Darwin473

If they were in your neighborhood, that means you could log the find on them - after someone else FTF's it. Maybe be like the third or fifth person to "find" it. Though in the OP's scenario, if someone is paying you to do most of the work anyway, odds are you'd have the maintenance in the contract anyway. So being close would be an advantage, yes?

I think CheekyBrit could elaborate on what they mean by "have them built under their own name". It could mean: Builder Account (BA) uses their account to build and submit the cache, with the cache being "for" the Moneybags Account (MA) (such as a GeoTrail for a government tourist bureau or other agency). BA uses their own account but lists the cache owner on the cache page as MA - but if a person clicks on it, it takes them to BA. BA logs in with the MA and does all the work, but the cache is "owned" by MA.

One of my caches is a a Puzzle cache that asks searchers to watch four movies, and the page lists specific scenes in which some numbers are clearly visible on the screen. The movies I picked were old enough and famous enough that the average searcher should be able to get hold of a copy to watch without incurring any costs. Plus since I named specific scenes, it's possible for searchers to find just those scenes online on YouTube, Vimeo or other video hosting sites. I thought it was an interesting enough concept, and it got FTF'd in two days (that's pretty quick for here in Darwin, where we don't have any hard-core FTF chasers), but after the first three finders, nobody else has logged a find since May. So maybe I was wrong on that front? The main tip I would give is to make sure there is no ambiguity in the answers in order to get the coords. For mine, spotting a number on the screen is quite definite. Identifying a colour, naming a brand of clothing, getting a direction are all things that can be subjective (my left / your left, is the dress black and blue or white and gold?) and can lead to frustration. And make sure to include a checker so people can be sure they have the right coords before they go trampling all over the countryside.

Ouch, I hope you have good insurance to cover your medical costs.

I'm glad I learned about this concept early in my caching journey, so I have a TB that travels with me to all the caches that I visit. It just missed the first five or ten, so it's a few miles short of what GC says I've travelled, though not much. Though I was careful not to log it on GC8NEAT as the "locationless" cache is actually based somewhere in the US and added 10,000 onto logged TB's. For someone like BirdSearcher who wants to get one up and running after already having 1k+ finds, you have to really want it before committing to it.

Acetone is my preferred method for proper acrylic, that melts the plastic and "welds" it together. I don't know how well the epoxy will work on this one, but I'm reasonably confident it should hold. Only time will tell, fingers crossed!

Hello again, back with another method of making proxies for missing or collectible TB's. This time, the focus is on a GeoCoin, with no hitch hiker. For this method, the main cost was the purchase of some acrylic (plastic) coin capsules used for storing collectable coins. I put "plastic" in there as I'm not certain that the ones I got were actual acrylic or some different type of plastic - but acrylic is preferred as it is easy to seal shut with a little bit of acetone. I bought a set of ten 40mm (1.57") capsules off eBay, so they could be made of compressed rice for all I know. Once designed, the first step is to print and cut out the inserts. If you want to use this method, check the sizes of the capsules you use. For most, one side will be slightly larger than the other. You can either print to suit, or print two the same size and trim down the smaller one - you just need to account for that in the design and leave enough border to allow for the smaller size. Once cut out, the faces are glued to the inside of the two halves. Note that I included in the print a "band" of solid colour. This is to use as inserts around the edges and hide the centre of the coin. The edges can be a little bit tricky, my bands of colour where much larger than they needed to be, so I cut them down the centre so I'd have two goes at it if I made a mistake. The glue is allowed to dry, then any protruding paper is trimmed off with a sharp blade. At this stage, the two halves could be glued together and the GeoCoin would be "complete". Personally, I didn't like the feel of a very light plastic coin, and worried that the hollow interior would allow the coin to be damaged too easily if some weight or force was placed on top of it. I applied more glue to the inside face of all the paper inserts in order to seal them, then grabbed a lead fishing sinker and hammered it flat into a coin-ish shape. (Apologies for the blurry photo, this is the best one I have.) The sinker on the right is the original shape, the one on the left is the flattened one. I used the underside of a metal stand for the hammering, due to lead being Something You Don't Play With. (If you're not sure why this is, Google "lead poisoning".) If I had my way, I'd rather have created a mold, melted the lead down and poured it into the exact size / shape I needed. However this would have required the purchase of equipment I didn't have, and added to the cost. If you're going this route: tip is to use lots and lots of little impacts to get the desired shape rather than attempting to smush down with a few hits. Lead is very malleable, but sudden impacts tend to make it crumble, which is a Bad Thing. A better option is to use a thick metal washer, an actual coin or lots of teeny tiny ball bearings. I didn't have any of these items in a suitable size, and I did have some spare sinkers which I wasn't going to use again. If you're not a fan of lead, there are alternatives available. For strength, and to seal the lead in, the smaller half had some 5-minute epoxy poured in and the flattened sinker placed in. Once dry, more epoxy was placed over the top to make sure it was all sealed in and make it safe to be sent out into the public. Once that was nice and dry, more epoxy was put on top, the two halves put together and then squeezed tight to force the excess epoxy out between the seams and seal everything up nice and tight. It did make a bit of a mess, but I'm 99.9% confident that no water will reach the paper, and no lead will reach another persons hands. (I also added a note on the TB page about the internal lead content in case it ever breaks open). And done! A nice, clean GeoCoin, weighing in at a feels-nice-in-the-hand 34g (approx 1.2 ounces), solid construction that shouldn't break in a cache or someone's bag and with nice legible printing for the design, text and TB code. Total out of pocket expenses were about $1.50 each (mostly for the capsules, the printing was negligible, the sinkers were old spares and the epoxy I had left over from another project; not counting the cost of a TB for the code). Time was about an hours' worth of actual labour over about two weeks while allowing plenty of time for glues / epoxy to dry. If I make more, I don't think I'll use the lead (I don't have any more sinkers, and there's the ever present concern about it breaking open), but I'm happy with these two. We'll see how far they travel on the winds of fate...

I've come across a situation similar to this, minus the money. There was a person living in State A that wanted to place a series of caches in different states. They contacted me in State B asking if I was willing to place (and maintain) their cache for them. In this case, they would do the on-line stuff since they could do that themselves. Presumably they were contacting people in States C, D, etc for caches there as well. If someone offered me money to do something like this (find a location, assemble and place the cache, submit the listing and maintain) then I wouldn't have an issue with it. It seems to be a fairly straightforward service-for-pay scenario. I'd charge an upfront fee to build, place and submit the cache, then an ongoing fee to monitor. Around here, I'd be happy with a nominal fee of $5 a month, to pretty much cover the fuel. Most caches here seem to only need a visit once a year, if that, for maintenance so the ongoing aspect wouldn't be an issue. Just add that cache listing to the Watch list on my regular account and after the submission I probably wouldn't even need to access their account unless they wanted me to log the CO maintenance logs as well. As for the upfront cost - it'd vary, depending on the materials and complexity of the build. I'm pretty good at scavenging what other people discard as rubbish to re-purpose into caches, so unless it was something like custom arduino boards I could put together some nice ones on the cheap. If they then stopped paying me the ongoing fee, then all I'd need to do is nothing. The cache will coast for a bit, then when it starts needing maintenance it'll get the NM / NA logs. Once archived, I'd CITO the remains and then possibly submit my own cache in that location. I don't see too many ethical issues unless people want to start over-thinking it. It's a bit like wanting to be an author but sucking at it. You can pay a writer / writers to ghost write your novel, then submit to a publisher for printing and distribution. Collect the credit by paying someone else for their ideas. They get the pay, I get the credit for the book. Not that I'd do that; I'd get much more joy from a few sales of my mediocre book that I wrote myself than I would from a best seller that I paid someone else to write.

I know with other games (not to be mentioned here) having spots near a hospital can be beneficial to patients who may be stuck in a bed but otherwise okay (such as with a broken leg). Being able to play gps-based games on the phone while in hospital can help pass the time. That doesn't apply to caching, as they can't come out and have a search. Personally, I'd treat it like a regular business - with the extra consideration of not placing it where a finder might park in a place where it could obstruct emergency vehicles.

This seems like the sort of thing that "should" be easy and straight forward using GSAK or similar - after all, it's just adding an extra field to existing items in a database. However, I assume that this type of behavior is exactly the type of thing anti-spam and anti-bot programs and procedures are meant to prevent. The one-at-a-time method would be the most reliable, though also the most tedious! Spending a few minutes each day doing five to ten logs would get it done without being a massive burden, though getting through 1,300 finds would take quite some time. Hopefully there's a better method someone can suggest.

Shame that it's US only, though I can totally understand why due to the costs of international postage. Fingers crossed you get a few replies. Be really good if you can get some from people who can act as a "hub", and receive a single package with a bunch to then re-distribute to other people within their state / county. I wish I could afford to buy several hundred! Out of curiosity, do you know what the cost ended up being each (if you're willing to share)? Good luck!

The forum / website is a business owned platform. They'd have at least the responsibility to be able to act on reports of bullying / harassment, and in order to do that then they'd need to be able to access "private" messages. It would be a requirement for moderators / staff / senior staff to be able to view those messages, though they shouldn't be allowed to just have poke around and read messages just because they're in the mood, or bored. Anything someone wants to really keep private from outside eyes should be handled via a different platform, preferably encrypted. For what JL_HSTRE said (making sure GS can see the communication or attempts to) then it makes perfect sense to me.

My first TB purchase was four, and I found I was getting way over-invested in their adventures (or lack thereof, as this was jut as the pandemic was kicking off). For me, the best solution was to buy more - each one represents less of an emotional investment, and more TB's mean more updates coming through more often. I'm up to about 23 now. Mind you, I also keep the originals at home and send out proxies of one type or another. So for me half the fun is working out ways to make proxies for less than the cost of a basic TB. And then if (when?) they go missing, I'll create a new proxy and re-send the code out again on a new thingy I've made. I did plan on buying more TB's, but had some unexpected bills. Frustrating because I missed out on the "spend $X get a free TB" deal many geocaching shops offer in December (and they sell out quick in Australia).

Cheers, I downloaded a copy to play with (I'm about to head off to work). Where did you get the sum of all cache types? Those numbers are low for world wide, so I assume they are for your area?

You can also try the TB Rescue Missions on Project-GC. If you haven't heard of Project-GC before, it's a kind of sister site to geocaching.com, with many tools and additional options available. To use it, you'll need to Authenticate your GC account (one click, no emails or other steps). The TB rescue missions are a way of setting up a "challenge" where you put up a message on the map basically saying exactly what you posted here - "I have a TB missing, can someone look for it". Other people can see the missions on the map and go after them if they can. Quite handy for when a TB appears to be stuck and somewhere you can't go visit yourself.

Actually, I was about to try and crunch those numbers myself! You've saved me from my math homework, thanks for sharing with the class. I did think that the variations in numbers meant there was a "set" number of caches to find each month rather than just being arbitrary. It looks like "the plan" is for cachers to log around ten or eleven caches each month to qualify.

I was hunting for one cache, followed the GPS to GZ, looked down and I was almost standing on it! Though this was one of my earlier finds, so I suspect that this was more of a case of dumb luck rather than the wonders of technology!

Yes, it's a little counter intuitive on that front. I suspect the programmer / builder of the site is not a native English speaker, as some of the best GeoCaching stuff comes out of Europe. The button should probably say "Show me filtered Results" or "Execute Query". It's also designed primarily for seeing which caches two players have both or neither found - but as far as I am aware, it's the only tool available to show archived caches on a map. I use it a fair bit and keep forgetting about that when sharing it - my bad.

Easiest way for you to do this is to go look at the Project-GC Map Compare tool (will require Authentication on the Project-GC site for your GC account, it's a one-click process), select "Show disabled and archived caches" and have a look at the area where the cache used to be. As far as I know, every cache that was ever listed on goecaching.com and has been archived should be on there.

Dang. Did you delete the log?

Cattle and sheep get tagged all the time, and a TB tag on one wouldn't look out of place. It's a bit specie-ist to discriminate against tasty pets!

Pretty impressive. I wouldn't have thought of that, which is probably why my found puzzle ratio is so low.

I thought I'd have a crack at GC819T6, though I'm not a big Puzzle cache person. I was able to find the hidden link, which provided an audio file. As the description implies, it's audio of a crying baby. I tried a few methods to check the properties, metadata and a few other methods of hiding information in an audio file (except the python-script ones) but wasn't able to come up with anything meaningful. Looking at the waveforms in an audio program didn't give any patterns that could be used to get a coord such as counting peaks. That's about the limit of my abilities...

Are you using it for figuring out road trips to collect caches along routes, or more off-the-track type maps? If it's mainly streets, I have an app that uses Open Street Map - free mapping worldwide (divided up into areas) which works great for driving from A to B. I haven't tried it for hiking and going along trails but I believe it is a bit rubbish for that. If you aren't doing a round the world mega-trip, you may be better off sourcing hiking / trail / topography maps of the specific areas you want to travel in if that's the case. Though it isn't something I've gone looking for, so I'm not sure where to start looking for something like that.

Are you after an interactive map like Google Maps where you can place markers and people can zoom in, or just an image? For an interactive map, there are a few apps, sites and options within GM to save a list of waypoints and share them, like sharing a list of bookmarks. Here is one way to do this. For a static image, your best bet will be a search engine with additional search options. Using Google, you would run a search for "world map", click on the "Images" tab, click on the "Tools" option and select Size = Large. Then tinker around with the search options (such as Simple or Clipart etc) until you find one you like. If you follow the link to the page the image is hosted on, you should only need to visit a dozen or so to find one that says anybody can use without a fee. You could also draw one yourself if it doesn't need to be too accurate, Photopea is a free online version of Photoshop which is fairly easy to use (you can learn how by watching a few Photoshop tutorial videos on how to draw basic shapes) if you need an image editing program (works best on a pc/laptop rather than a phone).