as placed by the CO.

Yes, that change was intentional. Why? Because the design team wanted to declutter and simplify the account settings. Many of the changes and removals you have seen so far may be "painful" for certain individuals, but they are laying the foundation for an upcoming significant feature that is under development that will replace the /my page entirely. There will always be growing pains when it comes to making changes to familiar and comfortable elements. Unfortunately, such change is necessary in order for the site to evolve and adapt. It might be nice to know what's likely to be coming. As it stands it just seems it's yet another set of release notes that relates to little more than yet another set of features taken away and nothing more than a vague promise of "it will be better soon, trust us". Am I the only one increasingly disinclined to extend much trust?

If the log sheet is a separate piece of paper -- that is, something replaceable when it gets full -- then there is no problem. The magnet is the container which encloses the separate logsheet. What if it's a wipe-clean surface so that when it's full the owner can start over? Or if the owner's maintenance plan is to replace the entire magnetic sheet when the old one is full up?

I think this is the winner. Whatever the cache page says I'll make up my own mind whether I'm happy to attempt a find/retrieve. I once met a really nice couple because it was clear the cache was on their back porch, and rather than just assume I knocked on the door to ask about it. I must admit I didn't expect to end up going onto their back porch through their house, but them's the breaks. Had there been no answer I'd just have moved on, I don't need the kind of unwanted attention it would draw had permission not been adequate.

I believe the Metropolitan Police do exactly this with geocaches in sensitive areas of central London. If you've got a large area to cover it becomes increasingly difficult to check every single item against the possibility it's a geocache. Of course even if something is believed to be a geocache the bomb squad have to be a little careful - it's not like it would be difficult to leave something truly nasty and simply write "Geocache - contents harmless" on it.

I've found magnetic caches before where the magnet was the container AND the log sheet. If I found that cache, I'd need to ask for it to be corrected or archived. It doesn't meet the definition of a geocache. Neither would a slate sheet or blackboard. Just because something was published doesn't mean the reviewer had all the details available to them. I'd much rather find out about the issue during the review process instead of having to deal with it after finding the non-compliant cache in the field. I can think of three recent examples of this, all involving magnets. A few caches I've found have been variations on a sign in an unexpected place where the sign was really a magnet with a log sheet on the back of it. Although such a thing isn't technically a "container" I think it would be nitpicking in the extreme to allow a nano with a log sheet barely able to take initials and then disallow another cache type with enough space for people to at least write their name in full.

I have an e-mail address that I created specifically and only for geocaching. I've used that same e-mail address ONLY to register for the geocaching site and the GSAK site. That was more than eight years ago. With my general-use e-mail account, maybe 30% of the incoming mail is spam of one sort or another. I have never, ever, not even once, received spam mail to my geocaching e-mail account. Groundspeak has never sold that e-mail address to any third party, and no one has succeeded in "stealing" it from either Groundspeak or the folks at GSAK. If history is any indication, I'm not worried about getting spam from Groundspeak. I vote for mandatory e-mail validation of geocaching accounts. --Larry Sure, re-reading my post it may not be clear that I don't imagine Groundspeak was responsible for me getting the spam messages from these young ladies. I suspect what happened was that one of them happened to find the address elsewhere, sent an email that looked enough like a real mail for me to open it, and then used some form of email tracking to confirm it was valid. If Groundspeak had sold my email address I'd expect to be getting mails offering more than the promise of an obligation-free weekend way.

I believe the POINT is that each of those things are a problem when members do NOT have a valid email address on file. Many of us would, as has been clearly stated many times in this thread, REALLY appreciate it if gc.com were to institute a requirement for both initial and periodic validation. No you wouldn't. There'd be full page ads, surveys, all kind of things in the GC "Periodic Validation" email, and accounts being suspended due to no fault of the users. Email validation is not for the convenience of people to "contact" others. It's a slightly out-dated way to prevent automated signup, and especially to gather email address lists for sale. If you wish to chat about the failings of an unvalidated user, start a Topic. Or is whatever you'd tell that person too harsh for public eyes? Because if it is, I can understand why they have an unvalidated address. When this plan goes way wrong, don't come emailing to me. I'm not a big fan of Groundspeak, as regular readers of my posts will probably have noticed. Even so I think your criticisms are way off the mark. They may be ads, surveys etc but as long as revalidation is nothing more than clicking a link I see no harm in that. We already get a weekly email that consists of lists of nearby events, recently published caches, and usually invites to visit a faceache page or watch a video. What's the harm if we get another email with a link to click to keep an account active? I don't suppose it will ever be implemented, simply because it would allow the "active geocachers" statistic to be measured and it sounds better to say "8,000,000 geocaching accounts" than "500,000 active geocaching accounts". Email validation is to make sure people have a valid email address. The fact a system exists to contact another user via email suggests the original intention was that each user would have an email address. It does little to prevent automated signup, given how easy it is to register a domain and then produce endless accounts with email address of spam1@mydomain, spam2@mydomain, spam3@mydomain etc. Automated signup is easily prevented with something like recaptcha rather than requiring an email address. Selling address lists is also something they need to be very careful with. I'm not the only one who uses an email address along the lines of geocaching@mydomain, so if I get anything commercial from anybody other than Groundspeak I know who gave my address away. As it stands I get a particular form of spam to that folder and that folder alone, which primarily consists of emails apparently from young ladies who feel a desire to spend a weekend with me with no obligations (there are a few variations on the theme, but you get the picture). If an unvalidated user has no email address registered the chances are they won't be visiting the forums so a comment, however eloquently worded and sensitively expressed, is wasted if they never see it.

OK, so register the domain abusivesilliness.com, use a prepaid mastercard to pay for it, enter a rogue address in the WHOIS domain, and then spam and defame to your heart's content. If anyone looks up WHOIS they get useless information, if they go to the card company they'll never know who owned the card, and if you're posting from internet cafes they can't trace the IP to anything useful. There comes a point when it's easier to just take down offensive material and ban the user rather than going to the n-th degree to make absolutely, positively, sure that nobody can slip anything past the checkers. And if the checker gets too intrusive the chances are it will just encourage people to subvert it. I still remember a BBS I signed up for years ago where my name was blocked despite being inoffensive, although after seeing it was blocked I noticed it contained a naughty word within an innocent word. From there the friend I was signing on with and I wondered just how silly/offensive a name we could slip past the filter.

Surely you're not suggesting that the success of the game - and the fact it is still going - is all thanks to Groundspeak? I'd like to think I, and thousands of other people, contribute a tiny amount by hiding and maintaining caches... It would be interesting to see how profitable geocaching would be if TPTB had to plant and maintain all the geocaches. You have to admit, it's a neat business model. Unpaid volunteers place and maintain caches following all the rules, however mindless, that emanate from head office. Unpaid volunteers review and publish caches following all the rules, however mindless, that emanate from head office. People pay to look at the listings. If you totally bork the site with an untested change, you just mumble some fluff about being sorry and making better mistakes tomorrow, and ignore the service outage. If your paying customers express annoyance at something, you just ignore them - the unpaid volunteers will attract more people to give it a go.

I don't care how many people know about the game and play the game. I do care when caching becomes a succession of film pots behind posts. Having lots of cachers out there makes no difference to me, as long as they follow basic game rules. Like putting the cache back rather than taking it away, like hiding it again properly, like closing it up properly. Really? It seems to me that TPTB are more interested in their own profits even if it means annoying cache owners. And without cache owners there would be no geocaching. I agree that there isn't a single group where we can say "if you are a member of X then you are the problem". Your ideas for improvement are good, but given they've been talked about for so long and there's still no sign of Groundspeak doing anything to address them it's hard to conclude anything other than that Groundspeak simply doesn't care. And for as long as people sign up, find a couple of film pots behind posts, think "ooh, me too" and hide a "me too" film pot behind a post then there's a steady supply of geocaches out there, which makes their numbers look good. If the average lifespan of a cache drops from many years to a few months and sometimes lower still, no big deal, someone else will come along to hide another film pot behind another post. Personally I'd rather find two or three interesting caches in good locations than 20-30 film pots along a three mile trail. But "35,000 caches in this county" doesn't sound as good as "500,000 caches in this county", so presumably Groundspeak are going for big numbers because they sound better. I'd still rather look for one decent sized box than a dozen film pots behind posts, and because I got bored of looking for film pots my caching activity has all but stopped.

All these could cause the problem. Of course there's no way to know for sure whether a person doesn't respond to emails because they don't receive them or because they choose not to reply. There's nothing to stop someone using a disposable email address to sign up, activating their confirmation email, then just deleting anything that comes from Groundspeak from there on in. It might not hurt if GS had an automated process that sent out an email every three months or so to make sure email addresses were still valid. Anything that came back undeliverable would result in the user account being suspended until they revalidated, and anything that didn't get a simple response within a couple of weeks would do the same. If people are on holiday they may not get their emails, but if they are accessing the web site they clearly have internet access so can process a basic email. All it would need is a simple "click this link to revalidate your email", leading to a simple page thanking them for validating. And if they got back to find the revalidation email they could just click the link and be revalidated instantly.

In your hypothetical situation, there would indeed be a reduction in anonymous users, but not an elimination. An anonymous user could still log those 10 caches with 10 (or more!) problematic logs. It really isn't that hard for people to click on a link in an email, so they should be required to do so before being given access to any cache information. ... and since smartphone app users are presumably connecting to the internet using their phones it's not as if they can't get at their emails. I don't see any need to disqualify hotmail/yahoo/gmail addresses. If someone is going to go to the trouble to set one up just to avoid giving away their "real" email address they're already talking about making an effort to get on board. It's not as if someone signing up just to steal caches and trackables is going to be put off by that extra hurdle, especially when you can register a domain for sufficiently little money they're all but disposable. But the emails are in HTML! I cannot read my geocaching emails properly on my smartphone as I only get to see the HTML code and have to dig for the relevant information in there Can we assume someone actually trying to validate their email is able to read the email in the first place? So make the emails text-based until the user expresses a preference for HTML. The fact they screwed something up once isn't a reason not to do a good thing later by simply unborking what they already borked.

Is ANYBODY from Groundspeak paying attention to this AT ALL? Maybe they'd like most caches to become premium-only, because then most members would become paying premium members. Ya think? If that is the case then the proper thing for them to do would be to SAY SO - rather than facilitate examples like that above This reminds me of the situation when the major supermarkets in the UK took away the half-height shopping trolleys in the belief that shoppers who couldn't get a half-height trolley would take a larger version and end up buying more. What actually happened was that they took a basket and ended up buying less. I suspect that allowing unknown numbers of caches to get muggled as a push to get people to make their caches PMO and gain more premium members is just as likely to alienate the customer base and push people towards other sites. Having let my own premium membership lapse I certainly wouldn't renew it unless I could be confident of having more on offer than a number of PMO film pots behind posts.

In your hypothetical situation, there would indeed be a reduction in anonymous users, but not an elimination. An anonymous user could still log those 10 caches with 10 (or more!) problematic logs. It really isn't that hard for people to click on a link in an email, so they should be required to do so before being given access to any cache information. ... and since smartphone app users are presumably connecting to the internet using their phones it's not as if they can't get at their emails. I don't see any need to disqualify hotmail/yahoo/gmail addresses. If someone is going to go to the trouble to set one up just to avoid giving away their "real" email address they're already talking about making an effort to get on board. It's not as if someone signing up just to steal caches and trackables is going to be put off by that extra hurdle, especially when you can register a domain for sufficiently little money they're all but disposable.

Statistics really aren't an issue. When I spent two months away from home last year I just updated my home coordinates to where I was based at the time. The site updated my statistics, which looked a bit odd because it showed about 10 caches found within 10 miles of home and nearly two thousand caches more than 2500 miles from home. If you have multiple "home" locations you'd still designate one as "home" and the others as something else. If you set one of the others to be your "home" location it would just update the stats as it does now, it would just make switching between them so much easier.

Well...I have one cache that is on the route I walk my dog almost daily. Every time I pass I glance over to see if it's still there. I will not post those visits. If you had a few DNFs perhaps you'd be inclined to log the fact you checked and it's still there?

I don't like all the red things around the one blue thing.

It would be really handy to be able to switch between "home" locations by simply clicking a link. It would allow people to use the "caches nearest home" option much more effectively if they could just say "I'm at my holiday home" or "I'm at Aunt Betty's", if they were going for a few days. Where people have a holiday home in France, or a mountain retreat in Montana, or whatever else, it would be even more useful. If you're just going away for a couple of days it's probably not worth doing but for those who regularly visit the same area for a week or more at a time it would be useful. Where notifications are concerned, it chalks up yet another request to allow multiple cache types per notification. I used to have one load for "Home" and one for "home from home" but it's silly having to set up one notification for traditionals, another for multis, another for puzzles, another for events, another for wherigos and so on.