schmittfamily

We have done a multi-cache that was exactly like the description in the original post. It was GC406DK (since archived due to owner moving and it was on their property). The first 4 stages were all trackable tags physically mounted to objects around the property and the fifth was the container. You had to load up the trackable page and look at the capital letters in the trackable description to get the next object to look for. Each trackable had one digit for the lock at the final in it's description. The trackables involved were tb5kd8m, tb5kd9k, tb5kd8g, tb5kd8b if you want to look. It was an enjoyable cache for us to do.

The best way to favorite point someone moving your trackable is to send them a thank you note for moving your trackable. That said, there are times when we really feel like we helped a trackable out and wished we could get the log more exposure. So here they are.... Some of my personal favorite trackable logs: 1. This trackable is owned by a 5th grade class in Nebraska and wanted to go to Paris. https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=9692aace-458f-40cd-ba21-07248809eff0 2. This trackable wanted to see reindeer and get pictures with Christmas trees: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=742cf677-9e1b-41c2-b185-67f1f1d757dd https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=7f79d74d-a4e6-41c1-80cc-12aa1af76103 3. This trackable wanted to visit cows: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=663a0cc8-8091-450f-997d-300120d188e6 4. This trackable was owned by a kid in Florida that wanted to visit every state: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=31f2eaa6-82df-433b-abd4-b5dc8d044ea1 5. This trackable wanted to go to see plays https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=b2d3e2b8-79b1-45b4-92ed-1cb275137d89 6. This trackable wanted to see hospitals and places associated with first aid: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=499a2913-b178-49fa-8454-ce7a813dbf1b 7. This trackable was in a race and one of the points to get to was Seattle: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=46c25308-589d-43e0-ad3b-e0caf33bbac5 8. This trackable wanted to go to sporting events: https://www.geocaching.com/track/log.aspx?LUID=29b44055-81ad-48e7-b619-b0cbe9f70e09

My first thought would be the whole point to having a family account and separate individual accounts is for the family account to be the superset of the individual ones. That is actually interesting for a family to track. Maintaining a family account to be a subset of the individual members finds doesn't seem interesting to track. I wouldn't recommend creating a bunch of accounts to track subsets or supersets of finds though as there are landmines in the "Terms of Use" agreement. To the OP. It's not really a surprise that your friend had a their personal account suspended when they wrote in to appeal the family account being suspended. The "Terms of Use" agreement says suspensions apply to the person who owns the account and they can not access the services through other accounts while suspended. Writing in on one account you own to appeal a suspension for another account you own is just asking to get that account suspended as well.

We did a multi (now archived) that used trackables as the waypoints: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC406DK_the-proposal Basically there was a trackable physically mounted at the posted coordinates. You had to access the trackable page. The goal of the trackable would be part of a combination to the final. The trackable description told a story with the next landmark to search around being encoded in the text. At the next landmark there would be another trackable physically mounted and so on until you hit the final container. Once you got to the final container you had to put together the combination from the goals to open the padlock. We thought it was a pretty fun cache to do. The cache didn't last very long but I got the impression that had little to do with the set up.

Two functions I haven't seen in the thread that I would really like to have: 1. Numbering of the ordering. I like to look at how many caches we have found with 100 or more favorite points - it's impossible to count the wall of text. I would consider being able to easily see which find is the 100th furthest from home to be an interesting new feature. 2. When ordering on a metric to maintain the previous ordering for ties. For instance if I order by difficulty it would be nice if the 5 difficulty caches maintained the ordering based on the previous ordering rather than whatever tie breaker it is using now.

I don't like the new format either but if you map the geocaches you can get a bunch of sorting options. One of those is by date logged (new to old or old to new). It's all your finds of caches that are active rather than recent finds though. The distance (far to near) sort gives some weird results.

I don't agree with BarefootJeff that a challenge hide should reflect the challenge but you are making a trade off with where you placed your cache. The climber challenge cache example given here is placed smack dab in the middle of a park that is perfect for new cachers. All the nearby traditionals appear to be found multiple times a week by new geocachers when the weather is nice. If you place a D5 challenge cache in a place that new geocachers flock to you can't really be surprised that some of them act like new geocachers. We love challenge caches and commonly work towards them - but one of the complaints about challenge caches is that COs monopolize prime geocache areas with difficult challenges. I would say getting a bunch of invalid newbie logs is feedback that you may be doing that.

It's not like we haven't deleted logs in the past. But it's not a big secret that if we find 25+ caches from a CO and they find 2 of ours that they have more leverage in a log deletion exchange.

I get the theory but in practice I don't think that is much of a concern as it requires a CO to delete a log to end the streak. There is no way I would do that to someone remotely local to me because it's not worth the fallout that would occur. Anyone maintaining a long streak generally has a significant number of hides, has caching friends, and cares about their streak. Even if 100% justified - deleting a log in that scenario is a poor battle to pick for the CO.

On a local forum a few years ago there was a thread about a cacher finding a dead body roughly 5ft from a cache. The newspaper article said it was an apparent suicide and the person had been missing for 6 weeks. The previous found it log on the cache was 3 weeks prior to the discovery. It wasn't our cache but logs not mentioning the dead body 5 feet away would draw my suspicion.

All found it logs aren't created equal. Being somewhat familiar with the recent loggers of the cache in question I would feel very comfortable that the cache was there just by looking at who did the logs. That isn't true of all cachers in the area.

I had this guy waiting for me one time:

Seems like they are requesting people type their log in ALL CAPS.

This seems backwards to me. I view a hide as successful if the person that hid it gets enjoyment out of it. We have a hide with 0 favorite points after 73 finds, but it was the puzzle and hide my daughter did when she was 13. That's her cache, she has an attachment to it, she gets enjoyment when people find it, and it's her favorite hide. Is it worthy of favorite points? Probably not but that's not really the point of the hide.

If you can create a webcam that is webhosted - it really shouldn't be that hard to add some vision processing to determine if there is a face or person on the camera. Then you could have the final coordinates appear on the picture or website only when someone is on. I haven't tried it but this tutorial seems pretty close: https://www.hackster.io/hackershack/smart-security-camera-90d7bd

I did notice at least one of the new virtual reward caches that had the logging requirement to capture a picture of yourself on the webcam at the location.

I expect attributes to be accurate - not necessary useful but at least accurate. It doesn't bug me when someone tacks on an obvious attribute - like "No Snowmobiles" for a library cache. It is true. The one that bothers me is the "dogs allowed" attribute. If a cache says "dogs allowed", it better be in a location that you can and would want to bring your dog. I see that attribute slapped on caches in a sea of 3 foot high grass or in parks with no dogs allowed signs posted.

There are some Earthcaches that are in locations that cruise ships frequent with the intention of being done from a cruise ship. For example we did GC1510R while aboard a cruise ship on a sea day. But that is pretty cruise dependent.

I tried the update and the app still crashed. I then tried deleting and reinstalling the app and it seems to working.

I am having the same issue. Version 8.13.1 of the geocaching app just crashes upon opening

For entertainment, I created a simulator that models the loss of travel bugs assuming that each time a travel bug is dropped off it has the same chance of going missing. I would say your data implies that the going rate in North America is about 1 out of 5 travel bugs go missing every time they are dropped off. The data is a little more limited for Europe but it looks like about 1 out of 8 travel bugs go missing every time they are dropped off.

I always considered geocaching to be the cheap way to plan a trip. We pick a place to go and make a list of all the tourist caches. Then we figure out the cheapest way to get to the most of those that we can. We get to see a bunch of sites and keep busy with the minimum cost.

We have gotten >10 discoveries in 24 hours on our personal trackable that has never been photographed, shown to anyone, or put into the wild. If Groundspeak is providing an interface that allows for multiple people to mass discover trackables then in my opinion it is on Groundspeak to provide a solution to stopping it. It would seem like providing the trackable owner a setting to accept discoveries or limit the discoveries to X a day would be a fairly straightforward solution. Or adding a "Are you human" test when logging a discovered log.

You should always look before reaching in a hole. I had this guy waiting for me one time:

I suspect the search would be easiest using this approach: 1. determine a list of "layover caches" 2. see if each finder has >1 find in that geography If you are reduced to a manual search, my guess is a sampling of 10 or so of those caches and 10 or so finders for each one may yield a reasonable estimate.