infiniteMPG

Just curious how you'd determine what other cachers would have preferences similar to one another? Would each cacher have to fill out some survey and add in their fav's? Sounds neat, just curious how this would happen. Sounds a little like GeoMatch.com I like this....!!!! Other then having a bookmark list as your fav's, is there another way of doing this? I think you'd have just as tough a nut to crack trying to come up with a system to find similarities between cachers and getting valid favorites lists. If a cacher just moved to Florida from Minnesota, they might match my tastes in caches 100% but their favorites would be caches thousands of miles away. And if no one in my area with my tastes filled out the survey (or however the data would be collected) then I'd have absolutely no help refining the list of caches I'd want to seek.

I think a full explaination for each would be included with the help pages. Some things like overall rating would be subjective, but specific things like kid friendly could be pretty much defined as you mentioned.

The logs are good but you can't PQ on log's contents and if you're visiting an area and have a day to spare, how long would it take to run thru the logs on the closest 300 caches to figure out what you might want to search for? You might spend the whole day only to find out the ones you really would of liked only had TFTH! listed in the last 20 logs.

If I could stand and applaud in here I would... good statements. We have the FGA in Floirda and there were award winners for each region given last year. I do agree that the cache that won in my area is in my opinion the best. But other areas it was noted, didn't even get enough votes to grant a winner. If you're trying to pick winners on votes outside of the GC website then you get very skewed results (if any). A rating system incorporated INTO the GC site would be great and allow cacher input to the rating of each cache rather then the single source of cache info we have, the owner. Not knocking owners as I are one but what I think and what the first dozen or so finding it think might be night and day, and I would have no problem having the averaged opinion of the masses listed rather then just my own...

One of the problems with this is that the only info you have for difficulty or terrain are what the cache owner thought it should be. An able bodied cacher might look at a trek across rough terrain with lots of footing spots and no need for special gear as a 2 while a couch spud who decided to put down the remote and pick up a GPSr might look at it as a 5. The attributes and ratings we have available have no input but the owner's. We have cached in an area and had similar caches rated massively different because of that single input fact. Having a way that cachers can provide input could help tremendously. Without any cacher's input the sampling is as small as it could get... the owner by themselves. I think anyone who has kids could make a pretty fair assuption if a cache is kid friendly. But how can we ever expect valid data on that from a cache owner who doesn't have kids? Totally open for debate. Kind of funny you bring up muggles, I did maintenace on a stage of a multi yesterday that required 5 miles of rough mountain biking (one way) and while I was there, an SUV comes pulling up. Land maintenance guy... who'd of thunk I'd worry about muggles out there I'd be looking as much for avoiding lame caches as finding great ones. But unless I missed something you can't run a PQ on a bookmark list. That sounds promising... but it's just as vulnerable to the skewing we spoke about. Someone who likes PAG's might put the quickest snags they can do without getting out of their car as their fav's. Several people like that would give those blue ribbons. When I visited the cache page I'd just see a blue ribbon and go "AWARD WINNER!" and hunt it even though I don't care too much for PAG's. Unless I took the time to investigate what other caches are on their list then I wouldn't know anything. And living in Florida we have a big vacationing population so people dropping into the area would have no use from a system that required them to visit some caches before they found something they liked so they could start checking bookmark lists. Gotta start somewhere and if that's easy to impliment it's got my vote! I think cachers would accept a rating system with open arms as everyone would benifit from it. It could be added to the visit page so anyone who wanted to could re-edit some previous logs and rate the caches. Everyone wins!

I would hope that people who rate the caches on their merits for what is being asked. But I think that skewing facet would and does occur with all rating systems but any rating system beats no rating system still...

This thread is still breathing?.... amazing! Anyway, thought I'd drop another 2-cents in the slot. I just did some cache maintenance on some urban caches in the last couple days and part of the problem was the baggies the logs were in were old and not sealing good. So new log sheets and new baggies were installed. But this allowed me to look at the logs, and some of them more then a year old. When the pages got damp the ink blurred out totally making it all but impossible to see who signed it and when. That would be impossible to police unless you did it on a very short and regular basis. Secondly, the ones that were fairly well intact I checked against the pages for chuckles... not a single one unaccounted for as far as I could tell. Of course some people signed out of chronological order, like skipped a page and then others saw it and went back and filled in, some on the backs of pages but the wrong page, some upside down, some all over the place. Just trying to sort it out was very time consuming. If I had to do this in the field I'd of had to of carried a sleeping bag as I'd of been there quite a while. With the fact that policing logs is pretty much an insurmountable task (and impossible if damage or something occurred) it just seems unless something nails a red flag on a 2X4 and slams you in the face with it screaming "I'M FAKE!", you would be hard pressed to keep up with policing even just a couple caches. And there's lots of us out here with hundreds of hides, some of them so far out it would take a whole day to visit it once. I am not saying fake logs are okay or that they may not cause the occasional inconvienience, but saying you want them elimnated completely is like saying we shouldn't let anyone speed on the highways. When a state trooper happens to be at the right place and the right time to catch it happening, he'll do something about it. But trying to put a halt to it across the board would be impossible. Yeah, people speeding are a pain and make driving a little less fun, but I don't see many people avoiding the road or buying personal radar guns because of it. I'd bet pretty much everyone does it and people even buy radar detectors so they can do it without getting caught. Kind of just the way people are. If a fake log comes to light, deal with it. If you feel strong enough about it then police it on your caches. (Does anyone actually DO THAT????). If you were to classify things that 'degrade' GC, fake logs would hardly make it on the list.

Anything beats nothing so even that would work... simple is good, but if you can squeeze a little more out of it, that would be nice, too. I just don't want a system that points to 3 caches out of 3,000 in an area and says "These are Award Winners"... that doesn't help you with the other 2,997 caches...

Agreed. If something is brought up enough then maybe it is worth investigating. I have seen posts about the reward system and although I like the idea, I don't think that would give your average Joe cacher an idea of how to find caches he wants to seek or if a cache on his radar is what he thinks. The review system is used in some form or another for Ebay sellers & buyers, for hotels, restaurants, cameras, TV's, repair shops, parks, trails, GPSr's and just about everything and there's a reason for that. In many cases people would like to hear what other people think of something rather then what the owner/seller/manufacturer says. You get the occasional whiner screaming sour grapes but those review/rating things are everywhere... because they work. I can start another thread Uhhhh, does this mean there's no prize? I was hoping they'd throw that in with my "Stepped On Most Snakes While Staring At GPSr While Hiking" award...

You could also do things like they do for judges in the Olympics, toss out the highest and the lowest and average the rest. I like the thing about not showing a rating until after X amount of entries.

Was thinking about that as I have seen some vendictive actions by some cachers but since a single cacher only has a single say-so, it would be filtered into the mix and diluted. If you had 2 people visit a great cache and it was rated great "5" but one and "1" by the other for spite, the cache would have a rating of "2.5". But if it was truly a great cache and there were 20 people visiting and only that one person rated it a "1" then the cache would have a "4.8" rating. That occasionaly skewed vote would fade into the dust. And just the same as the log entries, once they are entered they are the property of the cache owner and as the guidelines state, if it was out of line and done for spite, the owner can delete it (and the rating along with it). Then you might get owners that delete all logs with negative ratings but you will have some sour apples regardless of how much you plan and they will shake out in the wash. I see the same thing on Ebay with the feedback. Like I had one guy refused to pay for something he bought and then he turned around and left ME negative feedback. All I could do is rebut it but the negative mark sticks. That's a risk you have but all in all it works, just like the feedback system on Ebay.

Many topics have been bounced around the forums about the quality of hides, owner maintenance issues, logging issues, guardrail caches, micros, nanos and preferences as to what people want to seek, and other things that appear could be addressed with the addition of a method for cachers themselves to review or rate the caches they visited. For this example I considered five review topics that a cacher who found a cache could review the cache on : Hide Location, Creativity, Kid Friendly, Listing Accuracy and Overall Experience and all ranked from 1-Poor to 5-Outstanding. If these were added to the log your visit page it could be accomplished with only a few additional mouse clicks. The page might look something like this : Then the main cache listing page would show an average of the rankings that the cachers gave the cache. If someone didn't select a category it wouldn't average in a zero, it just wouldn't include it. This way you wouldn't just have the cache owner's description to decide if this is a cache you'd like to seek. And things like "kid friendly" wouldn't be based on just the owner's interpretation and attribute icon, which is a very important item to the ever growing number of families caching together. These items could be included in the PQ page so someone could search for 100 caches they haven't found, within 50 miles of a certain zip code, that had a creativity average above 3 and a kid friendly average above 4 and where people had an overall experience average above 4. Whatever they wanted. This would accomplish several things, one of which is it would entice a cache owner to try to make his hide as good an experience as possible. Caches that people praise about being great experiences could be searched for just as much as ones that people complain about being lame could be avoided. This might clear out some dead wood, too. The overall quality of hides would improve. People with kids could use that in their searches and make their kid's experience more fun. Obviously the categories to rate a cache are totally open for debate but this would do a lot to make the geocaching experience a better one for newbies as well as the seasoned pros. And when people want to reward a cache for being best in a certain area or whatever, it could be determined from the ratings rather then on a small handful of people who nominate or vote at some separate site somewhere. And since a single cacher only has a single input the occasionally vindictive temper tantrum would get averaged out of the picture. And people could edit this as easily as editing their log so if they made an error or if conditions changed they could change their rating. My 2-cents and I'm sticking to it.

Totally depends on what you're looking for, how long you spent getting there, and the circumstances (in other words each cache is different). We have been swarmed by muggles looking for an urban cache and canned it after 5 minutes. Then again we spent around an hour looking for an ammo can that was towards the middle of an all day hike that had several DNF's and hadn't been found in about half a year. Yeah, we found it, too.... we like those and it was worth every second!

I had a nice black tag on the front of my Jeep with the geocaching logo and www.geocaching.com under the logo. After a while I decided to ditch it as to me, part of the fun of geocaching is to do it kind of 'under cover'. I started to feel that the tag was like someone putting PRIVATE DETECTIVE on their vehicle. I just like being stealthy about things and don't like parking somewhere and having my Jeep yelling "HEY EVERYBODY, I'M GEOCACHING!!! WOO-WOO!!!". On the top of my windshield I have a custom decal with the infinity symbol and MPG under it but I figure if someone knows me from infiniteMPG then they're already cool. Muggles wouldn't understand the meaning.. "You don't burn no gas in dat 4X4?".... hehehe I do have a green bison tube with the geo-logo on it hanging from my mirror but I don't mind the subtle nature of that.

I think there have been some pretty good tweaks offerred up to improve things, but it all boils down to one major point.... What is the official procedure to make suggested updates to the site/game/guidelines/etc? Seems that yakking about it in here is often just that, yakking about it....

I have a cache placed near a pond by a humane society place and made some statements in the cache listing about cachers being able to adopt their new best friend while they were there and got it shot down for advertising. I have found them to be pretty strict on this....

I love it!!! You should make it a rural cache to keep from waking the neighbors... but then again that would be harder for EMT's to get to when the elderly cacher has a heart attack... hehehe One day here I got a call from someone from the state wildlife office. They said there was a nest of some endangered species snake and they found a cache hidden right in it with the snake eggs. They saw my name in it and that is why they were contacting me. Told me it was a serious offense to endanger this nest. I was at work and caught off guard so I explained the cache was there first. They really got after me and after dragging me over the coals for a while identified themselves as one of the local cachers who's been fighting for FTF's on my new caches. Was funny... after I knew who it was it was funny... but I had planned, but never did, a cache that was going to be in some remote swampy area (i.e. gator and snake country), and fill a container with those spring loaded snakes (from the old peanut can prank) as I knew he would probably be the FTF on it. Never got around to doing it and he's been inactive for a while (a new baby) but he's been talking about getting back into it. So it's still on my game plan....

We have a stage of a multi like that and it's been well received. As well as some that are fake squirells hanging on the side of a tree staring down at you and other various critters. Found one that was a big bug on a beam under a deck and you had to poke your head up close and personal to find it.... those are always fun finds Go for it!!!!

Hiking stick in right hand twarting spider webs, GPS in left hand to enter data with right. But belt clip more comfortable on right side so right hand for a quick coord/direction check. Still looking for GPS mount to go on top of hiking stick so I don't step on resting snakes again... focus! ::sigh::

Guess I am a little lost on the "awards".... could a cacher visit say 20 caches and if he thought they were all great he could award all of them? Or would an "award" be something granted by collecting a certain number of "votes" or something? Just don't get the configuration.... if an urban cache was located near a busy airport it might get 100 visits and if 10% of the people liked it then it would have 10 "votes". If a rural cache takes a day to do and everyone visiting it thought it was great, but only 5 people have tackled the challenge it could only have 5 "votes". If you looked at the two then the airport urban cache would "look" like a better cache when it really wasn't.

Have yet to see a cache that would get archived for too many visits.... I don't even think if you offerred free beer at a cache it would get enough traffic for that to happen unless it was already in an envronmentally too sensitive area to start with.

Hmmm, maybe it's the size or shape of the fingers that's the problem... but even people that borrow mine for a few minutes complain of it.

Attributes are good but they are also subjective to the owner's opinion. Better use of the attributes and a review or rating system would clean things up a lot.

There are awards from FGA for best caches in each of several areas of Florida. Okay, one cache won in each area. So now how does that help anyone searching the other thousands of caches? It doesn't. And I think there is as much to be gained by giving bad reviews to bad caches as there is rewarding great ones. If everyone got rated or reviewed on every cache, then everyone would be inclined to make every cache good, not just the people who would be inclined to make their caches the BEST. If someone didn't care about trying to beat out the other 10,000 caches in their area they wouldn't change a thing they're doing to try to win and no one would know it's a lame cache until they found it.

I agree that it needs to be made the most helpful it can be, but awards only give kudos to a select few. Doesn't give any help to people trying to rule out lame hides or cr@ppy locations or unique camo jobs or whatever they want to search by.... I would opt for some review/rating system that's applied to all caches.