TeamRabbitRun

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.

More than a 'right'; I'd consider it a responsibility.

...and of course, with any pole to be used to reach UP in to a tree, make sure it's non-electrically-conductive. It would be nice to be remembered in these fora after we're gone, but not like that.

The whole 'trackable' thing is a staple at Events. Every one I've been to has a TB table or people showing off collections. That's great, and I'm an enthusiastic participant in all that but I wonder if TB-ing is so integral a part of the hobby that it would be considered an actual form of Geocaching, and therefore you couldn't hold an Event whose stated purpose is to swap & log trackables, as you couldn't hold an Event whose stated purpose is to find and log Caches. Reviewers, lackeys, pooches (some of them, anyway)?

Nuthin' like overkill: https://www.amazon.com/DOCAZOO-Extension-Telescopic-Retrieval-Telescoping/dp/B08159BMJH?th=1

Back before auto-decryption in the app, we had to manually decrypt hints. For you relative newbies, that's why the ROT-13 chart appears on every cache page; if you printed the page to take with you, you decrypted in the field when you got frustrated. For me, it was kinda like a pre-message center 'phone the CO'. Back then, I played around with creating a hint that, when encrypted, also said something in English. The trick was that someone would look at the cache page and see what looks like a valid hint, and not bother to manually do the decryption; just try to apply the apparent (false) hint. Never made it work. I thought about upping the difficulty by one notch if I had, but probably wouldn't have.

Well, that's kinda the POINT, right? "Take me places I never woulda seen..." Congratulations.

What did the guy do with it? Does he still have it? Can he be contacted and educated? Politely asked to go get it and restore the amputated appendage, then put it someplace more appropriate? He's got THREE finds - an excellent opportunity to mold a better player.

Volunteers, my friend, doing us all a favor. I understand the anxiety, but patience and gratitude. Hope it goes smoothly for you, once it gets reviewed.

Isn't that only half the saying?

If you plan to shoot a cache with RAID, DON'T! You may not like the wasps, but think about the people who come behind you, who'll be unknowingly sticking their hand into a cache soaked with insecticide.

Could be either case.

Could be either case.

You didn't get what I was saying - I was describing a case where there's a need to keep people away, as in a safety issue or an angry landowner. In that case, I may very well have not picked it up yet, and in my opinion someone who ignores the archival reason and logs it 'because they're allowed to' is filing what I consider to be an 'inappropriate log', to paraphrase Keystone above.

I completely agree with what you've written. No arguments. But, you haven't addressed the rest of what I wrote. The system sounds great, but just remember that we're dealing with the killer of all plans: PEOPLE. Many, if not most people will not, in general, keep their caches because they don't like the looks of an applicant. If you're looking to get out of the game, then you're looking to get out of the game, quick. If you're moving away and have to ditch your local caches, then you have to ditch your local caches, quick. That's your priority. A CO would most often not be able to evaluate an applicant as most requests would come in from strangers off the list. They could only look at their profile and try to get a sense of them, if they bothered. Many would not bother. You want it? Here. The current methods are less *efficient*, yes, but if someone replies to your note posted on the cache page, at least you know they LOOK AT cache pages. If someone approaches you at an event, at least you know they're involved enough to attend events! There's some status in this hobby to be had as a CO. Mass-marketing adoptions would create a class of mass-adopters. Many of them would be newbies; not that there's anything wrong with the occasional newbie cache. Heck, my one adopted cache was created by a newbie: a six year old Boy Scout Merit Badge cache with 295 finds, 20 DNFs and 22 images in it's gallery! By many standards, a very successful cache. But, I'd sure hate to see seas of foster-caches where the point was the ownership count; an inward-facing goal instead of an intent out toward the rest of the community. Anyway, that's my opinion. As they say in France, your mileage may vary.

Oh, yes; of course, thank you. Glad I didn't get it wrong - that would have sought.

I agree with you. Slippery-slope-wise, I also don't think it'd be very long before there's clamor to have 'lonely' or apparently abandoned caches added to the online list. GS's policies on those caches are clear, today, but there'd be pressure, once such a list is in place. And, even though the CO would have final say, what happens if the CO doesn't know the applicant? What's criteria should the CO use in making a decision? Should there be a requirement that an applicant must first be the owner of their own cache? So, someone would put out a LPC to 'break the list open', then apply for everything in sight. There aren't any requirements on Cache Ownership in regard to a 'find count'; how would you justify a 'pre-ownership' requirement on an objective basis, and not on what I've presented, which is a 'quality vs quantity' argument? And finally, there's the valid point about find-counts and ownership: "I DO own caches under my other account, but I want to hold all my adopted caches under this other Basic account." What does a CO looking to get out of the game do with THAT? Most likely, approve, approve, approve.

If adoption were that easy, where anyone could go look at the list of caches wanting a new parent and grab them, then we'd almost immediately end up with a fast-growing new class of COs. We'd see a ton of 'aggregators'; people who collect caches and have never created one. We'd be flooded by those who have never thought about cache creation, or thought about why a cache should or shouldn't be created here, or what kind of container to use, or what kind of logbook, or what the experience should be, or ANY of the factors that are *supposed* to go into cache ownership. No investment = no ownership = no pride = no maintenance = no community. Now, of course we all complain today about thousands of thoughtless crappy caches placed for absolutely no reason at all except "it needed one", but even these endless LPCs require SOME thought, planning, acquisition, construction and execution. Shouldn't there be a difference between a cacher that's created twenty mystery caches and had them published, and one who owns twenty mystery caches because he looks at the list every day and scarfs up anything that comes up? Respect for the former; something else for the latter. ----------------------------------------------- Now, I'm NOT saying that cache-adopters are bad; on the contrary, it's noble. I'm one myself, but I'm not who I'm talking about. You get that.

The key is the phrase "Inappropriate logs". If, using an example from up above, I archive my cache for safety or landowner issues and someone subsequently logs it, then you betcha I'm gonna get that log removed, either by deleting it or more politely appealing to the finder that the existence of a FIND log on a cache post-archival is an invitation to people - "It's still here!! C'mon and get it!" THAT, in my opinion would be an 'inappropriate log'. ----> gone. People would complain and appeal it to HQ, and I might lose, but those are the people who care more about ONE POINT ON THEIR SCORE OUT OF PROBABLY THOUSANDS than they do about playing the game rationally and collaboratively. I ASKED you to stay away, and you came anyway because the RULES say you can. "*&^$# you; you can't stop me." Doesn't matter that it hurts the game. Or maybe themselves, physically. Or gets the landowner MORE mad. In the fringe event that the finder whines to me convincingly, saying that the cache was pre-loaded on their GPSr so they had no way to KNOW it was archived, weeeell, maybe I'd let it stand, but add a NOTE log stating unequivocally that the cache is NOT to be seeked (what's the past-tense of 'seek'; 'suck'? No, that can't be right.) and THAT would be the most-recent 'Activity', after the find log.

Lots of people are still wearing covid masks in public. Maybe you could, for the picture. Or, combine MNTA's suggestion way up top with 'kidnapper protocol', and take a picture of your caching name written on today's edition of the Chicago Tribune. OR, take a picture of today's Tribune alongside your phone app, clearly logged on to your account!

I just successfully uploaded three through Chrome.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to present my favorite TB Hotel, which just went under a bulldozer in Oneonta, New York. It was a stick-built hut masquerading as a kids' playhouse in the woods with a hidden slidey-wall behind a blackboard with shelves. https://coord.info/GC8192F Check out the gallery. Sorry to see it go.

Have you considered the possibility that she just likes you? That's advice I gave to my kid when he was having problems in middle school with a girl who kept kicking the ^&%$ out of him every time he walked by. He thought about it, and they've now been together for years!

As in, "Dear Groundspeak - You're showing me too much data. Please stop!"?