schmittfamily

I feel like when we have found two containers at a cache site it's been due to a replacement by the cache owner who thought their original cache was missing more often than it has been a throw down by another cacher.

My experience is when there gets to be more than 5 trackables in a cache it tends to not go well for the trackables.

I take as many as I feel I can do a good job. That means movement that meets the goal, pictures of each at interesting places, and that I won't dump all of them in one cache. In general caching for us that is 1 or 2. Any more than that and it gets hard to place them. On trips we will go up to 5 or 6. That depends on how much caching we plan to do, what types of caches we are planning on doing, and what bugs we come across. My general experience is once there gets to be ~5 travel bugs in a cache, it tends to not go well for the majority of the bugs.

It can be a big deal. We came across a trackable in Vancouver that was owned by a family in Germany. The goal of the trackable was to get to Vancouver in time for the owner to pick it up on a trip which happened to be the next month. Us taking it 1800 miles away would completely blow the mission so we left it. The next cacher picked it up and left it in Chile. Another time we moved a trackable trying to get Switzerland in time for the cache owner to pick it up on vacation. That one actually made it there about a year in advance. Then it got moved to Ireland and missed the owner despite having the goal as a the trackable name. Another time we picked up a bug that was trying to get into the hands of 5 specific video blogging geocachers. We researched the cachers in questions and placed it in a cache owned by one of the cachers that was a tribute to another one of the cachers on the list. The video blogger picked the bug up live on periscope for the bug owner because fortunately the cacher that found the cache between us and the video blogger read about the bug and didn't take it.

I always read the goal before picking up a bug. If nothing else to check it's goal isn't to get to the cache it is sitting in (that has happened). Generally if I know I can really hit a goal in a near time frame, I hold it. That means the trip is already booked and less than ~3 months in the future. Especially if the goal is very specific. For example - on Memorial Day of 2017 we picked up a bug wanting pictures with Reindeer and other horned animals. We had an Alaskan vacation planned at the end of July. That seemed like an obvious case to stretch the hold time out. I ended up getting a picture of it with all 8 of Santa's Reindeer at Santa Claus's house and a shot of it with a wild Caribou at ~10 ft away in Denali before leaving it at the Anchorage zoo. On the other hand, in October 2016 we had a bug wanting to get to specific caches in British Columbia. We placed that one right away because the Alaska trip was still a concept rather than a booked trip and further out. We did log one of the caches on that Alaska trip so we could have hit it's goal. As it turns out that trackable almost beat us to the area. It got jumped to Seattle and picked up for a cruise to Anchorage then it jumped to Hawaii. Right now it is in the United Kingdom.

There is a lot of room for improvement on the trackable webpages. Right now all you get are total number of logs, total number of pictures, and miles. Information if you wanted you would need to compile: 1. Number of cachers to move the bug 2. Number of cachers to discover the bug 3. Types of caches the bug has visited 4. Which state/countries a bug has visited 5. Number of logs per cacher 6. Time each cacher has held the bug 7. Time spent in caches 8. D/T of the caches visited 9. Longest stretch without a log 10. Most logs in a day/week/month/year 11. Most mileage in a day/week/month/year 12. Number of pictures from each cacher 13. Total number of favorite points of caches the bug has visited 14. Total number of favorite points of caches the bug has been in etc. Even the map page is missing a lot of information that would be nice. For instance right now you point at a number on the map and get the name of the cache. It would be nice if you could click the name and scroll to the log. Also it would be nice if the ones with pictures or logs of 10+ words were color coded differently. It would also be nice if the log on a travel bug and the log of the cacher on the cache were linked. That way you could click through and read any information there if you wanted to.

GC5Q44G is furthest South in the Continental United States. GC786HF in Hawaii is the furthest south in a US state. But that ignores US controlled territory.... GC5B2YT in the American Samoa appears to be the furthest South in a US controlled territory East/West gets a little cloudy depending on your break point - I am going to use the Prime Meridian. East is in the Virgin Islands - I think GCH9ZX on St. Croix is the furthest East. West is on Guam - I think GC3XWKD has the furthest west posted coordinates. It is an unknown cache so GC1MHF9 may or may not be further west.

If you really wanted to place a high number of stages multi along a highway I know a way to do it without the maintenance headaches. Basically you start with a number of waypoints that point to signs along the highway. These would be signs placed by the DOT that aren't likely to change very often (mile markers, distance to exits, etc). Also they would be signs you read without slowing down. Then you use those numbers to calculate more waypoints along the route to get more numbers. Eventually you end up with the numbers to plug in to get a final cache location. It would be fairly straight forward to be build in redundancy and/or error checking into that system. If we saw a cache like that in an area we were traveling we would attempt it.

Generally what I have seen is people create their own tag. Usually it is a piece of laminated paper. If you really want a more robust tag.... a crazy shot in the dark suggestion would be a local High School robotics team may have the tools. We recently moved a bug from a team out of Michigan that had cut their own tag (TB7VRAW) that looked really professional. If you are in Indiana there are some strong teams there. For example, 4926 out of Columbus Indiana might have access to an etcher or access to a 3D printer. After that they just grab the travelbug and go with it.

We have had very little luck with our released travel bugs over the years. We started one at Santa Claus's house at the North Pole last year with the goal to get back to a local cache - that one made it home in 43 days. Otherwise it's been pretty spotty and we just clear 25,000 miles between all of them combined. Of the bugs we have moved, 3 that are in the wild are now over 100,000 miles. The highest I have seen (and believed) was over 2.2 million miles.

We have a trip coming up this weekend so I manually tried your filters against the list we came up with for the weekend. One of the caches on our list is a webcam cache with 180+ favorite points. It would have been filtered out by this list because the owner appears to be a reviewer and has disabled/archived a few of their caches with their reviewer account. Another two are a pair of traditional caches at the same exit along the highway with 110+ and 260+ favorite points. They would have been filtered because the owner hasn't been on since March. In that time they have one cache with a NM due to the trackable inventory being wrong and another NM from a cacher with 1 find saying a cache was too hard. We have a few clumps of challenge caches on this list. They also would be filtered because of a couple NM logs on unrelated caches from 2015 after a flood hit the area. A couple unknowns would have been filtered because the cache owner has a habit of letting their event caches get archived by Groundspeak HQ.

So back on cache quality.... One question I have is what do cachers do now to select which caches they search for? I consider us to be pretty selective cachers - we definitely have smileys intermixed with unfound caches all over our map. We use cache type, favorite points, cache description, and recent logs as our filters when deciding what to look for. I am not sure I would use an "Owner Score" as a filter. I don't see how an algorithm attaching a score to an owner would say more about the quality of a particular cache than the current tools we have.

I was going to search a hollow stump one time, I took a peek first and saw this: Glad I didn't stick my hand in first.

That thread is returned to owner, not returned to circulation. We picked up a travel bug in October of 2011 that had been last logged January of 2006 (70 months). It was listed as being in someone's hands and we found it in a cache. That would be longest break we have seen on a trackable. That TB bounced around until 7/2014 before being picked up and disappearing.

One time back in the early 2000s I was playing softball when we had a thunderstorm blow in. The rain just opened up for 10 minutes and swamped the field. Even though the sun came out they called the games. As I was packing my stuff up, a bolt of lightning comes out of the sun and hits the scoreboard. Easily the closest I have been to lightning strike - at least while outside. Fast forward 10 years and someone has a puzzle cache named "When Lightning Strikes" at pretty much the exact coordinates I was standing at when that happened.

I have posted on this already - I have a print out of this cache from July 10, 2014 at 11:15 AM. The OP was flat out wrong on this point. The requirements in the description were in place when the OP logged this cache. The CO changed the name of cache after the OP logged the cache to highlight the requirement but the requirement itself was clear in the description. (Edit - the cache name change was on a few month later time frame after the OP's log. I don't want to give the impression that it was directly because of the OP's log).

As someone who has visited that cache page a number of times over the years.... It seemed like the CO had something going on from about July of 2015 to March of 2016. Outside of those 9 months they have been fairly ruthless in policing the webcam and pictures from that spot only. Not sure why logs from that timeframe stood for two years but my guess is someone recent pointed them out after their log got whacked. One of the reasons I have visited the cache page is I always kind of respected the CO for actually enforcing the requirements. There is a webcam in Seattle that can face two directions. The requirement for that one is the camera needs to face South - the North view is basically the highway and you only be a dot on the overpass 0.25 mile away. About a third of the logs are the North view. Lackeys will even log it using the North view. We specifically booked a hotel near that webcam and ended up walking to it in the rain to get the right direction - so seeing logs saying "that's my car on the highway" is kind of annoying.

Just to follow up on my previous post.... When we go on vacation I bring a hard copy of the cache page for caches that I think we are going to look for - especially for Virtuals/EarthCaches/Multis/Webcams/Unknowns. I went through my box of print outs last night and found my hard copy of this cache printed 7/10/2014 at 11:15am. Not a single word of the description has changed between now and then. The name did change (my best guess is May of 2016) and the best spot photo changed to account for the camera angle change (in 2014 it was the webcam photo from "TheDeverills" log on 6/21/2013), but absolutely none of the text in the description changed nor did the picture with the X on where to stand.

We logged this cache back in July 2014. That big picture with the X was on the listing at that time. I remember when researching the cache back then that it was quite clear to me that a log with a picture from elsewhere was going to get deleted. That's why all three of us had both feet in the square for our picture (our niece who was with us did not). After logging that cache, I didn't put it on watch but I visit that cache page fairly often. Over the past 3.5 years of looking at the page I would say 10%-20% of the logs get deleted due to no picture, only posting selfies, or pictures from across the road. Most fairly quickly so my percentage is a guesstimate. It was around Christmas of 2014 the camera angle changed to not really have much sidewalk on the camera side of the road (between the logs of Il Boss and Spirit-of-Floymo). The name of the cache changed late 2015 or early 2016 - I am guessing in response to a jump in logs with pictures from the other side of the road due to the camera angle shift. To say the requirements changed or that this owner hasn't been enforcing the requirements is simply not true.

To answer the original question - we had a challenge cache publish in January that we knew would be difficult (checker has an 87 rating). The reviewer at the time told us we had to provide a list of local cachers that qualified. Their comment was they usually ask for 10 but would let us get by with 5 due to the difficulty. I had done the research before placing the cache to make sure it wasn't an insane challenge, so I did provide a list of 10 on principle although some on the list were not really local.

I always use the trackable tab on the profile page so that is what I was referencing. I actually never noticed that feature on the dashboard page until this thread. It looks like they may have removed the listing of moved/discovered trackables on the new dashboard. The dashboard page is not as useful because that only lets you look at you. If I wanted to go check out another users trackable movement habits I would have to use the profile page.

I would like to make myself clear on my main point. My opinion is right now the only incentives to post good trackable logs in line with the trackable owners goal is: 1. The occasional thank you note 2. Because a person wants to I would like to see Groundspeak add some better incentives because my opinion is those two incentives are not sufficient as evidenced by the many lost trackables.

The thought was it would be a way to get people to post quality trackable logs. Ask yourself - why is the last trackable picture you posted all the way back in 2014?

My theory is the reason so many trackables go missing, get mislogged, etc is because Groundspeak is providing no incentives for people to treat trackables with any respect. Literally the only stat that appears on any geocachers profile is a total of the trackables that that person has logged. Discovering a trackable counts the same as completing a trackable's mission with a series of interesting stories and pictures. The page where you can get a single list of every trackable you own isn't even attached to your trackable page. Forget about trying to sort your trackables by latest activity or miles. A couple years ago Groundspeak did a poll about what type of pictures people post to their gallery and pictures of trackables wasn't even an option on the poll - that is how little they think of them. The only two incentives I see for people to move trackables is the occasional thank you note from a trackable owner and their own interest in trackables. The reality is the only real motivation to log trackables correctly is to not get hassled. Until Groundspeak gets their act together and adds some incentives and usable trackable features (*see below list) - trackables will continue to be treated badly. Suggestions for some trackable features: 1. Ability to list your own trackables on one table with the option to sort by: recent activity, distance traveled, and current distance from home (based on last log location). Maybe the same option for trackables that you have moved/discovered. 2. Allow users to favorite trackable logs. 3. A trackable section on the statistic page in the user profile. Possible statistics to track: trackables moved, trackables discovered, average move distance, average time held, favorite points, percentage of logs with pictures or 50+ words, percentage of logs with steps >10 miles, etc. Basically statistics that would reward good behavior. 4. It would be nice if there was a way to translate trackable activity into a number that represents how much that activity contributed towards the trackable's goal. That way you could sort your own trackables by how well they are doing towards their goal. Also that could be tracked on each person's profile.

I need to vent about something the universe does that seems so unfair.... We always try to do trackable missions as stated as well as possible. With so many trackables owned by people who are following their trackables go missing - it just seems so cosmically unfair that when we really hit on what a trackable wants that the owner has gone missing. For example, we recently had a trackable that wanted its picture taken with reindeer. We posted this picture from Denali National Park: 10 feet from a wild Caribou - in focus and in frame. The trackable owner hasn't been on the site since January or logged a cache since 2014 and probably will never see it. At least I hope the person watching the trackable enjoys the picture.