chramm

Yes Please! Looking forward to December, I'd love to do Wherigos on my phone. cH

This is certainly how I will organise events in the future.

This makes sense, but nowhere in this specific situation does attending the event require you to register anywhere. In fact, if exclusivity is the issue, then making us hold our award voting without linking from the event page is excluding people from joiing in that extra fun part of the event. UPDATE-- Groundspeak have now asked us to remove 'Will Attend' logs that mention the Facebook Group.

Well I am finished. I have made my point, I see no reason to keep going round in circles so I will stop following this post and just go caching, and keep enjoying the local group I belong to, without being able to share it with others.

Our reviewer said that it was because Facebook is a commercial site. I will ask if she would allow it if the group was open? The sad thing is, when the group was open people came and caused so much trouble the police got involved, so I think we would just lump it! It seems to me that GC.com have just told me to post the comments here because they know there will be so many points of view they will find one that agrees with them. I would prefer that they just say 'No, we have decided not to change it.'

That does not seem to be the case, though. We were allowed to link to our local group when it was a domain that we owned, and you still had to register to access it. The only thing that is different is that it is now hosted by Facebook. I do understand the issues, and I can see why people would be disapprove. We would just like to be inclusive of new people not be exclusive, I am not sure why you are so against that? It is up to Groundspeak what happens on their website. I was just asking...

We are certainly not advocating Facebook being essential to find the cache or attend the event. We would just like to invite people to join our local geocaching group. I have had a much better time geocaching since I was introduced to EMcache, and met many new people as a result. We were allowed to put a link to our group when we had our own domain, and people had to register with that before they could take part so it was no different. This is not stopping us from having the group, or from doing the voting. That is all still happening on the Facebook Group. It just means people are excluded because we cannot tell them where they can join in. Sure some people don't want to sign up to Facebook, I can understand that, but they do not lose anything by us having a link to our group. They wouldn't want to join in anyway. It is those who already have Facebook (the majority) who do not know about what is available to them that misses out.

EMcache is a local group, and we'd like to invite others to join us. That is all. We have decided not to keep paying for a domain name and hosting, and then having to maintain the site oursleves when there is a free service doing just that with Facebook Groups. Our Christmas Event does not in any way require people to vote on the awards, but it is good if they do. The awards promote good geocaching: Best Cache, Best Log, Best Cache Description etc. We want to recognise those cachers in our area who make the game more enjoyable, and say thank you to them. If I were running a football team and the local hockey team were training some of our players I would have no problem in advertising them. We do have it as a Facebook Event too, but only those who are already part of the group will hear about it, and that is then even more exclusive. We are a friendly bunch and we'd like to invite others to join us. We do not want to insist that people have to use Facebook, they don't have to, they can just come to the events. But if we only listed the events on our group site then these other people would never hear about it, so how is that better?

I originally sent an email to GC.com about this, but they have advised posting it here. I am not sure why, but I suppose it is so that others can weigh in and they see the general opinion. We are a local geocaching group based in the East Midlands called EMcache. We have had an online forum, but recently moved onto a Facebook Group, which has meant we don't have to pay for hosting and those without technical ability are able to administer it much more easily. We did not thing this was unreasonable because it is free to sign up to Facebook. This only became a problem when we published our Christmas Event and asked people to go to the Facebook group, giving a link, to vote in our annual Geocaching Awards, the EMmys. The reviewer did not allow the listing with the Facebook group link, even though we had basically copied an pasted the cache description from last year, where we had linked to our other web forum. Further questions and discussion showed that the reviewer was following guidelines, and since Facebook is considered to be a commercial enterprise it cannot be advertised in cache descriptions. This seem unreasonable to me. Firstly, you can sigh in to GC.com with a facebook account and publish your finds on Facebook so there is clearly already a relationship between the two. Secondly, it is not the website we wish to advertise, it is our geocaching group, so that other can come and join us, rather than us being an exclusive group to those who already know about it. Someone suggested that it may be because we are a closed group. This is necessary only so that we can monitor the suitability of the posting, which has have had problems with in the past, and prevent abusive or illegal comments being widespread. The admins (not me) are very quick to accept individual's requests to join. What do others think? Should the guidelines be changed to allow geocaching related groups to be linked to in cache descriptions?