The red-haired witch

That would be a total overreaction. Events and gatherings are cancelled or postponed in places where local authorities are recommending it. That is far from being everywhere on the planet at this time. Also, not all events attract a massive crowd of people. If I go meet for breakfast with a dozen other geocachers, in a country where about one person in a million is infected, I'm pretty sure the riskiest part of my day is still the drive to the event. I prefer to follow the "don't panic, wash your hands" method at this time.

Places where geocachers can search without being seen are a good start. If the hiding place is exposed, the cache has to be well hidden from non-geocachers, but you don't want geocachers to have to search too long (or that will attract unwantwd attention to your cache). A good hint can help achieve that. Oh, and fake electrical panels are only a good idea when they are far from real ones, in places where their could not be a real one. In the proper spot, they are a good example of something only geocachers will notice.

It can be ok if it is a small amount and if it is paid to a non-profit or to a government agency. Entry fees into a national park for example.

As the odds of a local cacher reading this are low, I'd suggest trying to find local cachers by searching for nearby cache listings and contacting the owners of those caches. Also, though the cache has no attributes, logs indicate it was never found in winter (not really surprising that far north), so you may have to wait a few months...

There are only 60 minutes in a degree, like there are only 60 minutes in an hours. So, it's similar as if you were trying to enter a time of 6:77PM... that doesn't work. Either your coordinates should be N47 17.130, or you are actually looking at coordinates in the dd.ddddd format and trying to transcribe them in dd mm.mmm without actually converting them to the proper value.

Indeed, it is really hard to spot when there are several feet of snow on top of it... Remember, geocaching is a worldwide game played in many different climates. Your winters might not be the same as another player's. Around here, winter is great for those worried about plants and insects. Even thorns are less of a concern when you have a big jacket, mittens and snowshoes! So, if your climate is great like that, think of picking the best season to visit those tricky caches in difficult areas! If all the previous finds on a 5 year old cache are in the winter, there might be a reason...

Could that simply mean Word of Mouth? So, a private cache you tell only your friends about... not a good place to put a TB. It's almost like keeping the TB on your desk, it's not actually travelling.

La cache appartient à celui qui l'a placée. Le fait que la page décrivant la cache soit archivée ne change pas ce fait. Donc Groundspeak ne peut pas demander à ses bénévoles d'enlever ces caches sur le terrain. En plus, ça ne serait pas vraiment possible dans la plupart des pays, où le territoire couvert par chaque réviseur bénévole s'étend sur une énorme superficie.

La règle (de geocaching.com, pas la loi locale) interdisant d'endommager les arbres (en y perçant des trous, en y plantant des clous ou des vis, ou en y faisant des graffitis) n'a rien à voir avec le fait que ça puisse tuer l'arbre ou pas. Après tout, la même règle s'applique aux arbres morts, aux poteaux, aux murs de bâtiments... Très simplement, les géocacheurs n'ont pas le droit d'endommager des choses qui ne leur appartiennent pas pour cacher ou chercher une géocache. Et pourquoi ces géocaches sont publiées quand même? Parce que les réviseurs ne peuvent pas aller voir chaque géocache en personne avant la publication... comment pourraient-ils savoir que le contenant est accroché à un gros clou planté dans l'arbre plutôt qu'accroché à une branche?

Je ne sais pas où vous prenez votre information, mais c'est tout à fait faux. GeoawareCA est bilingue et comprend très bien le français et l'anglais. Elle habite au Canada (présentement dans les prairies, précédemment dans la région d'Ottawa). Si un géocacheur décide d'écrire sa cache en anglais seulement, il n'y a aucune règle permettant au réviseur de refuser la publication parce qu'il n'y a pas de texte en français sur la page de cache. Et, oui, il y a des géocacheurs anglophones au Québec, et ils ont le droit de créer des géocaches. Au lieu de blâmer le réviseur, il serait plus constructif de contacter le propriétaire de la cache et lui offrir de faire la traduction pour lui...

Je ne sais pas de quelles "badges" vous parlez, mais quand vous visitez la page de la cache pour inscrire que vous l'avez trouvée, il y a un menu déroulant vous donnant le choix de la date qui sera attachée à votre "trouvé". Évidemment, vous devriez choisir la date où vous avez trouvé et signé la cache en question.

Of course people go out in this weather. Just be dressed properly Some (hundreds of) people will even attend an outdoor event in this weather next weekend http://coord.info/GC4G0YQ At least there will be no mosquitoes

Exactly (logbook is optional, of course). You can have the event at the trailhead, and people can go hiking before/during/after the event. You can't have the event being : "wherever the event organizer happens to be along the trail at this precise moment". And you can't have an event being : "to log this as attended, you need to hike 10 km with the group".

I'd say it's the creep towards increasingly ridiculously short events... first there were the 15 minutes flash mob, than 5 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute, 1 second... I don't know what is the shortest one that got published, but, yes, listings for events lasting one second have been submitted. An event is suppose to be an occasion for geocachers to socialize together. Not much socialization happens in a group in one second. A line was needed somewhere. Discussion led to 30 minutes being considered reasonable. Note that people can still stay at the event for a much shorter time. But the event has to last at least 30 minutes. So you should not miss the entire event because it took you a few extra minutes to find parking... As for the one hour minimum for CITO, I guess it was considered that you need a bit more time to socialize and pick a reasonable amount of trash.

I think reviewers all know that maps are not perfectly accurate. But when told to archive all the caches on trust land, maps are most probably the only thing the reviewer could use. Going to visit the location of each cache to see if it's ok is sadly not feasible. Have you tried sending your reviewer a polite email with some pictures clearly showing where your cache is and where the fence around the trust land is? I think it would be worth a try...

I'm really sorry if the cache didn't have permission (or no longer had permission, as it quite possible permission was given 8 years ago by someone who no longer lives there... with 240 owners, there must be a lot of change over 8 years). As for the damage, I think the OP is doing a "jump to conclusions" that I've seen before and is usually wrong : There is a geocache in that area + there are dommages in that area = geocachers caused the damage. How can you logically conclude that? PLease take a step back and consider the whole picture. This is not an area in the middle of nowhere, it is near a road, so geocachers are certainly not the only people going through there. Actually, with less than one find/week over the history of the cache, geocachers are certainly a very small minority of the people passing through that area. I could believe some rocks being moved to look for a cache (though the great majority of geocachers would put them back after looking), but not power cords being "cut with a knife or shovel" or light fixtures being destroyed. Vandalism and trespassing existed long before geocaching... and geocachers are not more commonly vandals than the rest of the population. Some examples of that type of "logic" I've seen : - In a local park, a cache was placed near an area were teens go to build campfires and drink. The landowner concluded the campfires and empty bottles were because of the cache and banned geocaching in the park. The partying and drinking continues. - A conservation officer learns about a geocache, concludes that it caused an illegal geotrail to form, damaging the environment, and asks for the cache to be removed. The cache was visited about once a month. The trail was there at least 20 years before the cache and is used by hundreds of people every year. Removing the cache had no effect on the trail. Of course the wishes of the landowners/land managers should be respected, and caches should be removed if permission is denied/not given/removed. As the OP saw, a simple request to the reviewer got the cache immediately archived. But I would suggest looking at all the facts carefully before writing about criminal accusations and legal procedures. Placing a cache in an area cannot possibly make a person responsible for the actions of every person who visits that area. As for the trespassing issue, as others have said, it seems to be very location dependant. Where I live, I cannot get someone arrested for walking up my driveway or stepping on my lawn. It's not illegal unless they had to break in or I tell them to get off my property and they refuse to comply. Maybe it's different where the OP lives.

That wouldn't reduce the number of records to search unless they had separate databases for every state/country. Restricting the search to a single/country would just an and extra element to the search criteria but it would still search over all records in the database. It's been a looong time since I did any programming, but it used to be possible to do this : search the entire database for one value of one variable (here the country or state), create a subset of the database, search that subset for your second criteria ( here the presence of words in the title). That way the "more ressource intensive" search is done on a smaller set of data. Seems like a reasonable idea to me. I think most would be happy with this search function. You rarely need to search all the caches in the world at once for a word...

In my experience, if a rule (or guideline, or law, or anything really) is interpreted one way by 99.9% of people and another way by 0.01%, the rule is very clear, and not "a little bit vague". The 0.1% are those not reading it with a mind willing to understand and therefore deliberately misinterpreting it. I don't think the rule really needs fixing. Seems clear to me what the intended meaning is. Of course, I'm just an engineer, not a lawyer There is no way to make a rule perfectly immune to deliberate misinterpretation. And attempts to achieve this often result in a 2 line rule becoming a 2 page long one

Ah, I understand now, thanks for clarifying. Clearly I should not have brought knowledge and facts into a discussion that was supposed to be purely about people expressing their opinions. Sorry, I'm told it's a common flaw amongst engineers and scientists. Like those silly climatologists trying to enter discussions about global warming, when their opinion is obviously biased by the facts and science they know. Please carry on with your expressing of opinions on what reviewers are or are not allowed to do, I wont interfere any more.

I am and I do. Knowing that, I'm puzzled that 1) You don't seem to believe me when I say that there is no mysterous "second reviewer" in that thread. 2) You think it makes my response less valid... I think having first hand knowledge means I may have a slightly better idea of what reviewers are allowed to do or not. As some recent answers indicate that some people got a mistaken impression of the situation, let me make crystal clear that the question : "A first geocacher wrote on a local forum that another geocacher was an idiot.. if the first geocacher is a reviewer, is that an appropriate thing to write?" Is purely hypothetical, as this situation didn't actually happen. Telling someone "hey, if you were a reviewer, you shouldn't have written that" seems rather pointless to me. If your point is that no one should ever call anyone else an idiot on a public forum, I agree that would be nice, but having been active on many forums for many years, I can tell you it's unlikely to become the norm. (edit : bad English)

First, you can't ask a question on a discussion forum and demand a simple yes or no answer. This is a place to discuss. Second, if you refer to a specific situation when asking a question, expect people to try to respond in reference to that specific situation. And to want more details to give an informed opinion The question you asked in the title of the thread is "Do reviewers ever get fired?" I haven't seen it happen, but I'm sure it could happen, if a reviewer did something very bad. Do I think commenting on a local forum under their player account is "something very bad"? No. Something very bad would be archiving the caches of everyone you don't like, or taking bribes to publish caches that don't follow the guidelines. You know, bad. Becoming a reviewer doesn't mean you can't have opinions anymore. You should be polite in expressing them, sure, but so should all geocachers, if you check the rules of most forums...

Your assumptions are wrong. I know lots of geocachers who don't understand English. You used to need English to use the internet, but nowadays there are many websites available in other languages, including geocaching.com I know lots of people who go on trips to other countries and don't speak a word of English. For example, if you live in a French speaking country and always travel to Spanish speaking countries, it makes more sense (and is easier) to learn Spanish than English. Sure, COs could use an internet translation tool to translate their caches in other languages. But those tools improve all the time, so you'll probably get a better result when you translate it for yoursef than if you use a translation provided by the CO months or years earlier. And even COs who actually understand English may choose not to use it on their cache page. In some parts of the world, language is a sensitive issue. When there is a history of trying to make the local language disappear (sometimes going as far as making its use illegal, or forcing schools to teach only in English), then people may deliberately choose not to put English on their cache pages. In the end, remember that, in most cases, a cache is found by more locals than tourists. The COs don't have to make them more accessible to tourists. Some do, be happy about those and don't demand that all others do it too.

that is not the quote, there are 2 reviewers in that thread, check both, and BTW the whole thread is nothing but bullying and bashing because the second party ( the one they are referring to is not on that board to defend himself ) I'm sorry, but I only see one reviewer posting in that thread, and, despite posting under her player account, she was extremely diplomatic and correct, and never used the word stupid. She explained the guidelines and how they apply to the situation. As I said, I'd really like to know who you think is the second reviewer there. Also, I don't see how that thread is "nothing but bullying and bashing"... if there is some bullying, it is in the e-mails from the "log-deleter" that are being quoted.

For the interest of clarity, here is the sentence (posted on a local forum) I believe cheryl1701 found objectionable : Fact: a certain portion of the general population are idiots. Why should the subset of geocachers be any different? Besides which, with a find rate of less than one per year, he hardly qualifies to be called a geocacher. So, yes, geocacher A pretty much said that geocacher B is an idiot, after said geocacher B deleted some logs, refused to correct coordinates and sent geocacher C an e-mail stating that the imprecision in the coordinate was delibarate, to make the cache more interesting . Now, the question I'd like cheryl1701 to answer is : What reviewer do you think geocacher A (who posted the comment) is? I'd really like to know, and there is no problem in sharing that information, as all the local reviewers are "out of the closet" about their identities.

Can you please add some information on this point? Because the event certainly looks like it's free when looking at the description... Also, maybe you are not aware, but any fee charge at an event can only be for cost recovery (renting a hall, park access fees, food...), so even if you did pay something, you can be sure the organizers didn't get a salary for their work.