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BlueRajah

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Everything posted by BlueRajah

  1. The ROI is the entire package. Companies pass on more revenue all the time. Does it interfere with current plans, or more than we can deal with. The company that I work for passed on a lot of new projects. We did not have the expertise, or the capital, to double the projects we worked on. You can grab short term money, but you need to pay for programming development and maintenance, unless you hire more, that means the sprints the teams make now would be delayed. So you are pushing off other updates. You have to pay to combat cheaters, pay customer service who will deal with angry cheaters. Do we need more employees. Do we have the space if so. Does it mean delaying critical site upgrades, or meaning you cant expand in another planned direction. I will not say its impossible, but there is always a cost analysis done. I don't think it is there, but maybe. Other sites proved that there was some money to be made. Would that help/hurt. Imagine you having to pay $5 a year for an adventure lab credit. Some would do it. Others would not. Maybe it would be worth it, maybe not. In essence, you are proposing a extra premium cache. It is an interesting thought .
  2. It's valid to take the time and think of new ideas. It's good to have ideas from newcomers. The hard part is wiring through the problems. Cheaters are the biggest issue. I can check the log, and I can delete a cheaters log. I have done it before and gotten hate mail. Solving that issue may allow it to happen if the website did the checking, but I don't see the return on investment for HQ.
  3. True, but the GSA and HQ have decided that it is not, and it has been there since the help center info was placed there. From the help center, the section with unacceptable tasks covers it. That is clearly the info I was given when i was instructed to review in 2010. You can use a sign, you just cant ask people to
  4. these formations or intendations are commonly refered to as Tafoni. See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafoni If there is not one nearby on the subject, it is not a difficult Earthcache to put together.
  5. Yes I agree with your statement. Using a sign for information, and using it for educational material, and even names of something that they will need to identify in a task. But going to a mine site and asking a simple, "what minerals were mined here" most likely would not work.
  6. I had written an answer, but discussion seemed to hijack this thread, so I split it off into its own thread with the replies.
  7. Hzio covered that above, and agree with him. I saw a number of Earthcaches that use the signs rather than including the educational material on the cache page. So you went there to gather the educational background to do the tasks. Howver, like Hzio mentions, there is a risk. Speaking with someone that worked at a US national park, they try and update the signs every 7-10 years. That gives new data, graphics, and wording. So you could lose the info you are teaching if the sign changes. I know of one that changed from a geology of an overlook, to one that taught the history that took place there. They had found more people were interested in the history, than the geology. Geology was a footnote.
  8. I decided that this was high jacking the other thread too much. So I pulled this apart from the thread "Are Earthcaches Dying" 2010 had this line in the guidelines Pulling some words from a sign is not an educational task. That was clarified in 2013 when the guidelines added links to the Help Center. 2013 started one of the flaws of the guidelines. The guidelines started to exist in two places. They were listed on the GSA website (like today) with links to the help center where the definitions were locations. The helps center stated acceptable and non acceptable logging tasks. "Asking geocachers to quote information from a sign" was added then.
  9. I was geoawareusa2 for more than a decade. I agree with most of brcross95's thoughts. Have things slowed. Yes, in many instances because the easy ones are gone, and people can't publish an identical one a mile away. I saw many submissions that were identical and sometimes even copied earthcaches nearby. I thought i would give some perspective and history. Originally, some first earthcaches were changed from virtuals to Earthcaches. After that point, you filled out a page on a website and sent in the information to the Geological Society of America. Geoaware would then review it, create a page and publish it and adopt it out. Over time that changed, but every earthcache from inception until around October 2008 was reviewed by him, and in 2009 he added one other from his office at the Geologic Society of America to help handle the surge. This resulted in very long publishing times (months after submission), and little communication. Many caches were published from this era that the GSA has regretted because they were rushed doing this at work and doing their full time jobs. There were many requirements that might seem really odd. You had to submit your cache page in English (because only those few reviewed them), he emailed your contact at a National Park to verify permission was granted, etc. In 2009/10 we saw a surge of reviewers selected, and 2010 saw the release of a major rewrite in the guidelines for their use. I think originally, almost all the reviewers were chosen from the regular geocache reviewer pool. They had experience reviewing, and the team was more global, and that would expand over the years. This allowed more local reviewers and would eventually allow for earthcaches to be written and reviewed in their local language. Because of seeing the responsiveness, and more reviewers to answer questions, I think that is why you see the huge surge in 2010 and into 2011, as we cleared the backlog, and many new submissions came in. We had a surge in caching interest in the mid 2010s, and that corresponded to an increase in Earthcache submissions. It also corresponded to a 2013 release of a major rewrite of the guidelines that had been extensively overhauled by the work of many people. If I recall, that was the first relaxing of the permission guideline that had been in place since the start. (the GSA enforced permission while they were reviewing, even though it was not written in the guidelines). I believe this led to a huge increase in submissions in Europe, as the rewrite meant many areas no longer required written permission. Are there areas that have slowed? Yes. Some areas saw large numbers of submissions, then the person submitting them stopped publishing, and few have kept it up. Others never saw much interest. It is far more difficult to publish an earthcache on farmland in the plains than in mountains. A few simple locations may be all there is. I think the numbers are still healthy. Though slowed from the last two years. I was going to post more info on the guidelines, but that is more for a separate thread. I think other than the 2009 and 2013 guideline changes, there have been none that really affect the publishing numbers drastically.
  10. Fire. Needing a lighter or candle.
  11. It looks like the GSA either changed location or changed the link. I am not sure these are the original sizes but here are some links It took them straight to the pics. right click on the pictures and copy image address.
  12. It has to be in the local language, and you have to have the translation done. The website does not do that for you.
  13. The way I understand it, yes they will go away. However, not instantly. Sometime in the next few months when website upgrades are coded, tested and approved. Those pages will not be updated. A two-week warning was given because the date may be as early as Tuesday. Plus, it may not be all at once.
  14. The announcement gave 2+ weeks warning, saying it will be "Sometime after November 1, 2022 and before the end of the year"
  15. I have found a number of benchmarks, and recovered some buried and hidden. They were treasure hunts. However, as a player I know that it does not warrant work when no one is using it, there is no owner to check logs, and it is decades out of date. I do not know this for sure, as I have heard no discussions, but eventually you have to put work into it or it breaks as you update the rest of the site. Your coding is decades out of date and will require a major overhaul. And it is for the 75 people that used it in a summer month to log 200 of them. One of those people was myself, finding a half dozen. Sad to see, but I could see it coming years ago, just sad we finally got there.
  16. You can find the reviewer for your area by looking for newly published caches and then looking at the name of the person that published them. I assume that is what you are meaning? or for another reason?
  17. I am assuming you are looking for advice? Contact the museum for permission and what you want to do. Outside is ideal. i have found a number of caches chained to the a post or a bush. You can also use something less expensive than an ammo can and hide it in the bushes.
  18. I believe you need this page https://www.geocaching.com/notify/default.aspx Check where the coords of all your notifications are set to be from.
  19. Is your reviewer saying it is an issue? or just in submitting it where the problem takes place? If it is the reviewer he should understand with an explanation. If it is just the HQ cache creation process, just move through it and submit it with an explanation. I ignore Earthcaches and Virtuals in my review if they block another cache.
  20. If it was very long ago, most likely not. I do not unarchive caches that were archived more than a few months ago. I never do if the owner does not go out and check on it and someone else replaced it, or finds it, except in very rare circumstances. It is the cache owners responsibility to make sure it is there. You may have had it disabled for some time, or archived it after a reviewer noted there may be an issue. Yet problems are yours to see it taken care of or send someone to take care of. If they were archived for maintenance issues by the reviewer or yourself, it is rare it will be unarchived without a visit by you to the location. (in my book) Every cache is different, every situation. So this is more of a general rule.
  21. You will need to have a logbook if it is a traditional. In order to list it i as a virtual you would need to have been granted a virtual a year ago. They have only allowed a few virtuals every few years.
  22. Moving to the GPS forum. This sounds like settings in GPS
  23. This is just me as a reviewer in my area. If the QR code give your coordinates to the next point. I treat those as if you posted a label with the next coordinates. You could have it as a multi. If each step has you solve a cypher, puzzle, or needing to figure out a code to enter into a checker, I would say those run a mystery. I am sure there are grey areas in between, but that would be my general rule. I do not know how prevalent that idea is in the reviewer community. However that is my thought process.
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