5thApe

Yeah, this seems to be turning into a big problem. Of the last SEVEN travel bugs that should have been in caches I found, none of them were present and none of them had been logged as retrieved. Some of them have been MIA for years. I think geocaching.com needs to do something: education for new users, education for purchasers of TBs (make it clear that when a bug goes missing, they should indicate the fact so it doesn't show as supposed to be somewhere it hasn't been for a while), maybe some form of oversight, or ability for a person who found the cache w/o the TB to record it as missing.

I swear someone jumps on a newcomer every day. Read but don't post, or try answering the question courteously as others have done in the many, many other threads about this. Thanks for the polite replies. They were helpful. I DID search forums for "Change username" before I posted, and came up with nothing. I think perhaps it only searched the particular forum I had guessed might be right. When I searched again after I got these replies (and wasn't looking at any particular forum) it did find the FAQ on this subject.

Is there a way to change my geocaching username? If I do, can I keep my user number and other information? hg1130

I dislike the term too, for two reasons. First, it sounds dumb to me. Second, it refers to a series of books I think of as childish. Maybe that's why I think it sounds dumb. It doesn't concern me in the least what non-cachers think of the term. Who cares. But what cachers think of the term means something, and I think it's awful. Onlookers is a better term.