ju66l3r

Control freaks are attracted to all games. It's the nature of games: people who like a game and want to do well at it prefer it if the rules are clearly dilineated. Here's where it gets interesting though...unlike the 528' argument or something in the guidelines, there is no rule that says "you can't give away the ending to the puzzle"...yet, everyone's acting like it's there and the spoilers are against the rules. If video game makers acted the same way people in here are doing, they'd have a heart attack if they ever saw http://www.gamefaqs.com (run by a big company no less!). There are whole segments of the game industry built around walking people through the hardest games...yet they still make new games!! To hear talk around here, they should close shop and go home..no more video games for you! What about the opposite tactic? Put out more puzzles with even more devious tricks. Make it nigh impossible for a site like that to keep up with the latest puzzles (especially if they're going to continue to require e-mailed submissions) and it is suddenly only good for people who want to do the previous year's hits. It works for the video game industry and everybody wins. Puzzle doers get new puzzles to bend brain over, spoilers get written for yesterday's news and the lazy/greedy get another smilie months late, and puzzle makers get pride in creating more puzzles rather than taking their ball and going home. Heck, put out your own spoilers (similar to snoogans' comments) with even more pizazz than that other site (include pictures and history of the cache, etc)...and you might even get to charge a quarter per booklet sold (ala Cheat Book Manufacturers).

Heh, all additions to the website must be e-mailed to them now. I honestly wouldn't care if people used spoilers or not. It's their loss in my opinion. I put out a fun game, but in the end, it's still just a box in the woods to be found. In the end, you can't easily fight this any better than you can fight someone who signs their friend's name in the book for them "because he woulda been out here if he didn't have to work" or whatever else have you. People who want smilies no matter how they get them will get what they want. It's amazing how many control freaks seem to be attracted to this game.

Loch Cache, you may want to contact Nomad64 about what would be necessary to get a mass listing like this, especially in coordination with the local approver. He was the geocacher that took on the large responsibility of listing all of the North Quabbin Tournament geocaches.

As a Boston geocacher, can I only ask that this not end up adding 30 film canisters to the region's caches. I do *not* want this to be a derailment of your plans or this thread, but as it seems this is in formative stages, it seems the appropriate time to be sure that small (not log-only micros) are used primarily in order to keep up the high quality that I've come to know in the city proper area. The recent North Quabbin Tournament event page should be a good place for you to get a lot of good feedback from participants on what would make this a really good experience (always best to start from the shoulders of giants). There's also a New England forum thread discussing the tournament and methods for improvement (like asking someone involved in the tournament to dry-run the entire set of caches and provide a single page printout of corrections to the book if they need to be made post-production).

brian, he may be a lowly warden, but he changes the situation significantly. Having no say and having no input are two different things. He's a neutral proponent with no vested interest that will argue there is no harm in leaving it. That's a strong testimonial given the situation as it sounds.

Nice work, Bootron. Can this post be stickied?

http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=31...ad-170dcc3b2fd5 It's clearly a sock puppet for someone without the courage to post SBAs from their actual account. Please close it/ban it. Thanks.

Meta-categories would work within this framework by putting them at the top of the page as another path: ----------- Home>>Places>>Buildings>> Home>>Validation Required>> Category: Landlocked Lighthouses Owner: The Leprechauns ----------- Just make the "meta-category" a top-level domain right under "Home" and it'll be a direct path to any number of categories that fit it, as well as their original path through the graph/tree.

Many ontologies are not arborescences (meaning there is a single path from root to every vertex in the tree). As long as the ontology here remains a directed, acyclic graph, I think it will work fine. (N.B. - Directed means only one direction for each edge...aka "X is a Y" in our context. Acyclic means no category can somehow lead back to the same category...aka "Person is a Human is a Person") If I go to a specific category's page, then having a list at the top of all the possible paths through the tree to that vertex is easy to determine and the kind of information that people will be looking for. Example: --------------- Home>>Places>>Theme Parks>>Disney World Home>>Places>>Theme Parks>>Disney Land Home>>Things>>Benchmarks Category: Disney Benchmarks Owner: Wintertime --------------- Of course, in the specific example of Disney Benchmarks, it may be more accurate to use the suggested "See Also:" feature, since Disney Benchmarks are not actually an example of a Disney World, but instead located within a Disney World. So, a modified example would be: --------------- Home>>Places>>Graven Mouse Images Home>>Things>>Benchmarks See Also: Home>>Places>>Theme Parks>>Disney World Home>>Places>>Theme Parks>>Disney Land Category: Disney Benchmarks Owner: Wintertime ----------------

Someone said they have waited a month to get approval of their waypoint. You said geocachers demand approval within 72 hrs of their geocaches on GC.com. How does that follow? What bearing does that fact have on the WM.com approval process? The two processes are run by different figures within them. Maybe it's been too long since we discussed how locationless caches on the old system worked. That's the direct corollary, not GC.com cache review/reviewers (which is done upon submission to Groundspeak through the Geocaching.com review, approval, and publishing system). Except in the old system, it was a negative action that the cache owner (now category manager) had at their disposal to moderate their locationless cache/category. The user could add a log regardless of the cache owner's disposition to that particular log and the owner had to actively remove it to maintain their cache. Pro - The user defaults to having his waymark listed on the site Con - An absentee category owner means a messy/incorrect set of listings The new system of approval (disregarding auto-approve categories from the discussion) requires a positive action from the owner/manager. Pro - The information will be its most correct (with the exception of incompetent managers...which we can't necessarily control, so they reside outside this particular discussion) Con - The user may have long/limitless wait times for absentee owners I think info correctness is more important than every waymark being listed. It's also easier to fix an absent owner (manager teams, replaced owner after contact attempts via Groundspeak, etc) than it is to fix potentially dozens of errant waypoints...AND the situation of a problematic owner shows up quickly for those actively interested in submitting waymarks to that category, as the other methodmay go months without being noticed at all by anyone except some sort of fact checker/waypoint police that see Dogs listed in a Cats category while browsing or waypoint finder who wonders why he found a Dog when he was in the Cat category. However the old way gets discovered, the problem is knowing the last time the category was checked to figure out how many of the waypoints are incorrect. So, I favor a mandatory approval system (and actually am against *any* auto-approval categories)....regardless of how nice it would be if GC.com had the same submitters' attitudes.

Being a volunteer (aka not getting paid) has *nothing* to do with the fact that your service is for the company and your status as a company man. I volunteered at a hospital for years. That whole time I carried a hospital ID and was a representative of the hospital when it came to interacting with the public during my work hours. The fact that I didn't get paid while I was there did nothing to affect that. It also didn't affect my motivation for volunteering (I like to help people and knew that my actions would improve the care patients were receiving)...but those motivations have no applicability to the expectations of my performance as a hospital worker. You perform your actions *for* Groundspeak. You have access to internal sections of their company in order to perform your tasks for them and they have chosen a very select few to perform these roles. The fact that *anyone* can not simply fit your definition of a "geocache reviewer" demonstrates that you are a part of the company. In other words, even if I wanted to "go above and beyond the level of hobby participation and volunteer to review caches submitted by other hobbyists", I can not at GC.com. That makes you a company man whether you like to try and skirt the issue (dropping the "admin" semantics, making posts like this, etc) or not. Then, as a representative of the company, you are tasked to interact with the company's clientele (paying or not). Part of that interaction is to help keep the customer happy. The customers know this and expect that the company will provide them good turn-around on their submissions. For some, they expect too much...and their recourse is to complain. You're working in a customer service position with direct interaction with the customer, it happens. Whether it's reasonable or not isn't the question here...but it *is* to be expected of your position in the company (again, whether they pay you for taking the abuse or not). Waymark category managers just won't receive this same sort of flak. The company has provided the framework only (partial at this point until category-specific forums, etc come on line) and none of the assignment of a role within the company for these managers. Therefore, they're to be seen by the other customers as something more akin to a blogger at blogger.com...nobody's blaiming Google for what a blogger writes or deletes from their blog comments or takes forever to accept from user submissions. Google provides the framework...the bloggers provide the content and if they publish other user comments, the culpability is with a fellow blogger and not with Google. I'm not saying I don't feel you get a raw deal in all of this, but I am saying that you can't draw a direct corollary between how you get treated and how the category managers will get treated (or ask that you should get treated similarly to the category managers) because there is a significant difference in the implementation of the two sites. Particularly what I commented on before when I said that anyone can become a category manager at WM.com....not anyone can become a GC.com cache volunteer guideline reviewer (or whatever semantics you'd like to insert here). One nice thing I could do, as a hospital volunteer, at the end of the day or during a break (except for actually taking my uniform completely off) was to remove my badge and refer any problems to someone actually currently working for the hospital. Maybe GS needs to redirect all e-mail/correspondence directed to your admin accounts to a central Bugzilla-like structure so that someone 'on duty' could answer it or at the minimum ablate any regio-specific problems until you were back 'on duty' (aka "keystone will address your question when he returns or you can contact GS directly at XYZ"). You could also put up a duty roster (I'm not going to e-mail you my diatribe about a 72 hour wait if I know you haven't been on duty for the past 80 hours)...and at the minimum a "Lifeguard on Duty" type 'sign' or "Manager On Duty: Reviewer X" type 'sign'. Of course, if you treat your role as perpetually "on call", you're going to feel like it's 24/7 activity, because it is. But in the end, I will definitely be more likely to give a WM category manager (and/or team) more slack, because the system just isn't setup the same way as GC.com. It means a more lax community atmosphere at WM.com than GC.com which is completely top-down (of which you're unpaid and the lowest part of the "top"...but you're still part of the "top").

I do hope you have caught on at this point to the difference between a company representative and a fellow hobbyist. You wear both hats, but they are at different times. There's no way around that. I wouldn't tolerate UPS to hold my package a month. If my friend said he could drive it to me sometime in the next few weeks, I wouldn't get mad at him as I would UPS. Therefore, your comment is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion. Your choices are to suck it up, restrict and better define your time spent as a company man (maybe even requiring GS to add more volunteer reviewers to handle capacity), or don't choose to be a part of the company. I know most of what you posted wasn't being crabby or anything, it was very light-hearted, but it's also old...and so reading it each time 'review times' are being discussed gets a bit grating. Of course, I have most of the same choices (suck it up, restrict my forum reading, or don't read the forum), but I thought I'd at least make you aware of the fact that it's well known that you're put out by people demanding your time when you're wearing your company hat (and this time you've even chosen to blur the line by complaining about what happens as a company man...but in your hobbyist hat). PS - I tried to send this by PM, but you've chosen not to receive them.

Self-edited for content.

All breweries are not brewpubs. All brewpubs are breweries. Therefore either a parallel category for non-brewpub breweries or an encompassing category for breweries, which brewpubs would be a member of, could be added to the tree.

It's as poor and vague as any other attempted definition, I guess. It still relies on geocaching to apply a definition so it is probably worse. Thank you for proving my point. By the way, you have shifted the terms of your request. Now you require the definition not rely on "geocaching" when before it was "Geocaching.com". When you're done tip-toeing around your preconceived notions, feel free to give us the definition that you continue to measure every other suggestion with, since it's clear that nothing will rise to the gold standard you have setup for yourself.

ju66l3r's definition is definitely a solid one. No it really isn't. It's a drawn out and complicated one which also happens to be weird as it can partly rely on geocaching.com to indicate what a virtual cache is. I'm sorry, I didn't realize you already had the answer in your head, but feigned ignorance in order to trap those responding. Next time, I'll let you play your word games alone. How's this for uncomplicated and unrelying on GC.com: The same thing as a geocache, but not.

I find that I never go after enough caches at any one time to make printing or PQs necessary. I also find that most caches can be boiled down to the important pieces in about a third of a piece of paper (and that's leaving plenty of room for notes and things). I have a notebook that I then add all of my info into, including driving directions, nearest cross-streets, and so on. Anything I need to obtain while caching (like puzzle info, etc) gets short-handed into the notebook as well. I'm only using a yellow Etrex and have become fairly adept at punching in the coords. I also end up using the first 3-5 letters of the cache or most important word in the cache name for the title (instead of the GC#). All told, I use no ink (other than my pen) and no whole sheets of paper (other than what's in the notebook) and rely on the logging features of GC.com to hold all of my records other than the checkmarks in my notebook. I'm a very tech-saavy and gadget-loving guy, but when it comes to geocaching, I find it works best for me when I don't get too plugged in. The only thing I have ended up dealing with, with some difficulty, when caching in this manner is the clues/hints. Rather than copy out the encrypted letters, I either have to decode them before leaving (which can often spoil a good cache depending on the detail/quality of the clues) OR what I've gotten used to doing since having a web-enabled phone is to access the cache page via WAP (and now my Treo will even just go to GC.com) and reading the clues online if I am truly stuck.

They are. Outside of your box. Isn't it great that that both boxes fit in Jeremy's?

I've always been rather partial to mine. (taken from discussions on improving virtual cache guidelines to better explain "Wow!" and "Why your virtual probably won't get accepted")

None of that has to go into your waymark description (the same way GC.com approvers have to know all positions of a multi or the answer to a puzzle prior). As a finder of a virtual cache (which requires proof at GC.com), you've always had to provide it outside the cache page via e-mail. What makes this situation any different? If proof is required for the category manager (and that's not the case in all categories), then a pre-emptive e-mail of the waymark proof would easily do. If you're thinking of this as a locationless situation (most want the proof in log), then as a *virtual* and a locationless log, the image should simply be marked "SPOILER!" when you give it a name. Anyone wishing for a virtual with a mystery won't click the image. The category manager will have their locationless proof. I don't see proof of waymark (ala locationless caching) on the creation of the waymark as being a meaningful way to give away the surprise (ala virtual caching). The site could even be altered to allow the hiding of a proof image similar to "approver seen only notes".

The "surprise" style category need not even be so obvious as being simply called "surprise". In the Category suggestion forum, I generated the idea for a waymark that I think maintains a lot of potential surprise (and it wasn't even what I necessarily designed it for). The idea is to have a waymark that brings you to a position that enables you to take an interesting picture of another waymark on the site. Unless you open someone's photo(s) then you'd never know exactly what is so interesting about the resulting photo/point-of-view that's being suggested. (it could be like taking a picture of Mt Rushmore from underneath...or a picture of the Washington Monument above someone's head like a dunce cap) You won't know until you get there and follow directions. In other words, I think it's all in the presentation here at WM.com. Right now, most of the easiest categories to create and/or fill are very simple. They require you to want to list a monument...or brewpub...or McDonalds...or Octagon Building....or whatever. The entries are very simple descriptions of the locations (this brewpub sells good IPA, but their reds are lacking). Imagine a sculpture waymark that says something like this instead: --------- The Dark Side of the National Cathedral (coords somewhere in DC) From the coords, you'll be searching for a sculpture nearby. This sculpture is located at the northwest corner of the nave, through the double wooden doors of Lincoln Bay (behind the statue of Abraham Lincoln). Go down the ramp, and step into the parking lot. Then, turn around and look back up at the tower closest to you. This is almost impossible to see without the assistance of binoculars. Waaaaay up, almost at the top of the tower is a gablet, or small peaked roof, located between the two huge louvered arches. At the bottom of each slope of this roof is a carved grotesque. Look on the north, or right-hand side. --------- If you also wanted to force validation info on it, you could require a photo of the finder acting like the sculpture they are searching for. Maybe people are just enthralled with the fact that they can finally list everything they always wanted to tell others about and so there's little thought to dressing the waymarks up into a mystery. Maybe it's that most people who think the mystery of virtuals is going to be lost here don't remember all of the virtuals that say "Go see the Lincoln Memorial. Email me the fifth word above his head." Maybe it's just that with so few virtuals being accepted at GC.com for so long now, all the really ingenious mystery creators are really out of practice for lack of wanting to beat their head against the approvers' decisions. I don't think there's anything about WM.com as a website (even *without* a blatant "Boo! Surprise!" category) that forces the mystery gone. There are very few virtuals that don't tell you even the most basic category of what you're going to discover at the coordinates (or puzzled coordinates)...especially since they *required* validation (unlike here necessarily) and that required telling the finder that they would need to find the sculpture/monument/plaque/whatever-have-you to get info for an e-mail to the hider. PS - The answer to the sculpture waymark above is a bust of Darth Vader as a grotesque on the National Cathedral in DC.

Interesting... I think this idea (a header/footer style publishing method) would need an adjustment to more of a blog-style approach (your cache pages are the equivalent of blog entries) rather than the current standalone approach (your cache pages are independent in the DB).

Actually it does do that. If you chose "remember me" on the login page it will do exactly that. From the OP I came to the conclusion that the user did not use the remember me checkbox so this solution wouldn't work for him/her. Ok, great, thanks!

One suggestion would be to continue using the same meet-n-greet cache/page for the 'new' events. Cachers in CT use this method for their monthly meet-n-greet. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...fd-ad183547dacc I'm not certain of all the details that need to get updated (the 'hide date' is updated each month to put it back on the event list/calendar even though the cache # doesn't change). I know they usually have month-specific content for some of the cache details too (like this month's halloween theme). The other issue with having the same page each time is regarding "finds/attended" logs. They have also chosen to have 1 smiley/find/'attended' log per account regardless of how many times someone has attended the monthly event but that would be your own perogative for your group, I guess. Other than those minor issues, it seems to work well for them and would reduce the copy'n'paste as you're looking for.

I doubt 2 months is a very fair assessment of...ok ok, just kidding! Ok, so it's not as was first thought (whew...because that seemed like a sorta foolish scenario...lol). So here's a followup question that I'd be very obliged if you'd answer: If (after not having accessed the database/server/website for 40 minutes) I click on a direct link to query the database (such as direct linking to a specific cache page) after having established a cookie in my browser cache by using the "Remember Me" previously, then a brand new session is created using my cookie'd login information. Right? Couldn't this same thing be used for cache submission? If my login info is available (via cookie), then even if I outlast my session expiry time of 40 minutes on a single page (the submission form page), by clicking "Report New Listing" couldn't the server just give me a new session for the submission rather than toss out my POST'd form and complain about my old session timing out (also removing the need for a relogin)? Thanks and Happy Halloween.