dprovan

Sounds like a play on "cycle" and "psycho".

Wow, it never occurred to me that a letterbox owner might object to a geocacher signing their log. I've stumbled onto 3 so far, and I always sign. If there's a usable inkpad, I leave my thumbprint, too.

The reason to give a clear justification in your NA log is exactly because it shows people that you aren't doing it for petty personal reasons. You may think the history speaks for itself, but you are also the first person to declare that that's the case, so it is your responsibility to explain why. Remember, that history was written by people that thought their log didn't tip the balance, else they would have posted the NA themselves. Besides, if it's so obvious, it shouldn't take more than a few words to explain your reasoning. Surely you can take the time for that?

I think everyone's covered the ground pretty well, but I just wanted to mention that these aren't your only two choices. You aren't being a jerk to tell the CO that you have a much better plan for the area and asking them to archive for you. That's done from time to time. You don't say exactly what you said to him, but since you sound like a nice guy, I'm guessing your note to him was along those lines. You haven't gotten an answer yet and may never, but try to keep it friendly in any case. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it if you did something more drastic if you don't hear or he doesn't want to give you the area, since, as has been said, it's within your rights, the cache isn't anything stellar anyway, and you're basically already maintaining it. But, for the same reasons, I'd expect the CO to cooperate with you without you having to do anything unilateral.

FizzyCalc doesn't explicitly solve the problem, that's true, but I use it all the time to trilaterate via successive refined guesses. I use both the distance tool and the projection tool, depending on how the problem is presentated. Not elegant, but it gets the job done.

Ha-ha! Good one! As if geocachers are subtle and hard to spot...

The lack of quality.

Or sell it.

I always liked 10-cent Art Store with its terribly appropriate code GC1D1ME.

The description needs to be on geocaching.com. That's what allows it to be downloaded into GPSrs. (It also avoids depending on the availability of your server.) So focus on how to move what you have over into the geocaching.com description. This will involve copying the correct parts of the HTML from the page you've created and moving any pictures. Alas, depending on what you used to build the page, you might not be able to recreate it exactly as you've created it.

Asking for a hint doesn't strike me as that bad. I ask for and give hints all the time. A lot of people "solve" these simply by asking their friends for the answer. That really defeats the point, although to each his own. To the OP: I definitely know what you mean. I skipped the ones that don't look like puzzles for a long time until I got the real puzzle bug. But the point is that the entire cache description is a puzzle, not just a way to present internally self contained puzzles. So sometimes people make the first step in the puzzle figuring out what the puzzle is. Sometimes this can be a lot of fun, especially when you finally discover the trick or theme and everything comes together. Once in a while, it can be frustrating because the CO hasn't really put enough into the puzzle for people to follow the logic. One great source of information is the logs. First of all, in the rare cases where the logs are negative, you might not want to waste your time. More often the logs will tell you that it's a really fun puzzle worth the extra effort. In addition, previous finders might drop hints to help you get on the right track. The important point is, though, to do what you want. I skip a lot of puzzle caches because they don't appeal to me. Many of those have later seemed more interesting, so I've solved them, but I find it more fun to approach them in my own sweet time.

Oh, OK. No, I don't see that. Yes, I care. On the occasional problematic hide, I post an appropriate log entry. As with anything else I do, I take responsibility for my actions and would never dream of posting the note anonymously. If someone reacts negatively, I try to learn from any mistakes I made in my comments, but otherwise I just move on.

In the private sector, this kind of thing happens all the time. Typically the validity of the claim is not as important as whether enough companies will pay because the legal battle would be more expensive. One thing that makes this more interesting than normal is that -- if I'm following this correctly -- it's literally the British government that's trying to shake everyone down. That's a novel way for a government to increase revenues! Lots of big guns seem to be lined up, so this could be quite fun.

I find this the most illuminating comment so far. And the other side of that coin: in other cases, the original cache could have been no better than a throwdown to begin with. Why replace a cache like that? So whether the throwdown's good enough or not, either way it seems pointless. And I'm not saying that because I'm too lazy to carry around throwdowns so I can get those extra smilies.

Bingo. (Not that I really know the official reason, but if it were up to me, this is what I'd be thinking.)

Naturally it's nicer if it's easy to open. I've never seen anyone rate a cache more difficult just because it's hard to get open -- well, except when that's an intentional part of the cache, of course -- but if you don't mean for it to be difficult, I'd suggest making it clear that it's hard to open and suggest the best way to open it and what tool to use. That gives people a fighting chance of having the right tool on hand, and it also might minimize damage of the type cwgrizz mentions.

Sure. I check all the time. People in your area talk about swag they took? For a while I'd find fun things to put in caches, but I got bored because no one ever mentioned them.

The idea is that the find is sufficient in either case, but it is more desirable to revisit the cache after the CO has performed the maintenance. Hey, I'm just explaining the logic, I'm not insisting you agree to it.

Perhaps to this end, Groundspeak should change the system so that if a cache has an NM icon, then the CO can only post an "Archive", "Disable", or "Owner Maintenance" log. I could see this being applied to other scenarios as well. For instance, if a cache is disabled, only allow "Enable" or "Archive" logs by the CO. OK. Sorry, briansnat. You can have your thread back. I like this, although I'd also include the "Write Note" option for both cases. I don't get it. What are we trying to rule out? It seems like the only things being left out of the proposed allowed options are "Found" and "DNF", as if a CO would use those. Oh, and "Update Coordinates". Oh, wait! Of course, "Update Coordinates" should be allowed, too! So this suggestion seems to come down to, "Don't allow COs to log finds on their caches in need of maintenance." What am I missing?

I am so grateful when I'm caching in an area dominated by another language and the CO provides English in the description. But that's about all I can say about it. I don't provide German in my descriptions, so I can't very well demand that others accommodate me. Multis are the worst, of course. Puzzles are a little better because I'm looking at them in advance where I have translation tools. Traditional caches can be amusing when a forgotten high school German course is used to "translate" the descriptions in the field, and then later we compare our ridiculous ideas of what the cache was about with what comes out of an on-line translator. What a hoot!

It's a relatively simple concept: the further away from home you are, the less likely you'll ever be back at some later point after the required maintenance has been done. I've even used that logic once or twice myself, but it has to be very special circumstances such as a puzzle cache or multi where the final hide location is undeniable yet the cache is clearly missing or damaged beyond being able to sign the log. And I'm prepared for my judgement to be overruled by the CO when I explain it in my log. But I don't think anything short of a CO's request justifies a throwdown and, if anything, to me, the further away from home you are, the less sense a throwdown makes.

A lot of good points made in this thread. Often I feel people overlook the impact of throwdowns on other finders, but that's been brought up nicely here from a few angles. I just wanted to comment on one somewhat tangential point: Then say, "DANGER: DO NOT LEAVE THE DECKING" instead of "There is no need to leave the decking." I can't count the number of times that looking up from below revealed a cache that would be otherwise impossible to see and nearly impossible to find by feel. (I'm sorry to say it, but COs have been known to forget that how much easier it is to slap a cache in an arbitrary spot that cannot be seen than it is to find such a cache with no clue about where it is other than a possibly unreliable GZ or with no idea about how it's attached other than a useless hint like "magnetic".) So I would never dream of taking your remarkably casual tip as a warning trying to specifically tell me that that approach would be both dangerous and useless.

Your concern is touching. Let us know if anything happened to them.

Worse was a cache I looked for that clearly implied it was a sprinkler head, then GZ was on the side of a field that had sprinklers all over the place. So of course everyone looks at them, and when they seem loose -- which, of course, they all do because of all the previous cachers -- they undo them to see if that's perhaps really the cache. Pretty dumb. My second trip, I discovered said sprinkler head was hidden elsewhere on its side, not even planted in the ground looking like a sprinkler head. Not one of my favorites.

At a gate? If so, there's a popular "up side" you might not have discovered yet.