Pieman

All gc.com emails stopped arriving on Saturday- PQs, logs on my caches etc. Are there any issues at the moment? I'm on hotmail, but they are not going to junk and geocaching.com is on my white list. It seems this problem occurs about once every couple of months.

Today, I have had the same problem with my hotmail account. Everything was fine yesterday.

Chris Hutchins?

£500 Superbreak holiday vouchers for me! I also thought an email headed "Congratulations" was spam.

I have been in search of a workable way to find out traffic info in a timely way for a long time. I had Trafficmaster, which can really wind you up when you are in a 3 hour traffic jam and it keeps telling you "traffic flowing freely". In pratice, it reported snarl-ups correctly about 60% of the time which wasn't accurate enough for me ever to believe it. My Tom Tom has a subscription service which is completely useless- it always claims my route home from work has a 90 minute delay (normally 0-5 minutes). The other day while I was sitting in a jam listening to the radio I was trying to remember if I had ever heard a traffic report on the radio that was of use in helping me avoid a jam as my hold-up on the M56 was unreported. I could remember one in 30 years of driving. Then, a traffic report came on the radio reporting the hold-up due to a crash. At that very instant the traffic started to move again as the crash had been cleared. Unfortunately, I don't think that the flow of traffic information is quick enough and unless the information is correct for the large majority of the time, you will get fed-up with the system diverting away from main roads for phantom hold-ups (and missing the real ones).

This seems a little harsh. Please remember this advice in years to come when things change in your hobby. As it happens I did just what you suggest. I joined Terracaching a couple of years ago hoping it would be the home of quality caches. Unfortunately, in the UK it's hardly the home of any caches at all and none are near me (still). I'm afraid they made a strategically disasterous move by not allowing listing of caches that are also on GC.com.

Yes, I found that very useful when I started caching but it needs a lot more research now to find the gems. If you concentrate on multi caches (the ones that just give one smiley rather than the ones that are a series of individual caches) I find the quality increases markedly.

There are lots of people who enjoy placing caches, so that if some cachers don't want to there will still be more than enough for us all to do. Cachers can give back to the game by posting interesting logs when the muse strikes them.

I think that the difference from "olden times" is that more caches are there just for the sake of a cache being there. When I began caching there was a variety of caches- short walks, long walks, puzzles, micros and multis but the majority had a point beyond just being a cache. There seemed to me to be a fundemental change in caching with the advent of Motorway Mayhem. Whether it's a positive or negative thing depends on what caches you enjoy doing and how easy it is to distinguish the types you enjoy before you attempt them. One of the good things about the various cash and dash series is that it's immediately obvious which type of cacher they are aimed at, so it's easy to filter them out or in.

It may only be a few years old, but the game has changed a lot. I used to tell people who asked me about geocaching (back in 2004) that the game invoolved hiding a box in an interesting location. I remember saying how useful it was when I travelled to somewhere new as it directed me to interesting spots that often only the locals would otherwise know about. For good or ill, that is no longer what geocaching is about; it is about finding a cache whatever the location. The prevailing spirit within the game (as I see it from new caches placed and numbers of finds on different types of caches) is that finding a cache in whatever the location is better than not caching at all. This is epitomised by series such as Motorway Mayhem and Off Yer Trolley. It's still possible to cache in the "old" way, but you have to take time to choose which caches to do. I have enough experience to sift through the mass of caches to judge which I will enjoy. I guess if I was starting out now, there would be a strong probability that I would lose interest in geocaching fairly quickly.

I tend to send emails after a few months. This probably works in about a third of cases the others get ignored. My unluckiest coin was held for a long time by a cacher who eventually emailed me to say that he had lost the coin. Some time later he found it and planned to put it in a cache only for his car to get broken into and the coin get stolen along with the rest of the stuff in the car . He sent me three unactivated coins as recompense which was very kind.

I notice that in the find count at the head of the logs there is no smiley to show you found it, but then that feature of the site is regularly inaccurate.

Sorry, I shold have said the FTFs do not show as finds on the cache page (smiley face) Your logs appear on GC1FMH2 and GC1FD14 which were your third and second FTFs.

Yes, I'd removed my only "armchair" cache from my finds some time ago so as not to upset my records. I actually signed a travelling cache recently too, but declined to log it on GC.COM for the same reason. I also found a travelling cache recently but altered the coordinates (and country) in GSAK to correct everything.

Thanks, Lignumaqua, for the excellent explanation.

According to GSAK, my centroid is just south of the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea). This is a somewhat strange as I have only found 52 caches north of these coordinates and 1001 south of them. I would love someone to explain how this can possibly be correct as some of the 1001 are a lot south of the coordinates and none of the 52 are very much north of them. On the main subject, I think it's an excellent idea to cache by trying to manipulate your cache centroid! Like cricket, caching is heaven for stats lovers!

Millets in Derby aren't yet involved in the promotion to judge from the promotion website. Millets in Chester had a few coins yesterday (Big Ben) when I got mine.

I did smile that, despite her age, her command of the English language was rather better than some of the other posters, in particular the person who wrote the guidelines!

Here's a guide to sorting some interesting caches: Do multis Do caches that haven't been found for at least one month Do caches where the terrain or difficulty rating is 2 or more It isn't infallible but it will keep you away from bus stops, service stations and rubbish bins!

It's now the most read story on the MEN website!

There are bound to be a few disturbed people involved in caching who would do this sort of thing by the law of averages; however, I think this should be kept in perspective. There are 30,000 caches in the UK and I doubt whether 0.1% of those will ever be deliberately stolen by a cacher. The chance of being stolen/ destroyed by a non-cacher has got to be way higher.

I agree. I have logged one cache twice as it was moved to a new location and the owner allowed relogging, but it wouldn't be a loss to me if the site ensured only one found log per cache. Having said that, I guess it doesn't really matter that much if people decide to log events or whatever cache multiple times, although I do find the behaviour a bit odd.

Well there is this cache near Manchester which is a 1/2 traditional and is unfound after over 2 months. One DNF and that was after nearly 2 months.

If it's a traditional it should be at the listed coordinates. However, whatever type of cache it is, it would be perverse to only make it clear that it is not at the listed coordinates by something encrypted in the hint. I'm guessing that it is at the listed coordinates- just not in the obvious place.

Having looked at the long list of fixes there's nothing there that particularly excites me although I see they have added a new bug on searching geocaches by name that is potentially a real nuisance. Think I'll stick with 2.51 for now.