Sagefox

Exactly. Some new people still need to be gently trained just like in the days of old. The rate is higher now, though, due to the ease of access to the game and the minimal financial commitment needed to get started. We are seeing more people doing stuff we never would have thought of. And with this ease of access often comes a lesser commitment from the new players. It is harder to tell now which of the newbies are serious about the game and which are trying it out on a lark with the free phone app and not likely to go very far. We spent a long caching day recently with two people that started out with phone apps and are now dynamite cachers deeply committed to the game and having an absolute ball. They were a joy to cache with. They want to do it right and highly respect the experienced cachers they meet. I can imagine how a couple of cold log deletions in their first months of geocaching would have made them feel and I don't like the thought of it. This wave of newbies might be frustrating to us, and it can be very frustrating, but we can't be so impatient with them that it leads us act unkindly.

I am very impressed that as a new user of the free phone app you care about a geocoin's (aka trackable) goal. This is good to see.

That's great. My average was 75 words and stayed like that for about a decade. I don't know if it still is. I might play with BG to see what it is now. I am still writing in a paper notebook. The 62s is awkward and the Colorado is even more awkward and I have been hesitant to grub up the phone or get it wet but maybe this will inspire me. Yep. That is 1/3rd of the fun in this game - the cache communication. We just had a 114 cache weekend (with 700 miles driving) and I perused almost every cache at home when I logged. I know this is not for everybody and I don't care if people don't write anything. It is just a fun part of the way I do the game.

Your "top" worked for me. Here's the full snippet of code for those interested in adding their DNF count to their profile. The "left" value will have to be adjusted individually based on one's number of finds and logged trackables. This worked great. Thanks! :)

Yes, that is certainly the case around here each time a big change happens but I don't recall changes ever being a major problem.

My dad gave us a Garmin eMap in the spring of 2001 before we knew about geocaching. Late in the year we went after our first six caches and we didn't even know what a waypoint was. We just lined up the North coords and moved around until the West zeroed out. Downloading cache waypoints must have been available around that time because I don't recall entering many cache waypoints by hand. Paperless was not available yet. December of 2002 We made a trip from Eureka to Seattle to Las Vegas and I printed out 163 caches at 3 or 4 pages each. That was a looottt of paper! We found 61 caches for the trip. Afterward I removed all the staples of the un-found cache pages and printed on the back sides for the next several outings. By summer of 2004 paperless caching was underway. We still used our non-auto-routing eMap but added an HP PDA with Easy GPS for waypoints and the venerable Spinner to prepare the downloaded webpages for the PDA. Here is the equipment that Wienerdog and Team Sagefox used during the two-day Portland (OR) Cache Machine: Garmin III (or maybe it's a IV), Garmin V, Garmin 60c, Garmin 60cs, Garmin eMap, four HP PDAs, two-way radios, printed CM route, Diet Pepsi and other assorted fun stuff. Sometime in 2004 We bought a 60cs and made the jump to auto-routing which was a major improvement. I no longer needed to have my head in the electronic map to see where to turn. I even learned how to fall down with a GPS and PDA both in one hand and not drop them. But the best improvement we made was buying the Colorado and the 62s. A GPS with the web page info - man, we love it! We also use a Garmin Nuvi to auto-route to each cache. I do use a smartphone now but only to augment. I still love the GPS technology. Last weekend we cached all day with some people who primarily use smartphones and they are very good at it. With a PQ in the phone they had everything they needed. I always appreciated whatever improvements came along for mapping and downloading no matter how awkward they may seem to us today. GSAK has been a lot of fun since I attended a GSAK workshop sponsored by the Washington State Geocachers Association. There I learned a few tricks to make some sense of that powerful database program and now feel very comfortable with the little bit I can do with it. Those early days were "the good old days" and today's caching is tomorrow's good old days. We are having a ball with this game. Edit: equipment list.

Good news! Smokey was found having been blown across the grasslands some distance. He was back in place by the time we got there. Oops. I know I should remember what I read in these pre-event notes. Sorry about that.

We missed you. Almost emailed you Friday night to commiserate but decided not to pester you. We did stop by the Alien cache on the way home and had a great time. We are now Chance the dog's best friends for life and we bought $125.00 of cool stuff that barely fit into the Honda. Actually, I suspect that Chance forgot all about us about 15 minutes later when he met his next best friends for life. The owner is a very nice fellow and we had a couple of chats with him during the hour we were there poking around all the cool stuff. What a great cache stop.

How timely - I'll stop for this one en route to the Spokane Valley Cache Machine. Thanks! Us too, but on the way home.

Why do you hate travel bugs? ( :lol:) Looks like you and your family are having fun with this game and I loved your log and adventure at the chimney rock cache and I am curious too... So after holding this travel bug for 4 1/2 years you want to put it into a cache that isn't likely to be found for a long time, perhaps years? Did I misunderstand something here?

The final version will be announced here - keep watching. Typically it comes out early in the week before the event. This is so the work of those people assisting with the status of marginal caches can be incorporated into the final route. It is worth the wait.

Unfair comment.

Benign comments withdrawn.

I don't think it is a very big issue whether NYPC logged a find or deleted that log because I believe his logs of this type are most likely less than 1% of his total finds and that really should make it NOT worth arguing about. I also don't understand why anyone would WANT to log a find on a cache they didn't find. It seemed cool at first to offer a find to someone in certain cases but now it seems so odd to me that I ever considered doing that. It was here in the forums many years ago that someone pointed out that an online find is not a reward for good effort. It simply shows that a cache was found and a physical log was signed (traditional container caches). A smiley logged in place of a DNF seems like a rather empty award especially if it were used to turn a state or country red on a stat map. Yes, yes, that's been said many times over many years but it is a community game we play here and the community has some thoughts on this subject that will get voiced and need to be discussed. A past find-count leading cacher who eventually quit the game once logged seven finds instead of one DNF on a cache in protest of the hide conditions. That it was done while in the race to stay in first lessened the integrity of the protest for me and I thought it was rather lame that they never deleted those finds after the point was made.

Given your Log-o-cide comment below I am suspicious of the laughing emoticon here. It is not clear that this comment truly is in jest. The section referenced: "If you digitally log a geocache without meeting these requirements (also known as couch logging), your log can be deleted by either the geocache owner or Geocaching HQ without notice." It says nothing of GS policing physical logs but it does clearly say that virtual logs might be deleted by HQ if it comes to their attention. I bring this up because I was surprised by your interpretation of another rule a few posts earlier... You've got me curious. It seems that you have read into this that physical caches can be logged online without signing the physical log. If that was ever the case then I think descriptions of the instances where you could log online without signing a physical log would have followed that statement. I don't recall reading anything like that. You don't sign physical logs? So much so that you feel you can no longer log online? I think there are many instances where a log cannot be signed but a Found It should be posted but I would anticipate this would typically makeup less than 1% of any account's find total. Maybe a tad more for low-find accounts. Edit: typos.

Not the very beginning. More like about a year and a half into the game I'd say. I recall that we joined immediately when the announcement came out. March of 2002 sounds about right.

Apparently, from what I am learning in this forum recently, there is nothing wrong with any kind of log posted to a trackable's page. Most visit logs, I'm sure, are well intentioned and since most people probably don't ever read the traveler's history it is, by default, a harmless activity. But when I have to sift through pages and pages of visit logs that many trackables get in order to see where the bug made "real visits" or to see if it met its goal it get very annoying very fast. A few of what I call fake visits by several cachers spread throughout pages of real visits doesn't get in the way but dozens of visits by one person followed by dozens of visits by the next handler is a big turn off. By then I stop caring what the goal is and just drop it anywhere which might be 700 miles the wrong direction during our travels.

Yes! A "real" visit where the trackable stays in the cache and the cacher moves on without it. Oh yes!! A refreshing but oh so logical point of view. I suspect that most visiting trackables are actually in a bag in the car or sitting on a desk at home rather than being at the visited cache. And mutter unmentionable words at your profile on the computer screen.

Oh, I've deleted a lot of visit logs and I know the owner gets a notice for each one. The trackable game has changed and perfectly nice folks are now piling on visit and trackable-fest discovered logs and hopelessly cluttering the pages. What I want to know is if it is possible to "retire" one or more of my travelers that are not in my possession in a way that prevents visit, discovered, grabbed and placed logs. Would my moving it to my inventory or other action I can do accomplish this? If it can only be done by Groundspeak staff then I don't want to do it. They have important things to do with their time and this is a low, low priority.

I adopted out some of our trackables around 2004, or so, but that caused us to lose that bit of history on our profile page. I want it to be known (to whomever might ever wander into that corner of our profile) that we were in the game. As for retiring trackables I was wondering if transferring them to our collection would lockout any or all logs from being posted to the tb page. I've never quite understood the collection feature.

All this is "real" geocaching including the icons earned by actually geocaching. This is "fake" geocaching. When you say "it is left up to the trackable owners to delete logs" that implies there is something fishy about this activity. We all know it is essentially not right, not what was intended and that we can now get away with if the trackab le owners don't object. You say the game is not the same as "back in the day" but that does not have to become the justification for virtual logging of trackables. Yes they are nice and they truly love what they are doing. They also loved virtual logging of Virtual Caches that they never visited and when that was discouraged by HQ they switched to virtual logging of trackables. HQ does not have the resources to curb this bogus logging therefore it is, by default, becoming unbogus I guess you could say.

(Que the screaming goat!) I had a feeling it was a bad idea to check in with this forum tonight. Makes sense? In a parallel universe maybe. Hey, that's it - the fake discovers and fake visits ARE in a parallel universe. Now that perspective should help me "get over it". The trackable game as we once knew and loved it is not really dead as I suspected, there are simply two separate games going on. I think I will be alright now as long as it is legal for me to delete unnecessary visit logs and I can come here to rant once in a while.

That is a good example and it reminds me of a similar situation back before the smartphone era. We were walking in a park that had a great four part multi and the first stage had some Morse code to decipher necessitating a trip back home. Later during that walk we came upon one of several benches and sat down for a bit. I vaguely remembered there was something about a bench and that got me to thinking... a short walk around a few trees produced the final container completely covered with moss but in an intuitive location. Actually, I found a letterbox first that was 12" from the cache and the cache owner didn't even know about it. Since it was in our town I eventually visited all the stages. Another example is when group caching for the day occasionally one member has worked out a puzzle but we are all there for the final. The point of all this being that sometimes mulits and puzzles are found without doing the intermediate steps. Where I would not feel comfortable is if someone emailed me final coordinates of a puzzle or multi for me to go after on my own. I'm sure, though, that there can be circumstances where even this would be acceptable but, for me, not as a regular practice.

There is no need to feel any quilt whatsoever because it is just how that one happened for you. The more caching you do the more these occasional incidents will happen. Having the container in hand and signing the log is always a find.

I never would have guessed. I can understand why Groundspeak would not want to get involved with trackable logging. I am glad, actually, that they don't waste their time with it. O.K. then, if that is the case I guess we are firmly in the new era of trackable handling and its gone to a place I can't follow. I used to like reading the logs and seeing where the trackables ACTUALLY went and who handled them. Pawing through pages of bogus Discover and and fake Visit logs is pretty much no fun at all. I stopped handling trackables about a year ago because of the Visit log mess. I did not know virtual Discover logs were allowed and had not paid attention to them until I rescued this travel bug from a remote cache and then noticed the virt logs happening while it was in my possession. This travel bug is only all about bogus Discovers and pages of took-it-tos so it feels like I didn't rescue it from anything.