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CanadianRockies

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Everything posted by CanadianRockies

  1. But why would Groundspeak care one whit about the ability to create patterns? Are they afraid a challenge cache creator will spell out an obscene word? I think most Volunteer Reviewers are quite capable of detecting undesired patterns (or archiving those that are brought to their attention).
  2. The short answer: No. The longer answer: New challenge caches must be verifiable with an automated challenge checker, which cannot check log text for Good Samaritan actions. I don't think challenge caches have ever been allowed to be based on arbitrary actions. Certainly anything like that was ruled out long before the moratorium and the subsequent addition of the verification requirement. I guess it depends on your definition of "arbitrary." Here's a Minnesota "Good Samaritan" challenge that I'm in the middle of completing. Its requirement: "Cache Assistance 12 Pack is 12 Minnesota caches which received assistance from YOU.... Assistance can be demonstrated many ways. Co-host an Event, voluntarily provide maintenance, recognition for a cache series or location, etc."
  3. The short answer: No. The longer answer: New challenge caches must be verifiable with an automated challenge checker, which cannot check log text for Good Samaritan actions.
  4. What makes you think it will be for August 21st? https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2017Aug21Tgoogle.html http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=344178 I don't think a "solar eclipse" souvenir would mean anything the same as a Canada Day 2017 souvenir. B. But the eclipses' path doesn't pass through Canada.
  5. While that's usually the way things happen, it isn't always the way. We found 10 caches on 22 April, logged all of them on 23 April, and never saw the "congratulations" page appear on our computer. I checked our souvenir page today, and the 3,000,000th one is there, but it indicates it was acquired on 24 April.
  6. I agree that one should be able to use a bike attribute even on difficult bike trails. As a courtesy to less elite bicyclists, it would be great if the cache owner mentioned the trail's difficulty in the cache page description. The same also could be said for off-road vehicles, horses, cross-country skis, scuba, etc.
  7. Yes, I would bet it is much less of a load now when new geographic souvenirs are released and made retroactive, because there is a diminishing pool of people who qualify. When the US and German states went out, they had to retroactively apply to thousands and thousands of geocachers, and let's face it, the system was pretty new. Now, any country souvenir that comes out is only going to have to sift through retroactive awards for 2,000 caches or less -- even poor North Dakota had more caches back then -- plus they're (hopefully) better at rolling them out. The folks at Groundspeak aren't retroactively awarding geographic souvenirs by hand. They use computers, and computers with databases can handle this kind of task very quickly...even with millions and millions of geocachers.
  8. It seems highly unlikely that the retroactive awarding of regional souvenirs is the primary reason why so few new ones are created each year. With any halfway decent database system, that task should be relatively trivial. From what I heard on a recent podcast (I'm pretty sure it's this one), the main bottleneck is coming up with appropriate artwork for the souvenir. After some early missteps, Groundspeak makes a concerted effort to ensure the image reflects the region well.
  9. Personally, I'd decline the offer. The "opportunity costs" are just too high. There are many other things I'd prefer to do with that time.
  10. I remember the days when one could discuss politics with friends and continue to respect them. Today, America is so politically divided that inter-party marriage is the new inter-racial marriage.
  11. I'm sure many different factors cause many different people to be more or less interested in geocaching. And I'm sure the points that individual geocachers have made are valid for their own experiences; but the reasons that apply to them won't apply to everyone else.
  12. ... I'm not saying geocaching isn't on the decline; it might very well be. I'm simply saying the Google Trends data aren't showing what some people think they're showing. If you aren't careful, it's easy to be misled by certain statistics. But, as I've mentioned before, it's hard to argue with the Project-GC stats. I find it hard to believe that the number of active geocachers is significantly declining (fact, according to PGC) without the number of Google searches for Geocaching declining as well. Again, I'm not saying that geocaching is not on the decline. As I've mentioned before, "If I was working at the Lily Pad, then I'd be far more concerned about the much clearer Project GC numbers than I would be about the very vague Google Trends data." Even if we had an accurate read on the number of "geocaching" Google searches, the connection between that number and the interest in geocaching is rather tenuous. A drop in the number of searches could reflect a more saturated awareness of the activity; far more people today know about geocaching than five years ago, so they don't need to look it up on Google. Or maybe more people are using Google competitors as their primary search engines today than five years ago. Even an increase in Google searches wouldn't necessarily indicate a favorable interest in geocaching. For example, I'm sure search numbers jump in localities where there have been recent geocache bomb scares.
  13. Your analysis is only as good as your assumptions, and your assumptions are wildly speculative. Google is deliberately very vague about its total number of searches, and the estimates I've seen are all over the place. So while you might be relatively confident about your conclusions, please color me skeptical. Using July, 2011, as a score of 100, we see that Jan., 2014, had a score of 48 while Jan., 2015, had a score of 41. To some, that looks like a nearly 15% decline in Google searches for "geocaching." But the total number of Google searches probably increases most years. By one estimate, there were a total of 2.095 trillion Google searches in 2014 vs. 2.835 trillion searches in 2015. That's more than a 35% increase in total searches in a single year. If that estimate is true, then the number of "geocaching" Google searches actually increased by about 16% from Jan., 2014, to Jan., 2015, rather than declining nearly 15%. Of course, I have no idea how accurate that estimate is. The same source claims Google searches probably declined from 2013 to 2014. I'm not saying geocaching isn't on the decline; it might very well be. I'm simply saying the Google Trends data aren't showing what some people think they're showing. If you aren't careful, it's easy to be misled by certain statistics.
  14. There still appears to be some confusion over what the Google Trends data indicate. The generally declining trend line linked to in the original post does not necessarily mean "people are searching for geocaching less often." The trend indicates that the percentage of Google searches devoted to "geocaching" is declining versus the total number of Google searches. But that's true for most things, since people are using Google to search for a much wider range of topics now versus five years ago. More people are using Google to look up word definitions, as a substitute for White Pages and Yellow Pages, to read reviews of restaurants/movies/cars, to find the cheapest refrigerator in town, to learn how to change their furnace filter, to select recipes, etc. More and more people are realizing that the Internet provides information they wouldn't have thought about being online a few years ago. If mixed martial arts (MMA) isn't the fastest growing sport in the world, then it's one of the fastest. But if you look at Google Trends for "mixed martial arts" searches, you'll see a trend line that isn't all that different from the "geocaching" trend line. Yet nobody's suggesting that MMA is half as popular as it was five years ago. That's just nonsense.
  15. It seems unlikely that D1 for any T rating would be a valuable grid space, but who knows. Some D1 puzzles could be valuable for people working on Unknown-Only Fizzy challenges. So far, I've only found a single Unknown for each of: D1/T3, D1/T3.5, and D1/T4. Of the 21,000+ Unknowns in Canada, only 4 are D1/T4.5 and 7 are D1/T4.
  16. True, but the percentage of searches about geocaching has declined significantly. That could suggest a decrease in popularity. It could suggest a decrease in popularity. Or it could suggest that people are Googling a broader range of topics these days. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if, today, lots of Internet users turn to Google to look up the definition of "Fascism," whereas plenty of folks would have been more likely to open their paper dictionaries five years ago. The lack of information from Google Trends makes it difficult to draw good conjectures from their data. You're comparing July, 2011, (normalized score = 100) with Dec., 2016, (normalized score = 21). That is a fairly significant drop, but it's not a fair comparison for a seasonally-affected term like "geocaching." A better comparison is between July, 2011, and July, 2016, where the normalized scores are 100 vs. 64. That's a significantly smaller drop, which easily could be explained by a broader use of Google over the past five years (see above). Regardless of what the Google Trends data may really mean, it's hard to dispute the numbers from Project GC (posted above) which show a decrease in the number of active geocachers (a decrease of 8% in the USA from 2015 to 2016). Yes. If I was working at the Lily Pad, then I'd be far more concerned about the much clearer Project GC numbers than I would be about the very vague Google Trends data.
  17. But the Google Trends data isn't an estimate of the total number of searches for "geocaching" on Google. Instead, it's normalized data showing the relative popularity of "geocaching" searches compared to all other searches at a given moment in time. In July, 2011, "geocaching" searches didn't peak at 100 billion searches. In July, 2011, searches for "geocaching" was at its highest proportion of total searches (so Google assigned a value of 100 to it). For the sake of discussion, let's say that in July, 2011, there were 1 billion "geocaching" searches vs. 1 gazillion total searches. In July, 2016, the relative popularity of "geocaching" searches had fallen to 64 percent of what it was in July, 2011 (so Google assigned a value of 64 to it). But the total number of Google searches has increased over time, so we don't know whether the actual number of "geocaching" searches has gone up or down. If there were 15 gazillion total Google searches in July, 2016, then (based on our previous assumption) there were 9.6 billion "geocaching" searches in July, 2016. (1 billion * (15 gazillion / 1 gazillion) * 0.64 = 9.6 billion.) That would reflect a huge increase in the actual number of "geocaching" searches (1 billion vs. 9.6 billion). On the other hand, maybe there were only 1.5 gazillion total Google searches in July, 2016. If so, then there were only 0.96 billion "geocaching" searches in July, 2016. That would reflect a slight decline in the actual number of "geocaching" searches (1 billion vs. 0.96 billion). So, have "geocaching" searches increased or decreased over the past few years? We don't know, because Google doesn't publish how many total searches they've performed over the years. Google says:
  18. I suspect the armchair loggers would do the same thing on the "advanced" geocaching site that they currently are doing on the existing geocaching site.
  19. You even could enjoy exploring an area that is completely void of caches. [blasphemy, I know.]
  20. You appear to have a very narrow view of locations and routes, if you believe they stay the same. Here in Canada, a hike along a particular trail can be a very different experience depending on which season of the year you walk it, what time of day you go, weather conditions, what types of wildlife and wildflowers you encounter, which friends you hike with, etc. That's true in my area too and I never said anything to the contrary. If you look at your bolded sentence, above, then what you said is quite contrary to my comments about locations and routes constantly changing. I never suggested that cache owners should feel any obligation to archive perfectly fine caches. I simply took exception to your claim that people who enjoy locations and routes rather than clever hides, containers, or field puzzles don't get something new when a cache owner opts to replace an existing cache with a new cache. These types of people can get a new experience hiking the same trail again and again.
  21. Technically, you haven't completed all the find requirements for an EarthCache, virtual cache, or webcam cache until you send the cache owner the information they ask for on their listing pages. So, if you submit that information on 9 Jan. via the plane's WIFI network, then you could log your find on 9 Jan. and keep your streak alive. Personally, I'd find that behavior rather cheesy if you don't normally log those caches on the day you send the information (rather than on the day you visit the cache location). I'd rather have a 50-day streak that I could be proud of rather than claim an ethically tainted streak of 500 days.
  22. You appear to have a very narrow view of locations and routes, if you believe they stay the same. Here in Canada, a hike along a particular trail can be a very different experience depending on which season of the year you walk it, what time of day you go, weather conditions, what types of wildlife and wildflowers you encounter, which friends you hike with, etc. There certainly are many trails where I enjoy repeating a hike even if a newly placed cache doesn't have an interesting hideout, container, or field puzzle. Heck, there are some trails I enjoy hiking multiple times even when there are no new caches to find. “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” ― Heraclitus
  23. Challenge caches can be used to reinforce a wide range of cultures within geocaching. In that respect, they are like other types of caches. There are challenges that require people to find highly favorited caches, which provide enjoyment to those who like quality caches. There are challenges that require people to find high-elevation caches, which provide enjoyment to those who like to hike up mountains. There are challenges that require people to find island caches, which provide enjoyment to those who like boating (or hiking across frozen lakes). There are grandfathered challenges that require people to find hundreds of caches in a single day, which provide enjoyment to those who like power trails. But people who dislike power trails complained, and new challenges of that type are no longer allowed. There are challenges that require people to find a diverse range of cache types, which might encourage folks to expand their horizons. But if a challenge requires finding six different icons in a single day, then it is no longer allowed to be published, because people who dislike "numbers" caching complained. There were challenges that required people to find caches whose titles included animal names, which provided enjoyment to those who liked different kinds of geocaching goals. But people who dislike such "bookkeeping" tasks complained, so new challenges of this type are no longer permitted. Challenge caches offer something different to people who have grown tired of simply finding Tupperware under a pile of sticks. But with the hobbling of challenges, geocaching has become less diverse and less interesting. So, maybe the decline in challenges has even contributed to the overall decline in geocaching.
  24. Earlier this month, I placed a challenge that requires finding at least 100 Alberta traditional caches that are located at least 1,800 metres above sea level. In 2017, I'd like to place a "100 x 2,000m Challenge," which means we need to find another 40 caches that are above 2,000 metres. (Assuming, of course, that Groundspeak doesn't end challenge caches in 2017.)
  25. As I understand it, there's a tool available to Volunteer Reviewers that will automatically check the "needs maintenance" status of caches, see how long it has been since any action has been taken, determine which caches should be disabled, and then disable them. No human interaction required. It would be great if someone double-checked the results of that program before any disabling occurred, but many reviewers already have lots of other reviewing responsibilities (not to mention, life responsibilities), so it isn't surprising that they don't always double-check these automatic disablings. As the reviewer acknowledged, the program probably cast too wide a net when it caught your cache among those to be disabled. Just remember that there's always a trade-off between catching too many caches that shouldn't be disabled versus ignoring too many caches that should be disabled. Read about Type I and Type II errors, if you're interested.
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