Gill & Tony

Welcome to the game and to the forums. I started with a car GPS and it was terrible for finding caches I now have a Garmin Nuvi for the car, a Garmin hand held for finding caches and a Galaxy S3 doing nothing much. I have cached with the S3 and accuracy was on a par with the hand held, so I'm guessing that the S5 will be at least as good. As others have said, please post DNF logs when you search and can't find as that helps both the cache owner (CO) and other searchers. Please don't log a DNF if you can't search, either because you can't get to GZ or because too many people are there. That can confuse things. If you want to log something like that, just use a Write Note log. (End of my pet rant). Hope you enjoy the game, above all - have fun.

Seems to me it would be even more user friendly to just include an email link right there, instead of saying go someplace else and use that email link. I could have put a normal mail-to: link but that would have forced people to include their email address in the message. I don't know how to include a link to the GC.com e-mail system, so I just pointed it out to them.

Unfortunately, most people will see an envelope with "Message this owner" just to the right of it and assume that's going to send e-mail, not go to "the message centre", especially since after they click on that link, the page it takes them to doesn't say "Message Centre" anywhere. The message on my caches says "Please do not contact us via the "Message Centre: Message This Owner" link above" and gives instructions on how to use the E-Mail link. Whether or not it works,I cannot yet say. I can but try.

Not yet. However, I have changed all my caches, not just EC's, and my profile to include a "Please do not contact us via the message centre" request.

Actually, I get caches over 1,000Km away because they are in NSW, but over 2,000 caches around 120Km away are omitted from the list because they are in the ACT.

The whole "near you" concept is garbage anyway. It gets my state correct, but, because NSW is bigger than Texas, I get caches over 1,000 Km from home. Not near, by any rational definition. Lucky I don't live in Albury, on the Victorian border. Then it would give me NSW caches 1500 Km away, but ignore Victorian ones just a few Km away. Nonsense!

Now if you would add - image attaching button and - automatic GC-code filling, when mail is sent from a cache page this would be perfect AND we could forget the MC Then you could use the resources freed up by dropping the MC to actually implement things your customers have requested.

Ah, Just seen ecanderson's reply - I obviously cross-posted. Thanks for the extra help. It will be renamed asap.

No, it is in the root directory of the SD Card. Thanks for that thought. I've created a Garmin Folder and moved the map there and all works perfectly now. Another silly question... Can we have multiple maps on the SD card? I've got Australia and NZ loaded from OSM but had the world-wide Topographic map included when I bought the E-Trex. It looks as if they are both the same name, so copying one will delete the other, but can they be different names or is that fixed? Is there a guide for beginners somewhere? Thanks again Tony

I've read about OSM maps in various threads here and thought I'd try them out on my E-Trex 30. I downloaded a zip file containing just one file - gmapsupp.img. I've copied this to a brand new SD card in the E-Trex 30, ejected the GPS, started the GPS and nothing looks any different. I then went into setup, found the maps option, found the select maps option, but there are only two listed - "Enabled - Worldwide DEM Basemap NR" and "Enabled - Digital Globe". Nothing that looks like an OSM Map. Obviously I'm doing something wrong. Anyone have any advice? Thanks Tony

As has been stated above, we really don't know exactly why Challenge Caches cause such a load on the appeals process, but I suspect that the following two sections of the guidelines may be major contributors. I believe we could eliminate both these guidelines without problem, provided that: i. the CO be required to prove their own qualification for the challenge AND ii. CO's not be permitted to have more than one Challenge Cache with identical requirements, but would be allowed a series of up to 5 similar Challenge caches provided the challenge requirements for each one in the series are significantly more difficult than the preceding one. We would need to nail down the definition of a series and to quantify "significantly" but these two changes would stop a lot of the perceived problems. Forcing the CO to pre-qualify would stop someone posting a challenge that only they qualify for under a sock puppet account, just to claim the smiley on their own account. Want to make a challenge to find 800 letterboxes whose names begin with "X"? Fine, provided you qualify for it and you realise that you can't claim a smiley for it. That would definitely not appeal to the majority of cachers and almost no-one else would qualify, but does that really matter? Let them publish it and the rest of us can ignore it. Yes, it is wasting real estate but it is just one cache and it is something reviewers no longer have to worry about. They qualify, they can publish - provided it meets the other requirements. I believe it was Keystone who said that he has great difficulty remembering all the Challenge Caches in his area, making the second requirement above a burden. Make the limit apply to just the CO submitting the cache. Is it the same as one of your other challenges? Yes? End of story. Again, the reviewer load is reduced. The reviewer would just look at this CO's Challenge caches and make sure they aren't duplicated. This change would also make it harder (not impossible) to place a power trail of challenges. A series of challenges would be a set of caches with similar challenge requirements, but each being more difficult than the previous. 5 Year, 15 Year and 50 Year Lonely cache challenges; Find a cache at 1000m, 2000m, 5000m altitude; Find 25 earthcaches, find 50, find 100. However, what about find 10,20,50,100,200 caches whose names begin with "X"? Is that the same series as Find 10,20,50,100,200 caches whose names begin with "Y"? The "significantly more difficult" part needs quantifying. As a starting point "The increment cannot be smaller than the value of the easiest requirement and cannot be smaller than the immediately preceding increment". Each of the above examples fit the rule, as would find 1, find 2, find 3, find 4, find 5. However, find 50, find 51, find 52 would be rejected. I think that these two changes would reduce the reviewer burden and would reduce the number of challenge submissions which get sent to appeals. Is this the major cause of appeals? I don't know. But I do think that they would be a step in the right direction.

My similar experience: I created a 2,000Km challenge ( Find two caches on the same date local time more than 2,000Km apart). My reviewer asked for a few changes in wording and it was eventually published. A few months later I flew Sydney to Vancouver and qualified at a bit over 12,000 Km so I created 5,000 and 10,000 Km versions, using exactly the same wording as the first one. They had to be changed since the interpretation of the guidelines had changed. The guidelines were unchanged, just the way they were interpreted had changed. I rewrote all three to fit and they are now published.

I drove from Seattle to Vancouver via Whidbey Island and hosted an event while we had lunch. I was only in the area for a few hours. We met some lovely people.

Would it make sense to restrict a CO from publishing multiple copies of the same challenge? That way the reviewer would only need to check that CO's caches. Couple that with the restriction that a CO must qualify for their own challenge to stop a CO having a sock puppet account to publish each copy. There would need to be allowance for variants on a theme. I have 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 Km challenges which should be OK. However 2,001, 2,002, 2,003 Km challenges should be rejected. Maybe set a 50% threshold?

If I'm allowed to count events, most of my caches are in southern NSW but I held an event on Whidbey Island, between Seattle and Vancouver. That's about 12,000 Km.

The info pops right up on your smartphone, No it doesn't. I don't use one.

Some users have some HTML to add DNF counts to their profile. I wonder whether it would be possible to put a plain white image over the "message user" link, so it is effectively hidden from view.

1. The message centre doesn't work with a lot of android devices. 2. I have absolutely no idea why we have this message system 3. Nothing that a small effort couldn't have fixed - basically give the ability to add an image file. Edit to correct spelling

I agree. The message centre is a complete waste of resources which should be used elsewhere. I believe they should Scrap it, add a bit of functionality to the e-mail scheme and get on with doing all the things which users have actually asked for.

How about sending a notification if the new log differs from the old log by a user-configurable number of characters. So no notification is sent for a minor typo correction but one is sent for a major rewrite.

I see that as the cache owner being bad for the game. Finders have been dropping throwdowns for ages, regardless of cache type and regardless of the need to complete a challenge. If that were my cache I'd have deleted his log - but the situation wouldn't have happened since I'd have sorted the cache out long before. CO's fault, not challenge caches fault.

What he said. The only thing I would add would be to separate the difficulty of the challenge from the difficulty of the cache. But that's optional. Just making it mandatory for the CO to demonstrate that they have completed their own challenge would solve a lot of issues.

Thanks for the advice. I'll gather the info I need then I'll start a conversation with Resort Management. I'll let you know how it pans out, probably in a few weeks.

I'm currently on Daydream Island on the Great Barrier Reef. The island is one of a group which were formed by vulcanism and are not typical coral atolls, which I thought might make a good lesson. However, Daydream is a resort island, it costs money to get here and the best spot for the earthcache is at Lovers Cove, a private beach for resort guests only. There is one traditional cache on the island at a spot accessible to day trippers. I suspect that the earthcache would not be allowed at Lovers Cove, but if I could find a spot accessible to day trippers would that be allowed? Any advice would be appreciated Thanks Tony

We are having a romantic week away, on a tropical island with just one cache. Which will be found on the 2nd. On the 3rd we are spending the entire day travelling home.