the hermit crabs

There was a thread about 4 years ago called "Oddly Named Caches"; it included this post which jumped immediately to mind for this thread. Still cracks me up.

We've hidden a few dozen caches, but the only one that we are really sticklers about "found it" logs is the one that is meant to be a challenge to open. It's an ammo can that has been welded shut, with a "secret" panel in the bottom held in place by a very strong magnet. There are at least three hints on the cache page regarding the nature of the cache, plus lots of spoilers in the logs. It's our only cache page that explicitly says that the physical cache log must be signed before it can be logged online. We've had some logs that said hat the ammo can was frozen or rusted shut, but they were claiming a find anyway... we've emailed them giving broad hints about the trick of the cache, and asking them to change their logs from "found it" to either a note or a DNF. All but one have complied, and came back out to find it for real... we did end up deleting the one holdout's found-it log.

Two and half years ago, we released a TB with the goal of getting to a particular cacher in the Netherlands. Here is our original post at time time (from this thread) : We dropped the TB off shortly after that post. "Scott" first reached the Netherlands more than a year ago, and has been slowly zig-zagging his way toward Amsterdam ever since (with a side trip to Belgium). Finally yesterday, he was near enough to home that dweez (real-life Scott's dad) was able to go pick him up. Scott made it home!

The cheapest ones I know of are at islandbuttons.com -- $2.99 per pair. (They are buttons, though, so they may not be as durable as dogtags.) I've never ordered from them, so I can't give any feedback about their service.

Brilliant! We arrive at the cache and someone is there searching. This cache (huh? I think he means TB - Xaa) has been dropped by him in the USA a long time ago and now it is "nearby". Nice find, after retrieving we gave it to the other cacher right away. Thank you! I was hoping t that's what it meant. A couple of years ago, we found a photograph of a little Dutch boy in a cache in the US. His father had written his name on the back, asking that the picture make its way back to the Netherlands. We turned it into a travel bug, and now it has reached its original owner! I love a successful TB story

Would someone be able to translate this log from Dutch to English for me? I tried babelfish, but the results were not very helpful. Thank you! Apologies for bad babelfish translation: -------------------------------------------------------------- Verontschuldigingen voor slechte babelfishvertaling: Zou iemand dit logboek uit Nederlands in het Engels voor me kunnen vertalen? Ik probeerde babelfish, maar de resultaten waren niet zeer nuttig. Dank u!

Maybe you could remove it without making it look like it has been removed: "You are watching this listing with up to 200 or more other users"

I may be wrong too (and probably am), but my first guess about the punctuation was that there are a whole bunch of cemetery caches in WI starting with "WSQ", and this is the only one in that group that starts with "WSQ-". Maybe someone just likes things to be consistent. Actually, now that I look at more of them, about half of them start with "WSQ:", so there goes that theory.. unless all those cache owners also got emails asking for removal of punctuation too. The CacheMate theory is looking more reasonable.

I'm seeing it, too. It does correctly list all of the caches on pages 2, 3, etc; it just has that error message up at the top of the page.

We do that quite often for high-up caches. We try to be inconspicuous about it, but it doesn't always work out that way. Once we were way out in the woods near an old chain-link fence; we had already foundd the cache inside one of the posts but for extra-curricular reasons we needed to see if there was anything else hidden down below it. So I got up on my co-crab's shoulders and was preparing to shine a flashlight into the depths of the fence pole, when out of nowhere two hikers came strolling along the path. We looked them and froze, they looked at us and did a double-take. Pause... "Hi," I said, somewhat lamely. With better social skills than I have, they replied, "Nice day, isn't it?" "Beautiful!" I replied, getting no help from the crab below me. They waved and resumed walking.

Sometimes they're gone for good, and sometimes they do come back. Sometimes when they are gone for good, it's intentional theft; other times it's absent-mindedness; other times it is life getting in the way of good intentions; other times it can pure bafflement by the not-so-intuituve method of handling trackables; other times it's just innocent ignorance of what trackables are. We've had lots of ours vanish, but we've also had a few come back from the dead after years of being MIA. Some of the resurrections come with weird stories of being found thousands of miles from where they were last logged; others are just a bug drop three years after the retrieval. Whichever it is, it's always a pleasant and unexpected suprise to see them moving again. We recently had an experience with a missing bug that came back. We were bug movers in this case, not owners: In August 2008, a bug was dropped into a cache in Texas. In December, a visitor to the cache reported that the bug was no longer there. The cache was visited almost 20 times in the next few months, with no mention of the bug, although it remained logged in that cache. We visited the cache in May, and had not read the old logs that mentioned the bug. We saw the bug in the cache, took it, and logged the grab. On the bug page, we saw the 5-month old note about the bug not being in the cache, and wondered how so many people could have missed it when it was sitting right there, plain as day. But we just shrugged and went on. Then in August, a log posted on the cache explained the mystery: "Actually found this cache long ago when we were muggles. My son took what shall remain an unnamed travel bug and held it for some time because we did not know any better. It was returned some months ago and I can see from log that it was taken from site some months ago." So it actually was MIA for a few months, and we just happened to hit the cache just after it was silently placed back in action. Travel bugs lead interesting, if precarious, lives.

Those caches were placed in May of 2009. Unless that is a new trail, "anyone else" had eight years before that to place caches, but didn't. So it's OK to stop newer cachers from placing caches in their favorite areas? Personally I would be behind a guideline that said cachers couldn't have their own caches within 1/2 of a mile from each other. It would help to avoid cache saturation by individual geocachers. I have no idea where you're getting the idea that I think that "it's OK to stop newer cachers from placing caches in their favorite areas"... what I'm saying is the opposite: I don't like the idea of stopping any cacher, new or old, from placing caches in their favorite areas. We have enough rules as it is; I find the idea that Groundspeak might say "Yes, this spot is okay for a cache -- just not one placed by you" to be pretty icky.

Those caches were placed in May of 2009. Unless that is a new trail, "anyone else" had eight years before that to place caches, but didn't.

(This is a copy-n-paste of a post I made in another Travel Bug Hotel thread. That thread is worth reading, since it was started by someone in a similar position to yours, asking advice for starting up a new TB hotel.) Here is a link to my favorite "travel bug hotel": Robin Hill Cemetery Cache. The things that make it perfect for bugs are: It is not listed as a TB hotel. It's just listed as a regular cache, and has other trade items in it as well. If you look at the yahoo map on the bug page, you can see that it is right near the intersection of two major interstate highways, so it is convenient for people who are traveling long distances and who want to take a short caching break. (Since it's so close to the two highways, it will appear on "Caches Along a Route" lists pretty frequently.) Although it is very near these two highways, it is not directly accessible from either one; it's not in a rest area that hundreds of people pass through every day. You have to take an exit off of one of the highways and then drive away from the cache before coming back toward it on a side road. No one is likely to find this cache unless they are looking specifically for it. It's in a wonderful location, back at the far edge of an almost-vacant cemetery from the 1800's. What few gravestones there are make for very interesting reading. A short walk from parking, and suddenly you feel like you're back in time, in the middle of nowhere, even though there are cars and buildings and highways just a short distance away. It's an ammo can, so it has plenty of room for bugs, and it keeps them safe and dry. Since it's just listed as a regular cache, there is never that big buildup of bugs that sometimes accumulate in "official" TB hotels. So the chance of multiple TBs getting lost at once is very low. Since it's just listed as a regular cache, people feel free to pick up bugs or drop them there all the time without worrying about angering the cache owner for not trading. There's often a bug or two there, and they tend to move very regularly. When I have pick up a bug that wants to go somewhere far off, I'll often drop it in this cache, and more often than not, its next stop is in a new state. Since it's just listed as a regular cache, no one ever gets bent out of shape when there happens to be no bugs in it. Finders don't complain about an "empty hotel". No one calls the previous cacher "greedy" for taking the last bug. And the cache owner never restocks the cache with more bugs. All of the bug throughput is natural, not forced. This cache has been in existence for four years*. It gets visited several times every month, all year long. It has had over 250 finders, and more than 100 bugs have passed through. Unlike other local caches at which visits drop off significantly after all of the locals have found it, this one continues to attract people at a steady pace. As far as I am aware, the cache has never been muggled or vandalized. So, if you can manage to make a cache like this one, it'll be perfect .... *the cache is now more than five years old. I was going to update the count of finders and TBs, but I'm getting a "Service Unavailable" message on gc.com.

any page in particular? I'm quite sincere, if the page you referenced is on this site, then it could be improved. My guess would be the Geocaching Software page, linked to from the Resources page. The "Windows Applications" section of that page has the phrasing issue described in the OP.

It depends what you mean by "list". Dependig on what you want to do with this list, you might want a bookmark or PQ as desrcibed in previous posts. But if you want something really easy without the extra usefulness that you get with those methods, you can just go to http://www.geocaching.com/profile/ , click the "Geocaches" tab, and then click the "?" icon. It will list all of the puzzle caches you've found.

I'll try to keep that in mind... No requests for changes or suggestions for improvements will be considered unless people will die if the changes are not made. "No impending deaths? Then shut up! We don't want to hear it!" A classic Straw Man argument. Nobody is talking about "no improvements". This is about whether it is worth making a specific, major change to the site's operations which might - if it were to have worked - have saved 29 hours of downtime, the worst outage in the site's 9-year history. Groundspeak has said "it isn't going to happen" and most people here can understand why. Those of us who have actually tried to build and operate redundant data centres can understand even more reasons why - most so-called redundant systems find ways to let you down. (A colleague just discovered that the dual-processor, "keep on running" server on which our accounting system runs, has been running on just one processor for a month, because the alert saying "help, a CPU went down" didn't get through due to some stupid firewall or other filtering issue.) See, now those are reasonable-sounding points that are relevant to the original issue, unlike the irritating post that I was responding to. (You left it out of your reply to me, but I have put it back.) I am neither for nor against any of the changes being suggested, since I don't know enough about the technical details to have an informed opinion. I was not responding to the OP, but rather to the maddening habit that some forum posters have when shooting down requests or suggestions or complaints. Responses like: "No one is going to die if the change isn't made." "The earth won't stop spinning on its axis if we leave things as they are." "It's just a hobby; get a life." "This is the way it's always been done." "I don't see a need for it, so I don't think they should do it." "What do you expect for thirty bucks?" etc. It just sets my teeth on edge when people try to cut off discussion by pointing out the ridiculously obvious: that this is just a hobby, for which there is no "need" at all, and which would kill no one even if Groundspeak were to go out of business tomorrow. Just because it's "only a hobby" doesn't mean that people can't have strong opinions, passionate feelings, and vehement arguments about it. These "no one's gonna die" responses to any discussion here just piss me off -- it doesn't matter which side I agree with, or whether I agree with any side at all -- that kind of response is just pointless and stupid and annoying.

I'll try to keep that in mind... No requests for changes or suggestions for improvements will be considered unless people will die if the changes are not made. "No impending deaths? Then shut up! We don't want to hear it!"

YOU understood what I was saying. Ok they now allow transparency? I will do the same then... just thought we could not use transparency, and since the forum alternate between 2 shades of blue every message it was impossible to get it right. No, I didn't use transparency. I just copied a piece of the light blue from the left column of the forum page, made a 75x75 jpeg with that color, and copied my 75x53 avatar onto it. Sometimes the blue looks exactly right, and sometimes it's a few shades off. (If you right-click my avatar and select "view image", you can see the blue stripe at the bottom.)

That's actually a reasonable option. You should make a pitch in the website forum. i'm against this option simply because people in general are lazy. given the opportunity to write nothing at all, many more people would jump at it. if they have to write SOMETHING, we have a better likelihood that they will write something decent. not a huge likelihood, but better at least. I had never thought of this logless find idea before, but I like it. If people only write something if they want to, then the information in a PQ would be more useful than it is now. If we only get five logs per cache, I'd rather have them be written by people who actively chose to say something, than by people who only write "TFTC" or "TNLNSL" because they are required to write something. (This is assuming that the logless find does not take up one a of the five log slots per cache.)

I have to say that I appreciate the limit. It's such a waste of space when people have one line messages and signatures/avatars that are 10-20 times larger. But it's not the limit that's the problem -- it's the stretching and skewing that gets done on images that are already within the limits. My avatar was 75x53, but with the new 75x75 rule, the forum software stretched the height from 53 to 75. The aspect ratio was all screwed up and looked awful. I had to take my original 75x53 and add 22 extra pixels of padding at the bottom, just to get the right shape back. I can see making an avatar smaller if it is greater than 75 in either direction -- but why make it bigger if it is within the limits? My original avatar: What the forum did to it: My replacement:

Which is why I wish that email notifications for new caches included a note indicating that they are PMO, in which case I'd never click the links to them.

Having never been a web designer, I am free of such baggage, and go straight for the sensible :-)

Sounds very familiar!

Five years ago we released our 3rd TB, "Best of Friends", a little Snoopy-and-Woodstock figurine that we had picked up as cache trade. Its (imaginary) goal was to wander around in search of the elusive Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. Two years later, while the bug was roaming around Canada, we got a notification that a new cache had just been published in Rhode Island, called "Daisy Hill Puppy Farm 1095", so I added a note about it on the cache page. (It wasn't listed a the bug's real goal, just more of a "Hey, look at that" kind of note.) The bug spent the next three years traveling to all four corners of the lower 48, and just a couple of weeks ago it made a trip from Texas up to Rhode Island, straight to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. It made me smile -- not just that it actually got there, but that it has been traveling safely for more than 5 years and 10,000 miles, and is still going. ================== And an update about "Scott (going home to Holland)" (which we first wrote about in this post): Scott was dropped into a cache in Holland last week! He's just barely over the border, so still not quite within easy reach of Scott's dad -- but we're delighted that he's sooo close.