Bing-GTX

Well, I am in no position to say whether or not it is deliberate, but I think one of the quotes in your signature is apropos, I am sure you know which one.

Nothing has changed at Groundspeak/geocaching.com as far as I know there has never been any thing other than a gentleman's agreement to prevent you from logging a cache multiple times. In fact there are several caches that I have come across where the owner makes a statement in the description that says if you do a certain action, usually a favor to the owner, feel free to log an extra find on the cache. I have never done that because like you I have always felt that one find per cache is sufficient. But there is a statistic generated by gc.com that tells you how many finds you have and how many unique caches you have found. If you are only logging once then they should be the same. What that tells me is that the software is written to allow multiple logs per cache. There is one type of mystery cache called a roving cache (see: GCCF79) because the finder moves the cache and posts the new coordinates in the log, since this is a new find each time it is legitimate to log each find. Disclaimer, this type of cache may be discouraged or even prohibited from being created, I think that I remember reading something about that but I could not find it when I went looking for it just now.

I, for one, certainly would not want to see the 'discover' option removed. It is mostly how I interact with travelers any more. In my area there are just too few caches that are large enough to hold a traveler, even a small one, so rather than grab them I just take their pictures and log the discovery. I have seen too many caches with a long list of travelers on the cache page but not a single one in the cache. I can understand that it would be possible that someone picked it up earlier that day when there are just one or two but when there are eight or more listed in a cache that does not have a lot of traffic that tells me that they have been grabbed by someone who does not understand what they are. So I will 'discover' them so the owner knows that it is still in the cache and has not gone AWOL. Please do as Isonzo Karst suggests and edit your photo to obscure the tracking number, then only those who have seen the actual travel bug can log them. If you don't know how to do that I can give you some pointers.

I went back and played around with turning GC Little Helper on and off and am now certain that it is the culprit in this double displaying of log entries that I have been seeing. This is not a ground speak problem at all. This thread can be closed.

Although I originally said that I did not believe it was the same the problem reported with the iOS double logs, I am now quite certain that it is not the same problem and has nothing to do with that problem. As I said in my post I was able to make the duplicates disappear just by refreshing the page. What I am seeing are shadow or phantom entries if you will, the duplicates are not duplicate entries they are duplicate displays of the same entry. Which is entirely different from the iOS phenomenon.

Yes, I am using GC Little Helper. I noticed some double display of logs on a page that I was looking at today. When I disabled GC Little Helper and refreshed the page they went away, that of course is not proof that it is being caused by that add on, since I was able to make them go away without disabling the helper the other day. I will keep an eye on it and perhaps report a problem to the developer of that tool if I can get definitive proof that it is the culprit.

That one has been archived. The sad thing is that there are geocachers who are so insensitive that they caused the problem in the first place. I can't imagine what they were doing that caused people to think that they did not belong there. How could people at a service determine that they were geocachers and not genealogists. That said, I would certainly like to see Groundspeak reverse the policy on not allowing virtuals to be adopted. I have said it before, I like them. I agree with geodarts, mostly they take me interesting places and allow me to learn interesting things that I probably would not have seen or learned if it had not been for a virtual being there. Most of the lame virtuals have been weeded out, most of the ones that remain should be allowed to be adopted. I say 'most' because there are some that are co-located with earth caches which don't really need to be maintained.

I think that is a pocket-query capability, but I cannot verify that since I am no longer a premium member. @ dprovan, Maybe you are not looking in the right place, I have a newest in Texas and that is of even less use than a newest in California. I agree it would be great to be able to define a radius from your home location and see the newest in that radius, but I don't expect that to happen because as I said I think that is a feature that paying members get through the pocket-query facility. So why would they implement it in two places.

As has been pointed out many times in discussions on a local mailing list that I belong to, we all play the game differently. Yep, clayjar's system is a good place to start, but it has some weaknesses. I have noticed that some hiders seem to have a bias toward lower difficulty and/or terrain ratings. While a very few others have a bias toward rating a cache higher than I found it to be. I have found that as I have gained more experience the difficulty ratings seem to even out. Sometimes I get credit for finding a 3D that I would have called a 2D or 1.5D, other times I eventually find a 1.5 and based on the time it took would have thought that is should have been rated a 3D. Sometimes your geo-sense lines up with that of the hider, other times it does not. Sometimes the cache is gone and you spent an hour looking for it and all you get is a DNF to show for your effort. If you are in it just for the numbers then it can be frustrating. If you are in it for the opportunity to get out of doors and experience new places and see new things then as long as you remember to do that as you search, does it really matter that you did or did not find the cache or that it was harder or easier than you thought it should be. Granted a lot of caches are in places that are not that scenic or interesting, but enough are that they more than make up for the pedestrian ones. I have had success, probably more than some others who have responded, in having CO's change their ratings based on comments in my logs, not everyone has but enough have that I feel it was worth mentioning when I felt a cache was rated far too easy or too hard. But I have also noticed that I have become a lot more tolerant as I have found more caches, so I mention it a lot less now than I used to. Even if they don't change them at least others who bother to read the logs will get your message. I am acquainted with a cacher who has more than 30,000 finds and he recently admitted that sometimes he has to DNF a 1.5D cache. You bring up a good point that can be very frustrating at times, especially for beginners. I found a cache this past week that was called a regular in the description, the size data said it was a small, but when I found it the container was definitely a micro tending toward the nano scale. This illustrates what I, at one time, felt was a deficiency in the size rating system. Does the size describe the cavity that contains the log and the swag or does it describe the outside size of the container including the camo that it is attached to and in which it is hidden. Based on implications in the container size descriptions I think that it is intended to be the cavity size. But nowhere in those descriptions do I recall that being explicitly stated. When I am looking I want to know how big of an object I am looking for, so I felt that there should be two sizes given. I found this to be especially true when I had less than 200 finds. As I have found more caches I have become less aware of it. Most of the time it does not really matter any way. I have learned that if it says it is a micro I know that it can be camouflaged in anything bigger while if it is a regular I know that I don't need to be looking at something that a small or micro could be hidden in. I have found, on a few occasions, hollowed out logs, bricks or rocks containing a micro or nano sized cache, many of those are among my favorite finds because they were so cleverly hidden or the craftsmanship that went into creating them was so good.

Several times in the last several weeks when viewing the cache logs I have noticed that several of the oldest log entries are displayed twice in the listing. This seems to be an intermittent occurrence, I noticed the most recent occurrence yesterday (17 Aug 2013) on the cache GC3Z581. This phenomena, while I have noticed it several times does not seem to be reproducible on demand. When I refreshed the page the duplicate entries disappeared. I have noticed that it is not the most recent logs that are displayed twice. When I have noticed this it is always the oldest logs and the published log is always among those that are displayed twice. That is the reason that I first noticed it, I had scrolled to the end of the log listing and saw that there were two published logs, one being the final entry in the list and the other being three or four logs before the final. The logs between these two were exact duplicates of the ones that preceded the first copy of the published log. When I have noticed this it is not always the same number of logs that are duplicated, I have seen as few as two and as many as eight. Since these logs are just being displayed twice it would appear that there is a problem or glitch in the server that is serving up the logs. It appears that the server somehow loses track of what has been displayed or believes that some logs were not displayed when in fact they were. I do not believe that this is the same as the problem that has been reported with duplicate entry of logs from iOS devices. Just in case it matters I noticed this when using Firefox v23.0.1, as well as the previous version 22.0.1.

I have noticed something that may or may not be related but certainly fall under this topic. Several times in the last several weeks that at times I have noticed when viewing the cache logs that the several of the oldest log entries are duplicated in the listing. I would give you the name of a cache where this occurred but it does not seem to be reproducible, on the one that I noticed it on today when I refreshed the page the duplicate entries disappeared. It seems that there is a problem or glitch in the server that is serving up the logs. It appears that it gets lost or does not recognize that it has reached the end of the list and just starts re-serving what it has already served. Has anyone else noticed this?

I have to agree that this is not a bug. I (a basic member) have gone caching with my son (a premium member) on several occasions when we have found premium member caches (several of which I found before he did, but that is beside the point). If the site did not allow me to log the cache I would be extremely disappointed and would consider that to be a serious flaw. There is no reason, because the terms and conditions do not prevent it, that I should not be able to log a Premium cache that I found while caching with a premium member. When you log out of your premium account and log into his basic account regardless of whether you are on the same computer or not, the web site cannot tell that it is you who logged in using his credentials (a poor security practice in my opinion, I might add). The fact that you were recently logged in using your own credentials has no bearing on your ability to log the cache using his account. As far as it is concerned he is the one typing on the keyboard. Since he was there he should do his own logging, there is no need for you to do it for him. The only advantage in your doing this in this manner is that he does not need to look up the cache himself in order to log it. Since premium caches show up in cache lists it is not difficult to find the names and GC codes for them, there is even a "log it" link for them in the list and on the cache page that is displayed if a basic member clicks on the cache name. At one time, although that is apparently broken now, basic members could even see them on the map at certain zoom levels.

I am not trying to start an argument but I think that the point made by Pup Patrol quoted above needs to be commented on. While it may or may not be true that the OP was "confusing" "puzzle" caches with "multicaches", it should be noted that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, a "puzzle" cache can also be a "multicache". For example, Father's Day Series 2008 #2 - Park Art is listed as a "mystery cache" and the description also indicates that it is a "multicache" which requires solving a puzzle in the field to obtain the final coordinates. As others have pointed out the "mystery cache" category allows the creation of a wide range of caches. So rather than being a confusion of two types of caches it may have been merely a misunderstanding of the broad scope that the category mystery caches entails. I have seen mystery caches where the coordinates were correct with no indication of the size of the cache as the mystery (barely a mystery to my way of thinking, but that may be just me), mystery caches with bogus coordinates where any one or more of a number of ciphers, or riddles, or encoding are used to hide the true coordinates, mystery caches where one of the coordinates was correct and the other had to be deduced. In summary, with apologies to the movie "Forrest Gump", Mystery caches are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

I had been using GCz II too, for about a month but noticed yesterday that it is broken again by changes at geocaching.com. I am sure that Tom will fix it again eventually, but that will probably not be soon enough for you, it took him a week last time this happened. Earlier this evening in the GCz II thread I noticed a recommendation for GateCacher. I have just downloaded it, but have not yet tried it so I can't say exactly that it will answer your needs. However, from what I read in the manual, it looks like it has a subset of the capabilities that GCz II has. The manual says that it can download lists of caches in the proximity of your current location, so it sounds like it may do what you want.