Ink Spots

I've released only three, but all are "in the hands of" someone for 8 months or more now. One is a cacher with two finds and no recent activity; that one's surely a goner. The other two might resurface - what the accepted practice around sending the holder a message (politely of course) saying basically hey, do you still have this guy somewhere, or should I mark it missing?

If it were mine, I might not mind, depending on the details... but I would like to be asked first.

Ciphers vary greatly - I glanced at the one on this cache (which does not look like a cache I would start with, nor probably try anytime soon, cool though it appears to be) and I don't recognize it offhand, which is not surprising. Solving ciphers is a science (and to some extent an art) unto itself. The most basic ciphers are simple substitution ciphers, like the "rot13" cipher used to encode additional hints. (That one is even easier than most because it's a constant shift.) Even if it's not a standard shift down the alphabet, a substitution cipher just replaces one character with another; a = 7, b = g, w = +, etc. They are fairly easy to solve by looking at things like letter frequency and knowing that "e" is the most common letter in English, "th" and "io" often appear together, "ss" and "oo" are common double letters, and so on. The longer the encoded text, the easier this is to do. At the other end of the spectrum are ciphers you might see that start with "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----". If you can solve that, a lot of mathematicians and computer scientists (and probably some government people) will want to talk to you. :-) This is rather beyond the realm of "puzzle" though. In general, there is a process for transforming the original text into the cipher text. The trick is to deduce what that is, and reverse it. Clues may often be found in various aspects of the cipher text, especially in puzzle caches where the goal isn't really to make it impossible to solve (which *is* the goal in full-strength encryption).

I didn't mean to imply it was, really; I just wanted to get a sense for what the community feeling was. Personally, I'm inclined to log more rather than less, and I'd started off assuming that was pretty much a given. I started wondering though after seeing logs about finding something on the nth try, but where the previous tries (obviously DNFs) hadn't been logged. When I get around to planting a cache one of these days I will certainly be interested in what happens to it, either way. Thanks!

Thanks - intuitively I'm inclined to agree; I started wondering when reading logs on some caches where I would see finds with notes like "this took three tries but we finally got it" or something like that, but tries 1 and 2 didn't have logs to match. I'm sure it's an individual thing to some extent, but was just wondering what was considered best practice. Thanks!

Hi all, I'm relatively new to this so far, and so - understandably - I find myself unable to find many of the more clever hides I look for. (I probably miss a fair number of obvious ones too.) The question is, at what point should one log a "did not find" entry? On one hand, if I'm very pressed for time and have only 3 minutes to look once I find GZ before I have to leave, that's probably not a legitimate "DNF" log. If I have a reasonable amount of time to look though, I'm inclined to go ahead and post an entry, even though I have no reason to think there's any problem with the cache and it's just me missing it. (I don't have any real interest in keeping a found/DNF ratio high for its own sake.) What would cache owners like, and what's the norm (if there is one)? Would you like to know I was there, even if I didn't make much of a search, or would you rather have less clutter in the log?