BethDaddyKaty

Presumably the main benefit will be in many countries events will resume on a staged basis, e.g. high risk groups may not initially be able to (or choose to) attend). Allowing online attendance of a "real world" event means cachers who may have attended events for years do not feel left out. It has arguable benefit in the interim. Long term it may persuade a small percentage who should stay home to stay home. But small percentages matter at the moment.

Received a few logs on mine reassuring me they were "wearing gloves". Not sure people realise the risk is going to frequently visited areas like petrol stations, shops to get some lunch etc. Problem is for every 9 sensible geocachers there will be one who sees it as a normal day out. And for every on sensible geocacher, there will be 9 people who see an extra car on the road and think things must be going back to normal. Still very torn about this.

Conflicted about this. On the one hand, I don't want a great hobby taken away. But, most of the time any caches found should be in any exercise allowed in our respective countries and for most people that means any local caches would be quickly exhausted or, in 90%+ cases, have been already. I'm strongly against driving to "exercise" - basic science shows we should be avoiding making any unnecessary journeys at this time. Even if geocaching isn't disabled in countries on lockdown it's clear things like "new cache notification" emails should be disabled. There is no way there should be any FTF races at the moment tacitly encouraged by Groundspeak.

Don't mean to put a downer on a good event, but the security of asking someone to send you their full name and email address via a non-encrypted contact form in order to pay are questionable. Anyone who intercepts the details (easy to do) can quickly fire over a "here are my bank account details, pls send £100" email and almost certainly get the money which the sender will have no way of getting back. IMO you should encrypt the page or provide an email address for *them* to contact you on.

I guess it's your personal opinion as to whether you hid a cache in xxxxxx, or from your description you hid a time capsule with notebook which you now wish to use as a cache. To me it sounds like the latter so I would suggest the cache hidden date is the date you decide to start use it as a cache and necessarily measure the coordinates. However, ultimately I think it depends on your (and your reviewer's) interpretation. I think it would be problematic though. As a kid I made a hidden black box in 1990 that I used to use to store swag, notes etc. Its still there now (relatively) watertight but I think it would be a stretch to claim it as a cache I hid thirty years ago.

With you on that, as a new cacher I cant understand the strong feelings among some against repairing camo, replacing damaged/full log books. Doing so would seem to be the community spirited thing to me rather than asking a CO to trek out to do something that takes you 30 seconds.

To claim a find you have to sign *the* log, not a piece of paper in the cache. To me that's just a standard expectation, I can't imagine any cacher reasonably justifying not signing a serviceable log book, or reasonably complaining about their log being deleted.

Or electric scooter. Mine costs 6p to charge and does 25ish miles. Quite certain I cost more than 6p to fuel for the same distance, although I usually take the pushbike for the exercise, sod the cost of my fuel

If that happens surely you just delete the log as it's on a separate bit of paper, if it bothers you? As long as you maintain the logbook so it's usable people shouldn't have any need to use separate bits of paper.

Thank you, sorry I meant more often people on here have already asked the question and know the answer rather than asking people to make a statement

AFAIK you don't get access to the API as a Premium member. From what you are saying you should never encourage kids to geocache, keep it to adults because kids will just ruin the game. To me that makes little sense. Apart from anything else the age range badges will appeal to are kids that are caching as families. It's only going to appeal to primary school aged children. I'm not aware that young families are any more irresponsible than other cachers. It seems unlikely that kids wanting to vandalise caches will be any more likely to do so just because they'll earn badges. You're quite right that GSAK means you could just create your own Geocache database as I would only need local ones. Pretty certain it breaks GS terms of service or at least it's less than ideal clearly circumventing their own restrictions, which I guess are there to push PMO rather than a server resource issue.

Most families around here older kids have their own account. That is how "family" accounts like YouTube, Netflix etc are usually offered, for circa 50% extra you can grant membership to others living at the same address, e.g. partners and kids. Difference for GS is it would be an easy thing to do because they're not licensing content from others.

Yep, I should have said EU countries have the option to raise VAT, they just can't lower it below EU minimums. But the principle remains the same, producers reclaim it at each stage so they only pay tax on the value (if any) they add, e.g. a fixed tax on gross profits. E.g. most supermarkets work on about 30% gross margin. So they will only pay 6% tax on that 30%, e.g. 2% marginal tax of the sale to them.

I emailed GS but didnt get a reply - maybe one of the helpful mods on here can help. Does anyone know why there is a limit of 3 full cache descriptions for basic users on the API vs 16,000 (!) for Premium members? I want to do a app for our local school to encourage kids to get out and about by getting badges the more geocaches they find. I know some have expressed scepticism in the past but trust me, five year olds are highly motivated by badges Obviously not every kid is going to sign up Immediately and some, like me, may have a parent with a premium account but as GS doesn't offer a family account its uneconomic to have four premium accounts. Don't get me wrong, I think lower limits are reasonable, but three full cache descriptions a day vs 16,000 makes the app unusable to new users/kids who are the next generation of GCers. Hopefully it's something that can be reviewed, otherwise the only alternative is just to scrape as much information as you want from the GC website as a well known app does, which then means as an app developer you can't offer any incentive for Premium membership. Thanks for any help.

I think a few apps will show a 161m circle around each cache which shows immediately if the area is free, other than as others have said hidden stages which can only be seen by a reviewer. Very useful for hiding caches but I keep it on all the time as a visual guide to how close caches will be.

VAT here and sales tax in the US are different. Firstly here everything is at standard rates across the EU, 0% for things like most groceries, kids clothes etc. 5% for things like electric. Circa 20% for "luxuries" including GCing memberships There are no further local taxes and unless you're surviving on GCing memberships and chocolate (not that it's my place to criticise) the tax you pay across everything will be much less as most of what you buy will be zero rated. In the US every time a product is retailed you pay sales tax. I'm.aware of course that in the US it varies by state so that's far from true everywhere, but that's the general way a "pure" sales tax works before you complicate things by not having the same rule for 500 million people. With VAT if you are buying something in the course of your business you can reclaim the VAT. Also the thresholds here are only monetary- currently as a business if you earn less than £85k a year you don't pay any VAT. In the US the limit is usually transaction limited as well as financial. Means someone selling cakes at a farmers market each weekend doesn't need to pay VAT. So essentially, if you are running a business VAT tends to work well because you only pay tax on the *value you have added to the product*, when you sell it. Here because of geography and cost of warehousing it's more common for say a product to bounce around between multiple businesses to get the final product whereas in the US it tends to be more economic to do everything on one site. Tl;dr for us poor buggers who have to study this there are pros and cons to both but as a consumer you pay nowhere near 20% averaged across everything and the rules for business tend to be more straightforward, you don't need complicated exemptions. Everyone is charged the same, but businesses take the VAT they've paid off their VAT bill. And that's why it's a pain not having the VAT number if GS invoices, because it's the proof that GS have paid VAT on your purchase so you can reclaim it. Possibly the most boring post ever on this forum

EU826017834 Although you're right, it's very poor that this isn't on receipts as it makes reclaiming more difficult.

As someone who uses templates, I used them because as a CO I find it more interesting to get a bit more of a narrative rather than just the paragraph I could realistically write if logging in the field whilst herding small kids. I normally set up my template as <top>Narrative about what we're doing that day, change each day.</top> Custom paragraph for each cache about how we found it, what it was like, what kids thought etc. <footer>Log signed "Beth + Daddy" and cache replaced as found. Thank you CO for placing and maintaining this cache.</footer> When I have a cacher finding 50 caches in one day and mine is one, I would rather know a bit about their day even if it's an app copying and pasting it in for them instead of a one line log. Each to their own.

It would be a dull discussion forum if we all just shouted our own experiences and didn't engage with others. Some of the stuff here has made me realise my complaints about muggles are somewhat trivial compared to what some experience. Which has made me a better cacher

Personally to me it doesn't really make any sense at the moment because it's presented as an "instant message" style feature but is still tied in with emails, which lend themselves to a longer format. Plus on the website we still have the option to directly email OR message someone. At which point if you message someone, they may well be emailing you back anyway. So either have instant messages with group converastions AND emails, OR just have one messaging system that can be used via the app or by email. That would also make it accessible to third party developers who, as I understand, don't have access to the messages shown in the GC official app through the API.

Shame you can't create Discord style groups as far as I'm aware so that local cachers could all discuss together. We have a local Facebook group but I don't use Facebook for anything else so it's annoying to need a membership just for that. Hey... it could be a PMO feature. That could get GS interested

If people cared deeply enough for no-one else to own the cache they could archive the listing and remove the physical cache. Otherwise you are leaving something out there that presumably, at some point, someone has to judge to be litter and remove. Because pretty clearly if you're dead you can no longer control when the cache will be archived, that becomes the choice of the cachers and, to an extent, the reviewer, although of course it will be someone on the ground physically removing it. The responsible thing you often see around here is COs who will no longer be able to maintain their caches offering them for adoption, and archiving/removing if no adoptee is found.

If I get any more sodding automatic cars, you'll be first on my list.

I would say a cache container is like the "signature" of a CO. As such I wouldn't appreciate being given a container with the *expectation* I should hide it. That may be miserable but it's like a friend finding out you need a car and buying one for you - really kind, but probably not at all the type of car you want. I was "given" an automatic car once by a well meaning friend who was leaving the country because it was newer than my car - I had to pretend for ages I was enjoying driving it when actually I gave it away as quickly as I could

If only they had some sort of dev & test environment they could use to check basic things like links working.