Darwin473

My new(ish) laptop keeps prompting me to "upgrade" to W11. I'm just counting down the time until the warranty runs out, then I'm swapping out the drive and putting linux on this puppy. Okay, I'll go back in my box now.

It's definitely not a partnership I would have expected, but I put my name down on the list. Fingers crossed!

It would be fascinating to see a similar study on TB's released in all states. If most TB's are going missing after a few drops, then it stands to reason that most TB's would go missing in their home states. If someone was dedicated enough (and had the funds) to drop one TB per state, then go back to the start and go again for an even spread of starting points across all states, then we'd have a better sample set to say which state(s) have the best / worst failure rates for TB's. Very valid point - especially when trying to control for variables! Did this Tb go missing because it was shiny? Did this other TB last longer because it was shiny? Part of the TB lottery I guess.

Ouch, victim of your own success?

Specifically for GeoCoins? I haven't seen one, but it may exist. The "best" art program I've found is PhotoPea - it's essentially a free online version of Photoshop. Nearly all the features of photoshop without the cost. The main downside is that it's online, so if you have a poor internet connection it can be quite frustrating, and I'm paranoid of losing work so I'll save often. If you've never used Photoshop before, there's a bit of a learning curve but the basics are straight forward. If you have, then there are a few nuances to watch for in the differences between PhotoPea and proper Photoshop. Usually the biggest difference between a good looking geocoin and an average one is the design choices rather than the software used. But this should allow you to knock up a bunch of options that will allow you to refine your design. Biggest tip: print out copies at the desired production size. Nothing like having it physically in your hand to tell if elements are working or not, and if writing is too big or too small.

That's cool, that given enough time all TB's would eventually reach Germany. I think the first TB I found (or one of the first) and moved came from Germany, and I've found a few others. And I was very disappointed that they then promptly disappeared after I'd dropped them into a cache. Very poor form Australia, letting the team down.

Thank you, I love reading the hard data posts you share. Much better than guesses or anecdotal evidence. I wonder how much of a difference the different cultures make? USA tends to be a roughly homogenous culture (it certainly doesn't look that way from the inside looking out, but from where I sit, I don't see huge cultural differences between the different states). On the other hand, Europe is a melting pot of different countries - many of which have been actively hating each other for generations. With all their borders mushed up against each other, and all countries having a few mobile demographics of travelers (both the young adventurer and grey nomad types) means that they would all have a fair number of people constantly moving around. Though less so in the last few years due to that little pandemic thingy people keep going on about. That kinda put a dampener on many people's travel plans.

Urban caches can be much more challenging. It would be a bit easier if CO's were able to find out exactly why a missing cache went missing - bored teenagers, council staff, drunks and malicious people all require different options to improve cache longevity. The common theme for longer lasting urban caches (in my limited experience) is for them to be hidden from view. Tupperware tucked under a bush or next to a bus stop is almost guaranteed to be spotted by a random person. Mint tins magnetically stuck under a utility box or sign and out of sight are less likely to be found accidentally, and as a bonus are also out of the elements. Semi-hidden caches such as those inside the lid of a fence post are "out in the open" but blend in to their environment. One of my hides is in a metal utility box (about shoe box sized) that that the original CO (I resurrected an archived cache) had made by bolting it a metal pole that had nothing on it. It's right in the heart of the city and it's been ignored by thousands of people over the last ten years (my cache is GC91QZG, the original was GC3F8B5).

Not sure if you live in Victoria or just travelled there for the Event, but there is one Webcam cache left in Vic - GCMJ2J - Spirit of the Skier at Mt Buller. In case you you didn't already know, to log a webcam cache you need a way to capture a screenshot of the webcam stream (easy these days with a smart phone) to prove you were there. A bit like the "hey ma, I'm on TV!" type scenarios you'd see on 80's / 90's sitcoms. If you're not in Vic, there's two over near Adelaide ... and that's it. Those are the only three active webcam caches in Australia.

Seconded, this would be a brilliant option. At a minimum, I think that when people pick up / place TB's in/out of caches and add a photo, those photos should get added to the TB's gallery. It's a crying shame how many photos don't get seen by TB owners because well meaning players add photos to Find logs but they don't know photos need to be added separately to TB's so they show up in the TB gallery.

Are we talking power trails or geo-art? I thought the whole point of a power trail was so someone could churn through and collect a bucket of smilies by driving past caches and throwing film canisters out the window? (That's just a light hearted jab as I'm not a fan of PT's, I'm aware of how PT's are meant to be done - not intended as an insult or to start a comment war ).

Very true. A riddle like "what's black and white and red all over" may be incredibly obvious to an older person, but less so to someone who's never heard the joke before (or picked up a newspaper). Knowing that there's an issue which often trips people up or I've made assumptions which were wrong can only be fixed through finding out there's a problem to start with.

"I made a mistake, how do I fix it?" Echoing GeoElmo6000's sentiments - you're a great person and we'd love to have you as part of the community! The fastest way to work out a possible solution might be if you fire up Google Maps, drop a pin roughly where you think you may have picked it up from (within a mile or three should be plenty) and take a screenshot then post it here. Or since you have registered a GeoCaching account, you may be able to skip a step and look up that spot on the geocaching map where you can see caches in the area, take a screenshot of which ones it may possibly be and post that. Note that there may not be any icons on the map where you think you picked it up from as there are various types of caches which require extra steps, so the icon can be several miles where the actual container is; or it may be a Premium Member Only cache, where no icon shows up for a Basic member. This shouldn't affect you, as either of these screenshots might allow a player who lives close to the area to either work out which cache it is and inform the CO (Cache Owner) or might be able to go out and put down a replacement.

There's a bunch of different ways, depending on if you're using a phone, Windows or Mac (or other). On Windows it can be as easy as opening it in Paint and choosing the resize option (change to Pixels rather than percentage). There should be an equivalent for Apple computers. On a phone, there's a million and one apps to edit images. I use Pixlr which does all the basic features (simple filters, resize, add text, etc). If you're on a computer and want a bit more control, I thoroughly recommend photopea.com - it's essentially a free on-line version of Photoshop with 98% of all the functions. If you use your preferred search engine to look up Photoshop and "how to resize" you'll be able to do it quickly and easily in no time.

This seems to be in line with what HandiCaching does, providing additional information about caches so that people can decide for themselves if a cache is worth going after or if it'll be too frustrating for them.

Just to play devils' advocate for a bit, I'd keep in mind that the blog post (and GeoCaching HQ in general) operate on the basis of what they know. And places around GC HQ would be quite saturated, and a lot of the complaints they would see would be of the "there are too many old caches here, can I put caches less than 0.1 miles apart" variety. I don't think this post is aimed at caches that fit all the other criteria they mention but are also miles out into the scenic outback bushland. Similar story up here in Darwin - lots of old, poorly maintained caches but the saturation is so low you could add thousands of caches to the map within the city limits and still have space for more.

Did you use the message centre or email? Assuming you used the same system for all the earth caches you found, you should be able to compare the caches you found on that day with the list of successfully sent messages to find the one that may have been missed. That's assuming the message isn't still sitting in your outbox or sent or equivalent. Most systems don't just delete a massage if it fails to send.

Agreed, for the most part and for most caches. In response to the OP's desire to adopt / maintain what appears to be a historical cache of value, there are some geocaching groups with established guidelines for community maintenance (such as this one here) which require a good relationship with the local Reviewer. Clearly we don't want to be creating extra work for the local Reviewers so this wouldn't be done on every cache (attrition of low value caches is natural and healthy to keep new people and new caches coming into play). The two big issues are that one - the "value" of a cache is entirely subjective and can lead to pages' worth of debate for which caches should be maintained and which ones dropped; and two - is entirely dependent on the good will of the Reviewers. I'd come across this concept fairly early in my time GeoCaching so I thought it was more well known / wide spread - hence my assumption that people would know about it and didn't elaborate too much in my initial post. My bad.

Correct. Hence the "contact the Reviewer" part. Keeping the local Reviewer in the loop and letting them (and other searchers) know that any issues are / have been taken care of means that the Reviewer can clear any NM / NA logs if they believe everything is good with the cache. Admittedly I only have experience with three of our current and previous Reviewers here in Australia, but I'd like to think other Reviewers are not so beholden to the law that they'd archive a cache that is being actively looked after by the community. My bad, I should have included this in my previous post, apologies for the lack of clarity.

If it's near you, and you had wanted to adopt it anyway - add it to your watch list. That way, when someone makes a log on it, you get notified as well. You may also want to drop an email to your local Reviewer, let them know you're keeping an eye on that cache. Though if you do that, make sure you react quickly to NM / NA logs if any come up to show you're monitoring the cache. By "react" I don't mean you need to drop everything and speed across the state! Just adding a Note "saw the NM / NA, I'll pop over and check it out tomorrow / next week / on X date" and then following up should be sufficient.

Hello again to everyone, new year, new me (it's 2022 in Australia now, still NYE in the US). My original username was Unit473L, which I picked from looking in the real estate section of the newspaper. Not a great name, not a terrible name. However, I did have a few people asking me if the "unit" part was related to some military unit, as many of them have numbers instead of names. Also, it's way too close to the awful Manshu Detachment known as Unit 731 in WWII. They committed many atrocities and war crimes (feel free to look them up if you feel like being depressed for the rest of the week). Since I don't want to inadvertently be providing support for them, I've changed my username to Darwin473. Now comes the hard part, remembering to write the correct username when I write my logs!

I'm not sure what a community trackable is. I know that lots of people buy trackables and send them out into the world to travel, but they are all owned by players. However, they do go missing quite often, so it is common to find a cache where on the listing it says there is meant to be a trackable in there when there aren't. And some people are bad at logging them (or don't realise they've picked up a trackable) so sometimes you'll find a trackable in a cache which is not listed - though this is rarer.

It might be that the local Reviewer is sick, busy or has some other issue going on at the moment which is taking up more of their time than normal? Up here in the NT, our Reviewer (who does NT, WA and TAS) has been reasonably responsive most of the year. The most recent Archive (that I know of) up here is GC11XG1 I logged NA on 10 OCt, was disabled 18 Oct with the normal "hey CO, please action" message and then archived 18 Dec. Considering this time of year, that seems to be a pretty decent timeline, and gave the CO extra time to react in case of issues with Covid or other. In this specific case, the CO was long inactive, and the cache was unrecoverable due to a new housing estate going in and the whole area being bulldozed. On the plus side, new spot opening up for a new cache, and the original had a pretty good run since it was placed in 2007.

I would have thought that a code-only PM would be a cash cow for GC. If people can buy a code to give Premium to someone else, there'd be a good percentage of people who receive it and never claim it. And I'm not all up to date on the laws over there, but a quick Google search suggests that it's okay to have an expiry date on there, so long as it is clearly displayed both on the point of purchase and on the gift "card" (though I suppose here we run into trouble if person A buys for person B, but person A only gives the code and not the extra information from the original email / pdf / image). Wouldn't be that hard to give it a one / three / five year expiration so that someone can't buy a $30 Premium today, then have it claimed in X years when Premium costs $60. Hey, who you calling regular? I'm a small, thank you very much!

Yes and no. There is a competing company that produces a similar product to GeoCoins but they all have the same code. The idea is that they are more like a business card rather than an individually tracked item. These normally come in batches of 100 and are metal. They don't get logged or tracked on GC as they are a seperate product, but many cachers like making and releasing them. If someone buys a TB, they can put the code on something else, creating a proxy. I've seen people use a TB code to make a stamp or to create stickers, and they put them into logbooks for others to log. This (and producing 100 wooden "geocoins") is allowed - on the condition that the TB is set to "discover only". This means that when someone sees it, when they try to log it the only options they get are Discover or Write Note. If the TB is not set up that way, and people can Drop and Grab the TB's, or log them into cache visits, then I believe those TB's get locked by GC because it gets flagged as "false logs" due to being Grabbed / Dropped in and out of caches in different places at the same time and creates confusion. So yes, someone can do that, assuming certain criteria are met.