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schmittfamily

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Everything posted by schmittfamily

  1. My thought is ultimately the hides in an area reflect the preferences of the people doing the hides in an area. If there are a couple of hiders in an area that like streaks - there are going to be PNG hides for those cachers to keep streaks going. If there are hiders that like big numbers - there are going to power trails for people to rack up big numbers. If there are hiders who like fizzies - there are going to caches with all the D/T ratings. If there are hiders who like puzzles - there will be puzzle caches. If there are hiders who like travel bugs - there will be secure large travel bug hotels.
  2. When we discover a trackable in a cache not in inventory we do the following: 1. We grab it. 2. Visit the trackable to the cache where we found it to get the location correct with a picture of the trackable For an example, look at TB5CX1X - it's the last page of the logs. https://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=4590944&page=21
  3. I have been thinking a lot about this statement.... I did some digging around through our experience moving trackables. Things like checking trackable owners last log in, direct messages from trackable owners, etc. I am going to go out on a limb here and say less than half of trackable owners ever actually look in on their own trackables. In 2023 we moved 13 trackables - 3 owners sent thank you notes and 4 haven't logged in the last year. The other 6 are a shmoo of likely to unlikely to have looked at the logs based on log ins. This is fairly typical from our experience.
  4. It's really up the the trackable owner to have a valid mission on the trackable page. The owner can update the page at any time so a trackable saying it's in a race that has been expired for years is being ignored by it's owner.
  5. We are currently at 182 finds (23 of those being adventure labs) for the year with 26 favorite points awarded. Those 159 non-lab finds are currently sitting with a combined 8892 favorite points for an average of 55.9 favorite points per cache That is below our overall average of 64.7. I think the top one for the year would have to be Koufonissis 1st We were on a bucket list vacation to Greece and it was probably our best story from the vacation. Also very notable was Water Works It was a fun gadget cache that we didn't have the tools to do. Fortunately we ran into a father and son who were fishing right next to it with the correct supplies and who also happened to be geocachers. We were able to team up and get the cache. The cache also happened to be the cache that gave us enough points for the teamwork souvenir. We also got 3 thank you notes from trackable owners this year which was also kind of nice.
  6. I spent about 15 minutes on google maps and I know where I would look with about 95% confidence I would find it there. So I personally find the puzzle to be pretty reasonable. We have found similar puzzles. GC47068 had the coordinates for a statue and you had to figure out where it was pointing and look there. GC3G1F0 had the coordinates for where a statue used to be, you had to find where it currently resides, draw a line between the two, and follow instructions on where to look. GC48P7G actually had nothing but the CO would answer one question a day until the questions and answers made up the puzzle.
  7. 1 - We definitely prefer travel bugs with a specific mission. If we are going to put in work to move and photograph a trackable, we would prefer it was for someone who has taken some thought into what they would like to see. Then we can try to accommodate those wishes. I would say that trackables with specific goals are better off if those goals are attached to the physical trackable. I would also say thinking that a trackable owner is actually going to look at the logs of their trackable also makes moving a trackable more fun. It is kind of a let down to post a great picture for a trackable and never finding out if the owner ever sees it. 2 - We would say some specific goals probably hurt a trackable's chance of surviving (IE - be left on College Campuses) but for the most part the goal has little affect. 3 - When we have a trip coming up we will actively try to find trackables with goals that align to our trips. We did this in April and May for a trip we took in June. We have also done the opposite - specifically looked for caches because the cache aligns with the goal/theme of a trackable in our possession. 4 - Favorite points are a much bigger factor in making a cache attractive than having a generic trackable in inventory. 5. In March 2020 the two trackables we had at the time ended up kind of sitting in our inventory for awhile. Early in our career we did specifically move a trackable to get miles on it so we could leave it in a challenge cache (you had to leave a trackable with 10,000 miles on it). The owner didn't seem active and it was close enough on mileage we could put it over 10,000. Nowadays, we really do try to follow what the trackable owner seems to indicate that they want. But it be honest - I would say half the trackable we move have been forgotten by their owners.
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. I had this guy waiting for me one time:
  20. Seems like they are requesting people type their log in ALL CAPS.
  21. 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.
  22. 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
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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