PandyBat

My favorite find was a sig item with a picture of Jeepers and Memphis on it. It was the first sig item I had ever come across and it somehow made a change in the game for me. It was kinda weird because before I found her sig item, the game didn't seem to have much of a personal aspect to it. After I found it, I realized there were real people behind the game and it didn't seem so much like just a container of trinkets I was hunting for and handling. There was a history behind the cache. It was pretty cool. And it inspired me to make my own sig items that I leave along with other trade items.

It absolutely cracks me up when people go to all the trouble to do a search and post something like this and there ends up being numerous posts after it, completely ignoring the reference to the other thread....LOL It's not that big a deal......really. My hubby makes more of a stink about me going geocaching now that gas is so high. All it takes is a nice meal when he gets home and a foot massage before bed and he forgets all about those gas prices and how many miles I travel in a day...lol

I think I touched a tb of yours at one time, Snoogans but not sure which one it was.

THANK YOU for saying that! I wholeheartedly agree. Everytime I see someone bring up the dead horse subject, I immediately start thinking that person is acting more like the smelly end of a horse. Remember, not everyone was here when you first discussed these topics and there's no harm in bringing them up in a new thread. If you wouldn't like to read about it again, then stay out of it and let other people contribute to it. There's nothing I hate more than getting email notification of a new post in a thread only to go back to it and find that someone has contributed nothing more than an insult or the dead horse beating and didn't contribute anything to the topic of the thread itself.

I'm going to try that with my first cache hide and see how it works out.

It's pretty funny that people will cheat for numbers when there's nothing waiting for you at the end once you get the highest number. Just because you have 5000 finds or have hidden 500 caches doesn't mean a thing to me except that you spent far more in gas and time than I have to do it.

There are tons of walking sticks available on eBay. I just bought two Wilderness Walkers from j.j.jackson. I started to buy a trekking pole at Target but the only ones they had left were ones that were bent or were locked into place and you couldn't adjust them. I decided that since I was likely to run into that problem with a trekking pole on down the road, I might be better off going with a wooden pole. Only thing I'm really missing by having a wooden one over a trekking pole is not being able to collapse it down and carry it in my backpack, but that's not that big a deal to me anyway.

The extra effort will also stop casual geocachers and people who simply don't want to create accounts (my 70 year old parents who are addicted to geocaching leap to mind). The loss of those people from the community isn't worth it in my opinion. You don't seem to value them but I do. You can't order from ebay or amazon without an account, right? Half the newspaper websites request that you create an account just to view the news. I'm not so sure that taking into consideration the people who just refuse to create an account somewhere is a good enough excuse for people not to have to register to see the co-ords either. It's not like GC.com asks for your credit card information as part of registration. Most places just a name and email address is required. I still believe that if people truly want to geocache, they'll register at a website in order to get the information they need to do it. Why are we so worried about the people that don't fully participate by not logging their caches, participating in the forums or paying the site for the premium membership? They might as well be ghosts to this site. They might as well go out and steal caches. Nothing even to the slightest degree is being done to prevent them from doing so.

Geesh....Are you all going to pick this apart to the inth degree until someone gets fed up with it all and cancels the sweepstakes? Trust me, these sweepstakes people know what they are doing. They'll have it all worked out by the time the TBs are mailed out...don't worry so much.

To me the most interesting aspect of a good cache is not the box or its contents but the place where it is located and where I would probably never go if I would not hunt for caches. You can't steal such a place. Is it such a tragedy if a plastic box with, lets face it, a lot of rubbish in it is stolen? I'm not as interested in the actual cache either as much as I am the location, but putting out a cache is part of the game. It is a tragedy when you take the time and effort to do things for other people to enjoy and stupid cache thieves ruin it for everyone.

I noticed it too. Hard to print off a page with the hint decrypted with so many logs on it. It needs to be last 5 logs and the hint decrypted only.

What are you looking at on the geocaching.com website where time is a factor? Maybe I am missing something.

I'm just thinking back to when certain parts of the religious sector seemed to have a huge problem with the Harry Potter books and movies and wanted them banned because they represented dark spirits, witches, wizardry and magic. Maybe a little of that outrage is being carried over into here by some members and that's the reason they don't like the term muggles? Not that it matters now though, the term has been used for so long now that I don't think that there's a chance of changing it. Use it if you like, don't if you don't. I don't think people are going to scorn you for saying muggle. It's just a word. You don't even have to explain to anyone that the name came from a Harry Potter book anyway. You can just say it was made up on the GC.com site.

I don't think any of the proposed solutions would completely stop the problem either. But it might help to slow them down a bit. If nothing is done to help stop or at least slow down cache thieves, then eventually the honest cache hiders quit hiding caches. The cache thieves win. I have a travel bug that I am leary of putting out because so many go missing. I also have a cache ready to put out but am leary of doing it for fear it will go missing or someone will take all the good stuff and leave it trashed. But as the site stands, I will never be able to even have an inkling of who did it because no one is required to log in to see the cache co-ords or even log that they found it. I'm a newbie! Kinda weird that I already have these feelings and I haven't been doing it that long. I don't know what the solution to all this is. I realize my fears are part of the game and I certainly don't want to quit playing the game because of them. But I'd also like to know that if there is a solution out there that can be implemented to help deter the problems even a little bit, that it might be considered instead of shot down right off the bat because others don't want to see changes in the site or the game. Everything evolves at some point.

I have NO clue what you just said in all this but it clearly indicates that I am not a computer programmer by any means. These stats gifs are not just limited to a couple dozen on that one page. Those stats gifs are robbed from GC.com all over the internet. They aren't "robbed"; they are externally linked to. There was an announcement that these were available. As I said, if regenerating and 6K image by looking up 3 things from a GUID (user name, find count, hidden count) every couple of days (on average) is killing the server, it's badly implemented. I'd have to look up the original announcement, but there's a clear expectation when you make information available (such as by putting it on the web) that it's there under standard "acceptable use" policies and external linking to web sites has been repeatedly declared by the courts to be acceptable use these days. I'd still like to here why Jeremy considers this "abuse". If the answer doesn't involve legalities, answering the above is a distraction. If the answer is technical, perhaps we can help. Ah...I see. Thanks for explaining!

That is so funny! AND so true!

Cool...thanks n00b! The film canisters and the bags must be the only things that I have ever seen WalMart contribute for free. And they don't even know it! LOL

Swag, muggle, micro, TN/LN, etc.......it's all I've ever known and I probably couldn't change that now even if I wanted to.

Well, yeah, I can see that, but recently one of my TB's was taken to an event cache. I must've gotten 40 or 50 emails in two days for all of the people that "saw it" at the event.....that kind of logging I can do without. It's all part of the journey of a travel bug.

Great ideas! I can't imagine someone being so freaked out about having to provide an email address in order to see cache co-ords. Lots of sites on the internet "hide" certain areas or specific information from non-registered viewers. If they're serious about wanting to play, then they'll register to do so. I don't understand why this site and this game is still trying to be played the way it was when it first started. There were virtually no rules because the problems were minimal back then. But how bad do the problems have to get before something is done about them? Everyone is so worried about discouraging new membership to the game. How about worrying about keeping the older members that get fed up with the new problems introduced to the game for a change?

That page has to be killing the server with every page load... I know it sure killed my browser both times I opened it....I wouldn't blame Jeremy a bit for killing that stat service just for that very reason there. Sorry, but if loading a couple dozen 200x50 pixel gifs is "killing the server" , there are deeper architectural issues than that. The 6,800-ish bytes per gif should -totally disregarding compression present in even fifteen year old modems - be totally dwarfed by the horrors of, say, decoding the increasingly pervasive GUIDs and Javascript on the pages... The gifs are essentially static and highly cacheable; they are highly redundant but contain an overlay of find counts and hide counts. When do these numbers ever change? When the person either gets a new cache approved or when they log finds. (The few exceptions, such as when a finder has his log deleted by a placer, are surely statistically insignifiicant.) If you can accept even as much as a 30 minute delay, even the most die-hard ubercachers (why, look, I happen to have had dinner with 5 of the top 30 this very night...) are unlikely to trigger the need to update these images more than a couple of times a week. So after the person has not logged a cache in the last 30 minutes, their GIF gets regenerated. Regenning this GIF is noise compared to the actual logging process. As long as the server obeys RFC2616 and related specs, it shouldn't have to recompute for most cachers more than a few times a week and even if the reader bangs 'reload' in rapid succession, it should not have to even have to resend it over the wire for most browser fetches. If you're doing something totally insane like a dynamic select on the database per gif fetch to retrieve finds/hides for that user, of course it will be expensive. But between breaking normality and keeping the count in the per-user record and simply recomputing this on delta log list for that user, that surely isn't what's going on. Jeremy, I'd much rather see you define 'abuse' of the states images and work with responsible cachers/programmers than to "shut down that feature". I have NO clue what you just said in all this but it clearly indicates that I am not a computer programmer by any means. So help me understand here........... These stats gifs are not just limited to a couple dozen on that one page. Those stats gifs are robbed from GC.com all over the internet. I see these stats gifs posted in personal websites, other geocaching websites, etc. That's gotta be some kind of significant burden on the servers or whereever it comes from, doesn't it? Also, wouldn't it be some kind of violation of the copyright law for them to be posted on that page or anywhere else? If you have to ask for permission to use the GC.com logo, shouldn't it apply to these stats gifs as well?

I still don't understand the reasoning behind not making people at least register before getting the co-ords from a cache page. There are tons of sites on the internet that don't allow access to certain parts of their site until a person registers. Also, there are tons of sites that keep track of IP addresses to weed out the sock puppet accounts, etc. But seeing as how its a little too late to do it now since the site has been opened up like this since the beginning, I'm wasting my time just talking about it.....lol Nevermind me....I'm just rambling.

Try a good old-fashioned hot bath. I hate to take medication. Anything that helps the aches and pains and also helps me avoid putting unnecessary chemicals into my body is ok in my book.

Thanks for the responses, guys! I really wasn't even keenly aware of all the trash until I started geocaching. It's kinda of like the Yellow Jeep locationless cache......you never notice how many of them are around until you start looking for them....lol Geocaching and CITO has made a deep impression on me. I try to CITO almost everywhere I go now, not just geocaching. I got my daughter into geocaching and CITO and she notices it even more than me. She even comments on all the trash she sees in places. She is only 5! She wants to pick up so much trash sometimes that I have to tell her we can't pick it all up in one trip. I'm very proud of her. She and I have taken a notice in our enviroment that we never had before because of geocaching. It's a pretty cool feeling. What's CITO canister consist of? I haven't seen one yet.

Hmmmm....I guess not. Not many responses about it.