TeamRabbitRun

Yes, I agree of course it is, but 'ten yards' or 'ten meters' is the often-quoted MOE for civilian GPS, post Big-Blue-Switch Day.

Well, your reply isn't at all responsive to what I wrote. I was simply pointing out that with the accepted MOE, two cachers could serendipitously and legitimately be 60' apart at the same coordinates.

Really? Stretch? or do you mean scale up or down to match the nearest aspect, then have borders?

2 x the standard, accepted margin of error for an adequate GPS 'lock' of ten meters = just over 60 feet. 30 feet for the hider, and an unlikely coincidental antipodal 'seeker' error of 30 feet (to stretch a term).

I have caches where I don't really care (or at least I'm very tolerant of spoilers, and a bunch of them with disclaimers that say something like "Spoiler logs or photos will be deleted, and you'll be enthusiastically invited to come back and re-log without the spoilers." Then, I DO IT. I could send them a message and wait for them to fix it, but if it takes two weeks for them to get to it, then that's two weeks of people reading my crafted puzzles, along with some knucklehead's specific instructions. Nope. Too often, cachers, especially newer cachers seem to have the attitude that it's 'us against them', and they want to 'help future seekers'. They're not helping. As long as my cache descriptions have the warning, I don't feel bad about deleting the log. I send my notes to them in the Message Center and email, if they have an email address.

Want a headache? Consider fonts from other languages.

No, no - don't misunderstand me - my impression so far is that you're up to exactly what we're all about!!! You just have to be careful to keep it ONLY about the fun! Keep going!

This message 'thread' that we're in now is called 'Introduce Yourself'. It's meant for all new people coming into this online message forum. You ALSO started a new 'thread' (forum topic) which is dedicated to you called 'would like to do this on our texas route 66'. Use THAT one for followups, otherwise we'll all be mixed in with a zillion other non-related.posts.

Work with your local Reviewer to see how far you could go to 'Promote your Association'. It's a very short trip from 'promoting a group' to 'advocating for a cause'. They'll guide you. To find your local reviewer, go to the cache page of any RECENTLY placed cache in your neck of the woods. Look for a 'PUBLISHED' log way at the bottom, and send that person a message to start the conversation. Good luck! Come back (probably to the other dedicated thread) and let us know how it goes! In the meantime, as I said, go hunting!

Kitty - Please see my response to your original post over in the 'Introduce Yourself' thread.

Hi, Kitty! Very familiar with the difference between Route 66 & I-40. I applaud your efforts. Many non-profits like yours have a presence in GeoCaching. The most important thing you'd need to know is the 'non-agenda' clause of our guidelines. One of the basic, fundamental requirements for a geocache placement is that it NOT espouse any 'agenda', cause, business interest or particular point of view in any way. This is a VERY restrictive requirement, by design. Some call it too harsh, but the point is to keep geocaching as a completely recreational endeavor with NO commercial, political, religious, social or charity influence. Doesn't matter how popular a cause it is; NO advocacy. Basically, you could, as you say, place caches along the road (subject to landmanager permissions) to provide an enhanced experience for your travelers and you could even provide local historical information in the cache descriptions, but what you CANNOT do is promote your organization, or solicit donations or memberships or advertise for businesses along R66 or encourage anyone to do such business. So, you might be able to say, "Stop in this town and have lunch on your way through," but you COULDN'T say "Stop at Joe's and have lunch on your way through." You might be able to put a note at the bottom of your cache description that says that it was placed by the "Texas Route 66 Association", but even going as far as listing your website would be up to your Volunteer Reviewer, who approves all cache writeups before publishing. Their job is to consider the specifics of your situation and cache writeup. You said in your post that you'd do this for FUN for your travelers. That's great, but this would be one activity that your org does ONLY for fun, and not for any other purpose. Read the Guidelines section of the website. Also, go find caches. The more you yourself find (of different types), the better your placements will be.

(It would be really, really funny if, after a few people chimed in on this thread, for NiraD to delete it!)

K - If you lock it to a dogtag as you suggest, then you're creating yet ANOTHER new-fangled thingamabob: "Eternal Trackable TravelBuddies". The Lock would be a TB with a tracking code, and the DOGTAG would be a TB with its own tracking code! Find it? Log 'em both! They'd have to travel together. INseperable. Awww, that's cute. "What a TO has put together, let no man put asunder." I'd get a kick out of finding it, er, 'them'. Man, I could carry this joke on for a while, but I'll spare y'all. -------------------------- PS - If this actually becomes a thing, then I want credit for the concept. And a piece of the sales revenue. You're all witnesses.

Here's what always bugged me about webcams. You read a cache description which tells you to go to a specific place and strike a pose or something. In early ones when webcam websites presented mostly live feeds, you had to coordinate with someone on a computer to be looking at the webpage, grab a screenshot of you standing there and submit it. That's fun! Later, when the feeds were logged, you could do it yourself by accessing the right time-spot in the logged feed. That's the basic 'webcam'. What always bugged me was that there was no requirement that you 'find' anything. Even Virtuals (in their classic form) require you to locate something and prove you were there by answering a question about it. As an example I'll use the one that used to be across the street from the Alamo, because I was excited about nailing it on my first visit to San Antonio, Texas, but I learned when I got there that the camera was down that week. Boo-hoo. About a decade ago, and I didn't file a DNF on that one, but I sure wish I had, now. I knew exactly where I had to stand in the plaza in front of the Mission building because there were a bunch of previous logs with good, appropriate pics of people standing in exactly the right spot. And I think the spot was described on the cache page. So, no GPS use required, no hunting, no finding. OK, it's a 'fringe' cache type, a gimmick inserted into the hobby at best. Fun!, as long as the exception doesn't become the rule. Please don't come back at me about how you don't really need a GPS for most caches because your brother-in-law only caches with printouts from Google Maps. Or the 'hunt' is finding your image in the streaming log. Yeah, yeah. So I stood there on that spot in the plaza, knowing that the feed was down, trying to spot the camera. I knew from the angle on the logged photos that it must be on one of those two buildings, with lots of 19th century scrolly detail on the second floor so it was hard to pick out, and I never did. I even walked over to the buildings and looked. Maybe 'down' meant 'gone'. Maybe 'down' meant 'physically out for repair'. I think I determined at that point that I would only claim a find on a webcam cache if I could find the camera. I just checked; I have no webcam finds. ------------------------------------- So, to bring this back to the OP's point (and justify my musings in this thread), should they come back? I don't think so. I find MOST new cachers with whom I interact, for a lot of reasons that have been debated here in lots of threads are pretty thoughtless in their caching. The rules (even those that ARE rules, not just guidelines) are routinely ignored either willfully or through ignorance. Consider the entire "I put one here because there was a big enough space" thing. People are people and new webcam caches would just be claimed with selfies more often than not. Webcams are a pretty high-minded concept in terms of where they fit into geocaching (and where they don't), and personally, as much as I like that concept, I think it's too much of a stretch for today's GeoCaching.

Ummm, I don't think so. I could be wrong, but I think 'unactivated' means exactly that. Can't be interacted with by cachers until it's 'activated', so a finder would have to know how to activate it, THEN grab it from the cache online. Few would, so they'd end up as couch-cushion fodder. In the meantime, someone would go looking for them because they're listed as being in the cache, and want to report them as missing, but to whom? Not activated = no owner. True Kaos. Nice idea, but missed it by THAT much.

With or without the 'K'?

Part of the point of blocking is so that the person blocked gets no info from the system about the blocker. In some scenarios, explicitly telling an aggressive person that another person has blocked them could make a situation worse,

Fizzy, I don't disagree with you, but perhaps we're standing on the opposite sides of the same sentence. To me, if I visit my cache and I notice that a listed TB isn't there, I'll mark it as missing as an act of maintenance on my cache, not on the TB. I want my cache's public face to be accurate. The fact that I've also in effect performed maintenance on someone else's TB by simply untethering it from a location I don't consider 'keeping track of someone else's stuff'. Unintended effect. Just happens, no charge.

SOUNDS LIKE this particular ebayer is a mensch. If they end up in a cache as he states, be sure to express our appreciation.

I only own a handful of caches, but several of them are classed as 'Mysteries'. This is an interesting question because 'M' caches are the catch-all. Might be field puzzles, homework puzzles, or anything else that doesn't fit into one of the other categories, so it's entirely likely that any single cacher would have wildly distinct opinions of each of the 'sub-types'. Maybe you hate sitting at home at a computer reading Wikipedia entries or looking up what Spock said in some episode, but you LOVE looking at historical markers and turning the year of the Jonestown Flood into a vector! Tough to describe. For me, I like most sub-species of Mystery Caches. I get very bored with yet another effing guardrail cache, LPCs drive me nutz and my personal nemesis is a 'Bison Tube in a Pine Tree'. I really like caches where you have to do stuff when you get there, or prepare ahead of time (if I know where I'm going and have time to plan). If I can't make a find today, I LIKE being frustrated because I don't have time or enough information and have to go back when I can. A better feeling of accomplishment when I finally snag it. It's apparent from my find count that my Team Cap'n & I aren't 'numbers cachers' at all, and we ain't playin' Pokemon. Interesting, wacky hides? Strange virtual requirements? Bring 'em on.

MUCH better than my non-solution.

It is absolutely a terrible idea to change your home location for the purposes of this inquiry, run your search, save your results and reset your home location to your home location.

Jayeffel - It was just a heads-up on these two issues and a suggestion that a Reviewer check your plans first because of them. I really hope you get it worked out. And, of course, I love auto-correct, too. ...Bill

Jay - A couple of points: Mermaid.Man's point about the potential for this to be considered an 'agenda cache' is valid. Your counterpoint that you wouldn't be requiring finders to join or do anything other than sign the log is wrong. If that's your initial virtual stage, you'd be requiring your finders to go to an installation created and owned by a charitable organization and read their stuff (to get info for the next stage). Most likely a non-starter. If it's your final stage, same problem, PLUS, even if it were to be accepted by a Reviewer you'd need explicit permission from the Lion's Club for people to come mess with their display without dropping old eyeglasses or whatever you're normally supposed to do there. You say your final will be about 20 feet outside of the 528 foot exclusion zone of another cache. Be careful with that; you're well within the margin of error for civilian-grade GPS devices. Did you grab those coords with your phone, a GPS or a map image? All it takes is for your device, whatever it was to be off in one direction and the Reviewer's calculation could cause him or her to bark at you. You said that you were going to get the 'cache holder assembled and placed.' Either of the two factors I mentioned would give me pause, and I encourage you to check with your local Reviewer on both before you do anything. It just could be that both the spirit and reasons for the 528' limitation apply in this case.

Your problem could also lie with your phone carrier. We use ATT, and a few months ago we had problems with application notifications being delayed, sometimes for days and sometimes 'never'. GC Message Center? Never got notifications. That created problems for me, as people would send me HELP requests from the field and I couldn't get back to them until later, when I got the message, by which time they were g-o-n-e and not likely to return to my cache. That's bad. There were definitely problems with the GC app, AND GMail, stuff coming from another email provider, and several others. The I-net was abuzz with the problem, and it cleared itself up eventually (or more likely, ATT 'fixed' something.) Check around with other people you know who use the same cell carrier, and if it IS an issue, you and your friends hassle them. Good luck.