Nils-Olov

..... However there is a loss rate that has become unbearable for most people so the idea of tossing $10-15 away for no good reason is losing its appeal. I agree that losing geocoins is painful but I don't think sending them out is for no good reason. On the contrary I think it's for a good reason. Most of coins I have sent out have rendered in very nice comments in the logs. I think the cachers that finds them are happy to see them.

I have been geocaching for one year now. My first coins were released in October and I have since then sent out 43 coins. Two of them are missing. I will send out 12 more coins in the coming month. Of course I think it's sad to find that a coin is missing but getting nice comments about the coins that are still traveling compensate for the losses. It seems to me that a beautiful coin is appreciated by the cachers that finds them and as long as I get the kind of nice response I have received so far I will let them continue traveling.

Thank you for the answer. Yes the areas are provided now. I have got the question on coins I recently have released.

Since some time ago Sweden is subdivided in areas (like the states in USA). I have some coins that were released before the areas was introduced at geocaching.com. I would like to update the coins web pages that don't have the area defined. If possible how do I do?

I did that on the last coin I released. For good measure, I also spray-painted it pink and baby blue on one side. It wasn't something I wanted to do to a coin, believe me, but I did it as a test. Will that keep it from being stolen? If not, it will be the last actual coin I release. I may turn to the dark side and start putting out proxies. My question is what would you rather have: a proxy or a coin that is drilled/painted/scratched/defaced? I know the answer is the actual coin, undamaged, unmarred...but with thievery so rampant, I'm not going to release another pristine coin just to see it snatched in the first week of its traveling. Edited for a stray apostrophe '...come back here! The coice between a destroyed coin or no coin at all? I think I prefer no coin at all. To drill holes and paint them is vandalism for me.

I am new to geocaching (6 months) and this is the first time I have learned about proxies. I have bought a little more than forty geocoins so far, half of them is out travelling the rest will go out this spring. I'm sorry to say that one of my coins have already gone missing. This thread has givien me the thought of replacing it with a proxy. But only sending out proxies? No I don't think I will do that. Even if it's a well made proxy it can't compete with the real geocoin. How fun is it to turn a piece of paper around and look at it? To sit and hold the real geocoin and turn it around, look at it with light coming from different directions and admire the colours, reflections and shadows is a much greater experience. As the owner of the coin I send out the coin so other people can see it and hopefully like it and be happy to see it's beauty. And I must say that it gives me great satisfaction to read the logs where a cacher writes that it's a very nice coin or that it's one of the most beautiful coin they have seen. Of course I don't want my coins get stolen but if they have given joy to some geocachers on it's way I think it is well spent money.

Landskap består. Län förändras.

Why not have it available for every country? Technically It isn't a big deal, the database structure is already in place because you have the states in US. What is needed are lists of regions for every country in the world and that is something that the geocachers easily would help with creating. The biggest problem is to add the region code to all existing caches, something that would be the responsibility for the cache owner.

I'm sorry to say that I can't find any line with content-type in the pages I have looked at. I have been looking at 'Your Profile' and one cache description. I'm using Firefox and view source. And as I said before the w3c validator couldn't find it either. Maybe I have managed to find the two pages where it is missing? When it comes to entering text I know how to do it in Java servlets because I have made the mistake myself and corrected it.

I don't like to be 'the wise guy' but when I checked the source code I found that the character encoding line is missing. I also ran the w3c validator at http://validator.w3.org/check and they are reporting a lot of errors and warnings. I do design some web pages myself and to be sure I haven't done any big mistakes I always use the validator. It seems that GC is using a tool that isn't compatible with the HTML standard and that is a pity. This forum has the character encoding defined to ISO 8859-1 which is western Europe. If I was GC I would prefered to use UTF-8 because it's ability to cope with not only western languages. I just have to try to write some of the national characters used in Sweden. Here they come ÅÄÖåäöÜüÉé. That works here in the forum, good.

In HTML the terms are 'height' and 'width' for size of different objects. So using 'Higher maps' is as I see it correct even if it sounds wrong. I did look at the source and hoped to find some 'max-height' parameter for the map but didn't find it. Maybe there is something in a script that set a maximum height?

Have there been a delay with the icon or is it me having trouble with icons? I can't see the icon on pages at geocoin.com.

I had the same problem. Updating the page helped me.

I agree! If a coin owner want the coin to have a mission it is necessary to have some kind of label accompanying the coin. I'm attaching a mission statement to all my coins I'm sending out. I have recently starting with coins so I have no idea of how well it works but I hope for the best. I'm enjoying the traveling of the coins.

I'm living in Sweden, a country with 9 million inhabitants. Many cache descriptions is in English and Swedish, some even in German. Some in only English or Swedish. I think it should be a strong recommendation that there should be an English version beside the local language description. The English version needs only contain the for caching most necessary information. I have recently been to Finland and unfortunately found some cache descriptions in Finnish only. But many was in both English and Swedish in addition to Finnish. I believe that a cache owner want to have as many visitors to the cache as possible. If so it would be a good thing to add as many languages as possible to the cache description. To have the cache description form made in a way that it will help and remind the cache owner to add an other language than the local would be a good thing. It would also make it possible for making the website easier to navigate when you search for a language you understand when you read it. I have seen examples on very nice formatted multi language descriptions and unfortunately some less good ones. I admit that not everyone knows English but those who wants to create a cache might be able to get some help with translations to English or maybe more languages.

Received the set I bought today. They are beautiful. Do the different coins have name? I guess the b/w one is Dark Sun but how about the other two?

You can click on the 'Map It' icon on 'My Profile' page. I you want you can bookmark that page instead of the Geocache home page.

Thank you Toojin! If you or someone else want to do the same I will gladly show you how to do it and also supply you with a small program that will help maintain the file with the data the map needs. Just drop me an e-mail Unfortunately I haven't solved the problem with showing it on old Internet Explorer. You can find my e-mail at http://fson.se/geostat.

I buy coins I like and I send them all out. However I do want them back some time. When they come back they will have a history that makes them more valuable to me then when I bought them. I also think its fun to see where they will go. In order to see ans show others where they are I made a map that I update at every move my coins do. See th map at http://fson.se/geostat/travelbugmap.html. I also want others to see the coins I think is beautiful. I'm still quite new to geocaching so I haven't lost any coins yet

Thank you Howlingmoon! I once been to the GCC and only found a members shop. This time I found the 'open' shop. I will keep my eyes open and buy this coin when it will be available.

Does that mean that I have to subscribe to th GCC coins in order to be allowed to buy the Lotus coins?

Agreed - I let the website keep the database for me. Just because I don't want to keep a database of my own I would like to get all the geocaches in the area I will go caching in in one PQ. It will be less load on the servers to produce one PQ with 1000 caches than three PQs with each 500 caches to cover the same area. There will be a lot of caches that will be in two or three of the PQs just to get the ones in the outskirts.

I agree! In the meantime we have to use the 'My Finds' PQ and some program that produces the statistics. When I wanted to add statistics to my own profile I didn't find any programs I could use on Linux so I made my own program. Now I have seen that there is at least one program available. But I think it should still be possible to upload material to my profile even if statistics aren't necessary any more.

First of all I will support your request. Even I will benefit from more caches in a PQ file. Especially since the newer GPS:s are capable of handling several thousand waypoints / caches. But while waiting for GS to implement your request we need to fix some workaround. In order to come with some creative ideas I would like to know what you are storing in your database and what you use it for.

Do you mean organising the gpx files from the PQ? they will, as you know, be named with a number and the suffix .gpx. You can put several such files in the Oregon without problems. I have sometimes changed the names from the number to the city name or something more easily understandable. It seems that the file from a stored PQ will always have the same name every time you run it so eventually you might learn the file name for the most used PQs.