MastahMatt

Of course. As I said above, this is what I did. What I also discovered afterward was the nightmare fact that the stupid device creates the field notes file in UTF-16 Little Endian format. I did not know this, and I spent almost two hours trying to figure out why, when I modified the file in a normal text editor, geocaching.com completely ignored the uploaded file. It was not cool. Even trying to re-save the old .txt file with the correct format didn't work after I had already saved it as UTF-8. So I had to basically retype the field notes in by hand. There were only a few to do, so it wasn't too bad, but it was very frustrating. Anyhow, I myself have written code to handle file imports with quotation problems like this - in several languages including .NET. This shouldn't be a huge issue to fix for the site, but the whole situation could be huge for someone who has no clue how to edit their .txt file.

I have an Oregon 450. Today I found several geocaches, one of which required me to enter a comment in the field notes. On the Oregon, and I assume all of the other Garmin models, you are able to enter symbols as well as alphanumerics. One of the symbols is the double quotation mark. This is the entry in the geocache_visits.txt file on the device that is causing the problem:

Thanks everyone for your input so far. The HWY 127 series looks like the most likely candidate so far, especially since I can take a MegaBus out to Chicago from the Twin Cities for 10 bucks (!) and rent a car out there for a several day run down 127. If I grab power trails along the way, I will probably be able to get 900 long before I get all the way to Alabama. Though it IS a nice time of year to go to Alabama If anyone has more suggestions, I'd still happily take them. So, anyone want to meet me in Chicago, throw in some gas money and go along?

The challenge is to find more caches each year than the year before, for five years running. I've known about the challenge for awhile from others who are currently trying to complete it, but didn't pay it any mind as I didn't realize I actually qualify for four years running and this is my fifth year. Despite this, I'm not a 'numbers cacher' per se, but more of a 'power cacher' who likes to get everything. I like every kind of cache in the world, from the long, brutal hikes into mountain ranges to get a single cache over a day or more, to the distant handfuls on remote islands, all the way to the urban slog in rush hour to get LPC's over the course of a whole day. Everything, though, means challenges too, so that includes the get-more-than-the-year-before challenge I'm trying to attempt. I'm not worried about snow except that it makes finding a cache 10 times harder. The cold is not a bother, but having to spend 20 minutes digging for a cache I could see in less than a minute if it were not snowy will obviously make it impossible to get the 50-100/day I'll need. As for how serious I am about it, I'm not serious enough to spend a thousand dollars over this, hence my self-imposed 750 mile limit. I've already considered the ET power trail in Nevada, but we'd be talking about a good chunk of change to just complete a challenge that in the end is not that huge of a deal. If I can't do this for less than a few hundred dollars, then I'm out. I'd rather save the big money for a more meaningful vacation out of the snowy hell I've (for some reason) chosen to live in. Thanks again! -matt

Hello! I am in a bit of a dilemma. I would like to find 900 caches before the 1st of January, 2014, in order to complete a specific challenge, that, if I fail to do so, will take me at least 5 years and huge effort to complete. So what I need is an area with many, many very easy caches, such as hundreds of caches along several power trails in relatively close proximity. Since there is snow on the ground in many states, these caches should ideally be easy finds, say in road signs. It would also be okay if they were under the snow, however, in predictable spots that I would still be able to find regardless of snow cover (e.g. the base of said road signs). I live in the United States in Minnesota, and would prefer to keep my destination under 500 miles from the St. Paul/Minneapolis area, but would be willing to go up to 750 miles, possibly. Rather than troll the map for hours fruitlessly, wondering if this or that power trail has acceptable hides, perhaps some of you can help to speed up my search and let me know of good candidate areas like this. I am setting aside 10 days for this task, which means I have to have my trip planned and begun by the 20th of December at the very latest. I am hoping some of you have some good information to help me make this happen. Thank you and regards, -matt

Seems to be all fixed. Thank you! Glad I caught this before it caused havoc on my account. Guess I spoke too soon. It's still not correct.

So I see that just recently, when I choose Compose Log on the Field Notes page, it autofills the date on the next page a day ahead. It even let me log caches for tomorrow... though that might be because it IS tomorrow in some parts of the world. This is a serious annoyance. I remember this being a major issue years ago, but was fixed. Is anyone else having this problem?

Sometimes, in Minnesota, where I live, I'll hike way out into the middle of a swamp (we have LOTS of wetland here) and grab a micro after a long search. I'll feel pretty good about myself... then I remember that in MN, the worst we really have here is the humble mosquito. I stick my hands into a tree, and belatedly realize that if this were the American SW, or SE or plain ol' vanilla S, I'd probably be dead. We don't have bad things in trees here. Oh, there's spiders and snakes, but none of them particularly venomous. In southern MN, I'd be a bit more careful because there IS the Brown Recluse spider, but it's a small spider and not like, say, a rattlesnake. So yep, I got it easy. No chollas, no snakes, no deadly spiders, no scorpions... we have cold. Lots and lots of cold. So much cold that we don't have other dangerous things.

So I was sitting here dealing with a wood tick that had literally embedded itself two thirds of the way into my flesh, a wood tick I picked up while geocaching, and this led me to consider all of the several painful things that have happened to me while out in the wilderness caching. These unfortunate things have happened directly as a result of geocaching, in order of what severity: 1) Poison Ivy (twice major, about five times very minor) - PI NEVER bothered me in the past, but I guess repeated exposure has finally made me sensitive. The first time I had it, I had NO IDEA what it was and it was very bad. Now I know and it's not so bad. 2) Chiggers - thought these were bed bug bites when I first got them, but eventually narrowed it down to chiggers after SCOURING everything to locate possible bedbugs. So thankful it was 'just' chiggers, and the bites took a very long time to fade. 3) A hunk of wood embedded in my FACE of all places, right under my right eye when I accidentally walked into a needle sharp dead branch. I was pulling slivers and pieces of wood out of my skin for a week. I've had hundreds of slivers, some in very sensitive spots which makes the following necessary needlework all that much, uh, funner (fingertips anyone?) 4) Wood tick embedded in skin (WHAT? THEY DO THAT?) 5) Various spider bites and bee stings. Bee stings aren't so bad, but I had several spider bites at one point that created quarter sized dark red bumps that itched and burned for days. I could see the little double holes that proved they were made by one or more spiders 6) Twisted ankles and other damage caused by falls, sprains and getting hit with branches and rocks. 7) One day I brushed a plant (or something) and felt an intense burn. One single blister was suddenly there on my arm. Plant? Insect? No idea, but it took six weeks with antibiotic ointment to go away. 8) I was peering in a hole in a tree in the dark and a squirrel jumped out, using the top of my head as a springboard to go up the three. I'm pretty young, in my prime, but I do believe I almost had a heart attack. Not kidding. Now I am careful to bang on the tree first, maybe put a stick in there and move it around. Had a couple of squirrels jump out since, but because I was checking this way first. So that's it. No broken bones - yay! No snake bites - yay! No scorpion stings - yay! No accidental experiences with wild parsnip even though it's here - yay! So what have you experienced?

As the administrator of several small scale servers for my own company, I absolutely agree that the huge drop in CPU load is indicative of abuse by a third party. Using (abusing) keyword search form submissions would be an excellent way for a third party to scrape the site and store the data. Fortunately, there are several ways to detect such traffic. Determining what it's being used for is usually much harder, and even harder still is reliably stopping it without taking the risk of blocking legitimate uses. But if this were me, I would certainly take a look at this scenario above all others to rule it out.

This has got to be a bad joke! That's really great: taking an almost useless feature and turning it into a completely useless feature and then talking about improvements. I'm really wondering what happened to all those database specialists in Seattle - either none of them works for Groundspeak or no one asks them how to create a keyword search that actually returns a list of caches that you really want to go searching for. I'll give you an example: I really love doing challenge caches and I'd really like to know which active challenge caches exist in the area I normally cache in. That's Northrhine-Westfalia in Germany and the Netherlands. Currently it's simply not possible to get this information out of the database in an easy way. If I use the (old) keyword search I'd enter "challenge" because every challenge cache is supposed to have the word challenge in its name. What do I get: a really long list of challenge caches from all over world of which about 90% for me are absolutely not relevant because I won't go searching in California, Ontario or New Zealand any time soon. What I would like to see is only the 10% caches from my area. So what would help me find stuff would be a combination of filters (like the ones you can define for the pocket queries) plus the possibility to add a keyword (maybe with wildcards). For the database search that means instead of doing a text search on over 2 million recordsets (I assume you filter out the archived caches beforehand) you'd filter first for search criteria (e.g. Germany) and then perform the text search only on the filtered number of caches. For this example this means text search on about 250.000 instead of 2 million recordsets. So you'd actually have a win-win-situation: you provide us with a useful feature and have less search load on the database. Just my 2 cents Atti I agree. What are people thinking? The new search 'improvement' is a horrible idea. I use the keyword search constantly, and now it's become very much less useful. What I REALLY needed, was a way to search for a cache by name and then specify WHERE the caches are. I have run into exactly the situation Atti here describes. I look for caches in an area. I always assumed the site would eventually catch up with the times, so to speak, and offer a way to search keywords filtered by location. I never in a million years thought keyword search would be utterly broken by poor planning and assumptions about how users need to search for data. A huge amount of stress could be taken off of the servers if you offer the ability to search for other things during a keyword search.

I swear that when I'm worth over 100 million dollars (any day now, yes, any day) I will charter a small fleet of planes to take first-come-first-serve geocachers down for an event in Antarctica. Of course, there's probably some treaty or something preventing it, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it (any day now).

To the "Quality over Quantity" crowd: I can't believe how often I hear people complain that the game for them is completely negatively affected by power trails or "numbers" caches. Then they vehemently cry that it's the caches' fault that they feel that way, and by extension then, it's the hiders of such caches' fault that the game is ruined for them. Say you are one of these individuals, for whom the game is hopelessly degraded and possibly even ruined because of "numbers" hides. Let's pretend, for a moment, that the ONLY caches you knew about, the ONLY caches that you were able to find, ever, were quality, excellent hides, as defined by your criteria exclusively. Let's pretend that you are totally unaware that any other type of cache even exists. They are all still there, but you have no idea. Suddenly, you find that the game is awesome for you again. You love caching, and you once more feel a warm, delightful bond of brotherhood (sisterhood) with the cachers who have risked life and limb to place extraordinary, challenging hides JUST FOR YOU. All the righteous angst you have toward the selfish, hurtful actions of those dirty numbers cachers is completely gone, as if it never existed. So. Notice how, in order to be happy again, you just had to ignore those mean ol' numbers hides and power trails - just put them out of mind? Well, here's the secret: You can do this any time you want!! Find a happy place inside where numbers caches don't exist for you. Those bad numbers caches you hate don't exist there! They can't hurt you anymore. I mean, they don't actively involve themselves in your life or hobbies. They don't have legs... they don't move, they don't have minds... they don't think for themselves. They are inanimate plastic/metal/wood/glass objects with no purpose other than to sit somewhere, out of sight. I guess the point is.... there is no external force "ruining" geocaching for you when it comes to other peoples' hides. I honestly don't know why you think that there is. Saturation is only a problem if the saturation prevents you from getting caches that you want. If you complain about how it's "NOT A NUMBERS GAME!111!!11!!" I think it's probably, maybe deep down somewhere, a numbers game for you. Else why would you complain about it? Listen. I'd bet a thousand bucks that NO ONE has come to you in your entire caching career, shook their head and stared at you in abject pity over your numbers. No one cares if you have 500 or 5,000. Really. No one. Not a soul... except maybe for YOU.

Matt, You continue to ask, "what gives US the right" and "because WE don't like it". You need to rephrase that to "What gives Groundspeak the right" and "because Groundspeak doesn't like it" and I think you will have your answer. But as long as you continue to believe that it is other cacher's preferences that have caused these restrictions in place, it will go unanswered. As I said above, knowschad, Groundspeak moves with the masses, or at least the most vocal "part" of the masses. That has been FAR from my experience! They march to their own drummer... believe me! If you say so. That hasn't been my observation though. If you say so. That hasn't been my observation though. The masses (actually, only a small percentage): "Bring back Virtuals!" Groundspeak: "Here ya go... http://www.geocaching.com/challenges/ " The masses: "Bring back country based souvenirs" Groundspeak: (silence) B. Ok people, point taken. Since this thread is past the point of dead horse, I'm moving on, for real this time. Here's to hoping Groundspeak makes *wise* decisions in the future, and perhaps undoes *unwise* decisions as well.

Matt, You continue to ask, "what gives US the right" and "because WE don't like it". You need to rephrase that to "What gives Groundspeak the right" and "because Groundspeak doesn't like it" and I think you will have your answer. But as long as you continue to believe that it is other cacher's preferences that have caused these restrictions in place, it will go unanswered. As I said above, knowschad, Groundspeak moves with the masses, or at least the most vocal "part" of the masses. If it was Groundspeak's decision to ban ALR's because they themselves were sick of dealing with complaints, then so be it. In that case, I feel Groundspeak should have simply removed themselves from such local discussions and instead of saying "No, you can't have a cache like this, if you want it, work with the reviewer," they should have said, "No, we won't undelete your log, work with the cache owner to make it happen." Groundspeak mediating because a cache owner is deleting logs for the heck of it is one thing. Groundspeak mediating because a cache owner deleting a log due to a challenge requirement not being met (ridiculous or non-ridiculous), while attractive so that "justice may be served" should have been avoided on their part. But perhaps that is a discussion for a different thread As an aside, I read one of your quotes, specifically the last one: "Mark my words, power trails will ultimately have a negative impact on this sport." I think this is truly apropos to this situation. Allow me to state this: "Mark my words, bureaucracy will ultimately have a negative impact on this sport." Bureaucracy always involves the best intentions of those making the rules. When you try to micro-legislate behavior, you end up with at best a bunch of rule-breakers, and at worst, apathy.

There are already quite a few quantity-based benchmarking challenges in MastahMatt's area (it's my area too). You just said a mouthful!! Just take a look at SparkyFry's St. Paul cluster, not to mention so many others! http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?tx=40861821-1835-4e11-b666-8d41064d03fe&lat=44.944033&lng=-93.133900 Knowschad, I specifically wanted to avoid yet another quantity challenge, which, to beat the dead horse, are a dime a dozen. Thus I created the challenge at issue here requiring only a single benchmark. The reason behind the FTF requirement was simple: requiring an individual to find "a benchmark" would have meant that popular benchmarks in the Twin Cities here would have just be logged yet again. My goal was to make an adventure out of this, to get other people out to find benchmarks that hadn't yet been located. In other words, to break new ground. There are LOTS of benchmarks out there to find that haven't been logged, but the only way to encourage people to find them was through a FTF requirement. Furthermore, it defeats the purpose if people can simply log a benchmark without a picture. Since no one 'polices' these things, obviously, it would be easy for a cheater (and there are MANY cheaters whatever you want to believe about the integrity of humanity) to simply log a benchmark as found when no such thing had been done. Also, how do I determine whether they logged a reset mark by accident, or a replacement mark. So hopefully you see my point. These were not arbitrary requirements foisted upon a naive and helpless population of cachers who need protection from my dangerous challenge, but instead an attempt to create a worthy task for anyone willing to try something new for a couple of hours. But apparently the (minority?) have spoken, and the other minority (me?) is out of luck. *sigh*

Every organization as well as society in general has the right to restrict activity. In the world you see people could use drugs, assault others and generally damage all others around them and you would think it was ok because they had no right to restrict what you do. Basically you are advocating anarchy. I wasn't going to respond anymore, but I couldn't let this one go. Really? If you read some of the posts above I made about this issue (a lengthy proposition, I understand) you would have seen where I repeatedly state that illegal activity restrictions are absolutely acceptable. What isn't, to me, are restrictions on my activity based on someone's dislike of the way I cache. A society has the right to restrict activity... I agree with this when it comes to said society protecting itself from harm. "Damage to others" is operative here. My geocache challenge suggestion does not "damage others". Instead, some people get angry because they can't (or don't want) to complete a challenge a certain way, and they PERCEIVE this as damage to themselves, and thus worthy of a new rule or restriction. I should have said, for the tenth time, 'What gives you the right to restrict my activity because you or someone else doesn't like it, as long as it doesn't involve illegal or highly suspect activity?' Since I'd already said this multiple times, I figured repeating myself would have been pointless. I guess not. But in any case, I am glad, Walts, that you feel that the restrictions in place protect you from my challenge cache, which would damage you if it wasn't otherwise restricted. Well played!

I appreciate all of the good feedback people have given here. Although I the underlying issue here is NOT resolved, namely 'What gives you the right to restrict my activity because you or someone else doesn't like it?' my feeling is that most people will avoid this question because there is no answer that will not make them look like a tool. The other side issue is that geocaching.com is definitely moving toward a state of mediocre bureaucracy - something that most of us in the modern world should be gradually and sadly becoming familiar with and something that every single one of us without exception should fear as we would fear an invading army bent on our complete destruction. I do not say this lightly. If nothing else, bureaucracy will be the end of geocaching using this site as we know it. Though I absolutely cannot wave it about as any sort of "proof", I have had SEVERAL people tell me via private email and on the phone that I am NOT alone in this along with the caveat that posting it here is a worthless endeavor. I don't agree with that last part, so here I am. Take that as you will, but it is simple truth. As one would expect, I have cooled down quite a bit from my earlier emotional state. I will put the excellent suggestions of Isonzo Karst into practice and perhaps I can get something of the original spirit of the cache into play. But I seriously chafe at the idea of others making rules curtailing my freedom to cache the way I want to cache. Though I appreciate the friendly and thoughtful responses of almost everyone here, I am still going to be putting most if not all of my future caches into play through a different medium than geocaching.com. I will not say where in this forum because I don't want it to appear that I am advertising for anyone else, but suffice to say that simply swallowing the status quo and continuing as things were because it has recently become the status quo is unacceptable to me. Therefore I must move elsewhere when I can and when it is practical to do so. If the individuals who complained loudly in order to create this sad state of affairs had simply accepted their own status quo, we would not be having this discussion, I would be caching how I want to cache, and you would simply be ignoring me if you didn't like my challenges. That seems like the way it should be to me. Thanks all, and I can only hope this discussion will make even one other person think before they decide to impose more bureaucracy on us all.

Thank you for the positive response about my challenge. I acknowledge what you are saying, but what your statement, in essence, comes down to is this: "There are some cache-nazis out there who abuse their power to enforce requirements, therefore, we had to take away the power of they and everyone else to create said requirements, regardless of how reasonable they may or may not seem on a case-by-case basis." This type of argument is the absolute death of every single free society in the history of all of humankind, whether we are talking about entire nations or little geocaching communities run by a central body. And still, no one has posited a proper response to: "Why should you be allowed to stop me from engaging in a legal activity simply because you don't like it?" Legal of course meaning law-abiding.

If your goal is to encourage people to try benchmarking, then have you considered creating a challenge cache that requires people to find 25 (or 50 or 100) benchmarks? Absolutely! Here is why I did not: #1 There are already two challenges in my local area that require 100 benchmarks. Another requires one benchmark a day (WITH A PHOTO REQUIREMENT FOR EACH BENCHMARK) for 31 days. Two of these I have completed and one of them I am on the verge of completing. Yet another 100 benchmarks challenge would have been almost superfluous. #2 100 benchmarks found means that, as usual, only those marks that have been found countless times will simply be found again. I could say, past finds don't count (maybe that's not allowed anymore though), but again, the superfluity comes into play here. What this means is that all of the benchmarks in the outlying metro (I live south of St. Paul, Minnesota) will still go unfound. Frankly, my main goal for this challenge was to get people out to find a benchmark that hasn't yet been logged. There are literally tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands like that, many within a close distance from where I live. My only regret is that I didn't publish this last year, when I was free to do so. Now of course, other people have decided for me that other people shouldn't have to put up with what they themselves don't like, never mind if the latter don't get a chance to ever determine for themselves. <sarcasm> I would like to point out that IT'S GOOD TO KNOW that many challenges I would be soon undertaking with great pleasure will now never see the light of day and that I won't have to be burdened with knowing about them. I assume that those of you who agree with the current state of affairs will be pleased that I am not pleased. Gotta stop those control-freak challenge publishers and after all, think of ALL THE YEARS you spent in rabid frustration that you couldn't tell me 'NO, SIR, you may NOT publish that challenge requirement, for the good of everyone who would otherwise be FORCED to complete it!' Everyone will now, for the moment, be safe from my cache-based predations. </sarcasm>

Hi, Matt! I find it funny that you would say that, because I feel that I'm in the minority in wishing that the challenge caches would go the way of the ALR (which I feel they really are, anyway), and that I have to put up with them because the majority approves of them. Then I guess the question might become, why don't we have an ALR cache type? And give individuals the opportunity to always display these caches or never display them. Then those that like challenges with ALR's can have them show up as accomplishments, and those who don't like them don't ever have to see them (and thus don't have to push for restricting someone else's idea of fun). Unfortunately, the basic issue still remains, and no one ever provides an answer to it: should you be allowed to restrict someone else's activity because you yourself don't enjoy engaging in said activity. I would remind you that restricting my ability to put out a challenge cache does not increase my desire to put out a traditional cache, so really, no one is winning.

I hear you. I only posted approximately a third of the original cache posting for the sake of brevity, as I didn't want to bog down the post with extraneous information. Thus you only see the requirements and restrictions. But since that is what is pertinent here, it was what I needed to show. As for the 'democracy' issue, geocaching.com moves along with the waves of the masses making demands upon it. This is a 'pure democracy' and is a dangerous state of affairs, since the requirements always flow with the majority opinion. If that majority opinion ends up being 51% (or if the minority is far more vocal), the the other group is completely suppressed. I like challenges, and since I seem to be either the minority opinion (or the less vocal party) I don't get to create this challenge.

Good observation there about me being steamed. You are ABSOLUTELY CORRECT! Good job. And I like how you've labeled the "slippery slope" effect as a cliche in hopes of convincing others by implication (since cliches are often foolish) that it doesn't apply here because the concept has been used too many times. I find it interesting though that you see exactly where I am going without me pointing the way. All of us now understand that you don't like challenge caches and that you like restricting my activity so you don't have to see challenge caches on your map. Please say something constructive. Thank you.

I disagree. If I want to create a geocache that requires a photo, but does not invade the privacy of others by requiring they post themselves or personal information on a cache log, why should I be told that I cannot? Of course, much of my original post was written in a state of frustration. You are right that rules are not changed 'at the slightest justification.' Instead these particular rules were changed because people didn't like being told they couldn't log MY cache in the way I intended. If other people didn't like it, they were free to not find it. I did not create my challenge to get around ALRs. I created my challenge for the purposes of a challenge, which should be obvious. The picture requirement is in place because anyone could waltz along and say they completed the challenge when they had not. There is no other way to weed out such despicable behavior, and it would be very unfair to those that had gone out of their way to complete the challenge as intended. I think moderating their effects so they don't apply with blanket force (haha) would be in order. Sure but there are people who can't climb - eliminate caches in trees perhaps? People who can't swim (or do not like the idea of the underwater habitat being "disturbed") - eliminate scuba caches. Of course not. You have no interest, so why would you concern yourself with my being restricted in what I wish to do? The fact remains that with challenge caches allowed (as they were, perhaps) I am free to create them and you are free to ignore them. With such caches banned, that freedom is restricted. With absolute respect, I am free not to create new caches on geocaching.com.

You are right. I should not have stated such a thing. What I should say is: "Rules are being created for the sake of trying to please everyone all of the time. What this will lead to is a vast conglomeration of rules, much like the tax code, through which cache owners will have a difficult time navigating, and which, will in the end lead to frustration and a apathy where it comes to publishing new caches. Fortunately, unlike the tax code, we cannot yet be jailed for failing to adhere to these rules.... yet."