ju66l3r

Since there was an arrangement between Buxley and GC.com, both parties may be equally aware (or even unaware) that there is an issue with the maps not showing GC.com caches. While asking Buxley is one possibility, asking GC.com is another. Both are valid, or is this just a game of "Mod-pile on the Rabbit"?

Didn't think that was rude. Sorry. "Bump"...always seems so pushy. Next time I'll try "Did this post get missed?"

<listens to more incessant hold music>

Hi, Jeremy. My TB had a log posted recently that had an incriminating photo (that innocently included the TB tag #). My options were encrypt or delete the entire log. As encrypt didn't alter the photo in any way, I had to delete their log. Fortunately, it was a note that they left in order to add the photo to the TB page (as I ask them to do as part of my TB's goals). But what I'm asking for (and I think I've seen mention of in the past as a suggestion from others) is the owner's ability to delete a photo seperate from deleting the entire log entry. There was nothing offensive in their log but the photo had to go (and who knows how long it would take them to edit the photo themselves or even respond to my request...so I can't risk having a few dozen people get my TB# from the picture before it finally gets edited by the log creator). So, can owners get a button to delete images attached to logs as a seperate option when viewing a log entry directly (right next to Permanently Encrypt and Delete Log)?

S.O.P. I know some people would never ever ever do it and may even rail against it, but the overwhelming majority of cache hiders will visit their own cache to retrieve trade items/trackables without even blinking an eye. Just don't ever log it as a find....

Glad to see it worked out. I have a TB that's been travelling for almost 3 years now. At one point, it made it into the hands of someone who was relatively new at geocaching and they said it would get dropped off in England when their relative went home from a vacation here in the US. I thought that would be cool and waited...and waited... But it never moved. A few e-mails were sent to nudge them along or at least inform me that the TB was lost/dead, but nothing. So, I tried one last e-mail before giving up and I got a reply. The bug had evidently been left by the relative in the infrequently used guest bedroom and forgotten. Months after the day they had taken it, they were kind enough to get out and place my TB back into circulation. It then bounced around a bit before randomly finding its way to my geocaching father (without any suggestive prodding or anything from either of us). Pretty amazing trip it's been for this TB. So, yes, it seems that sometimes things happen to TBs and they just disappear without further word..but sometimes, yes, sometimes, they find their way back around again.

Forum connection problems...."new posts", "search", & rss feeds currently disabled to reduce connection load. EDIT: RSS just allowed to return but on double secret probation...

If I don't act out every now and then, they'll cancel my Tin Foil Society membership.

Whatever the potential internal computational reasons for changing it to a link, it will certainly do its job at killing sites like Grand_High_Pobah who don't download enough pages currently to set off the bells-n-whistles of the anti-server-scraper bot, but ignore the TOS rule against scraping the pages for info. As soon as they have to hit everyone's profile to get the info instead of a few dozen or so cache pages with that same info, they'll be done for. Can't wait for that day in the forums. Gratz, Jeremy! Another minor site, catering to a sub-population of cachers by doing what you refuse to provide, bites the dust! I imagine your desk as having a series of Signal Head stickers, like a college football helmet or fighter plane nose section, for each little site you swat by altering the site UI for more obfuscation...do you make the gunnery sounds too when you update the code?

If you read the logs, the puzzle provides information helpful for the original location of the cache. But then that hiding spot was damaged by Mother Nature, so the owner moved the container to a new spot. Rather than re-doing the puzzle, the owner asked for finders to e-mail the answer to the puzzle in order to receive the coordinates for the new location. So, that was all added after the review process, if I'm reading the history correctly. (Note: I did not attempt to solve the puzzle.) Yes, you actually read and interpreted what happened accurately. The Cow seemed to have skimmed over and did not fully understand the history before mooing about whims. Well then, your cache should have been archived a while ago then from the sounds of it. You can't alter the location post-approval by doing an end-around on the process with e-mails of the correct coordinates. If that were the case, then why don't I go hide a "Not Buried at the RR Tracks" cache in a nearby park and then wait a while to move it to a hole 6 ft under the rails...you know, cuz the original good spot was compromised. Then I could have people e-mail me the original puzzle coordinates to send them to the RR tracks to dig. Sorry your cache had problems, but you should feel lucky it's lasted as long as it has given your lack of attention for the site guidelines here. Seriously, pack it up, archive it, put out a new one...but realize that the only exacting control you have over the activity of cachers seeking your cache is to place it or not.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I don't know what you're talking about.

This is not a browser-dependent issue. Most likely, when you are seeing one browser work and another not (even on the same computer) is a session-dependent thing. If you create a session prior to a problem that brings the forums to its knees, then your cached session most likely needs to be reset to a new session post-problem for the forum software to seem okay again. When you check with another browser, it's most likely that the problem has passed, the forums are fine, and you start a new session. Enough new sessions doing enough accessing/searching/whatever simultaneously and the forum software chokes...dumps those sessions and tries to right itself to start again. The old session needs to be dumped and it's between the time of the actual forum problem and your previous browser getting synced up with the re-righted forum software that makes it seem that one browser is bad while the other is good. This is all just a guess based on my experiences with the forum problem and Jeremy's comments at the end of page1 in this thread. Of course, if there's a problem with connections and open sessions being too great along with searching the entire forum DB at the same time...then when a problem occurs, if it doesn't do enough to shake some users off to do other things on the web, then everyone refreshing their session to get back to using the forums is just gonna send it into a tailspin again. Thus the need for a fix hopefully from the updates (as J said he was looking into) or maybe even just dumping some of the old forum posts into a repository somehow.

I think you should pack it in, quit the sport, take your caches, and go home. If you do choose to stay, any future hides you make should be on pavement. That will solve all of your dilemmas and allow other people to hide caches in your area. Hopefully these new people will bring more realistic expectations for how a few hundred other people might choose to find their caches. Of course, I'm all about improving the sport and not about coddling you when a cacher's log rubs you the wrong way...so take my suggestions with a grain of salt since you came here for a back-patting rah-rah session instead of good advice.

I just wanted to chime in by saying that it's funny because people would rail on about Virtual TBs all the time...but until someone defaced the site owner's wife's TB by turning it into a virtual, suddenly it's a hot-button issue for the site. To balance that "nanny-nanny-boo-boo" childish remark, let me offer a solution: My TB has been in the wild for nearly 3 years and has passed around in the most traditional manner (for full disclosure: i've only deleted 2 logs very recently from 'lay-over' caches where the bug didn't actually change cacher hands and that's out of personal preference for how I want the distance calculated). If my bug went virtual on me, like a stage I cancer cell, I'd probably kill it myself before it got out of hand. I think that's the solution here. Add an option to the TB Options menu for "Disable this TB" and allow the cacher to kill the ability for that number to be logged. The only worry would be a rampant abuse of the TBs by a concerted effort to make every TB a virtual one in order to get them all disabled. This would be little different than the other storms geocaching has weathered like local cache hoodlums and pirates and so on. None of them have many lasting ill effects on the game today....as fizzy points out, it's still growing exponentially. So, there's your answer. Just like a person can disable/archive their own cache, a TB owner should be given the option to ultimately squash their TB page if need be.

Go to this page: http://www.geocaching.com/track/search.aspx In the Keyword Search box, type: % (it is a 'wildcard' character or "anything that fits" and by itself will return ALL TBs) Then in the results page, click once on the box next to Distance to sort by Distance Travelled. You will then have to go down the list reading the titles and descriptions of the TBs to determine if it fits your definition of a non-virtual TB or if you agree with how it obtained all of its miles. I think you'll probably need to jump a few pages in to pass all of the virtual TBs out there now. Anything in the six-digit mileage is likely to be a virtual, racked up mileage from going to a "graveyard" before the creation of "unknown location", or personal TB that logs the distances for a specific user and is not a more "traditional" TB, or odd jumps from the use of a replacement tag or multiple tags for the same tracking number. My TB is a few months from its 3-year anniversary and has a mileage around 16,400 miles (not that mine is average, since it ended up on someone's shelf for about 6 months unknowingly before getting back into circulation again). But that even includes a trip to Hawaii and back and a few trips up and down the East Coast. I used to have one of the longest-lived, furthest distance "Traditional" TBs, but I'm sure it's been passed now. * (Traditional was a term I came up with a while ago for the pattern of TB travel that goes owner->cache->cacher->different cache->different cacher->etc...It excludes mileage due to multiple hops by the same cacher and direct hand-offs between cachers and any virtual activity).

Okay, don't worry. I had assumed things were not stagnant, of course. But it's good to hear on the progress. I imagine there will be any number of things that the first rollout for group management either won't or can't take into account. Thanks for the update.

Just wondering how the programming of features sets like creating new categories and managing them is going. The site may need a major "relaunch" party of some sort once it's fully-operational (yes, I know it's 'beta' and it hasn't had a 'launch' yet...but today's world of beta is yesterday's world of 1.0). I know my interest has waned since there are different things that I want to list that don't have an appropriate category yet...and different categories I'd be interested in creating, but don't have a method yet. Any word, bootron? Jeremy?

OOOOO You're right about that. The best "outing" was I know who the pirates are by Jeremy. No WAY. The best outing by far was the "I know you're MadMarty, Jomarac5...come clean and you can continue to use my site". Especially since MadMarty was tlc.

Already fixed as far as I can tell.

If the question were "Who has the most finds, I must worship at their altar", then it's a matter of status. I wonder who has the most in my area occasionally. It's more of a trivia or "because we keep track" thing than a status symbol. In fact, in most of those threads you use as example, someone invariably says "well, they have the most, but it's a team..." or "i wouldn't give them a smilie, but it doesn't matter if you do...". And the original poster says something like "yeah, true, just curious" or "just wondering what other people do, I know it doesn't matter really". In fact, the only people who use those threads to defend the "status" provided by smilies are the same people that I think worry too much about whether their puzzle has spoilers available on the web. Then again, maybe the forum provides the right kind of place/atmosphere for self-selecting the type of person that gets set-off by issues like this...and in turn, they also ask questions like "how can I see who's pedestal is the highest". I bet more users are like Metaphor or myself in thinking it petty that you'd deprive us (via archival) of trying out an interesting puzzle that you created just because you're hoping to preserve some derived "status" of exclusivity that comes with putting out a puzzle cache and safeguarding the smilies from users of spoilers the only way you can be absolutely certain. Security through obscurity has never been failsafe.

Vinny&Sue (and anyone else of like mind), you might just want to let these people light their torches and ramble around without any real aim or ability to do anything and not get in their way. While dialogue is usually useful, even if it doesn't enlighten anyone to one point of view or another, it appears that this conversation is like spitting into the wind. One view is based on a "who cares" attitude while the other is fueled by an ire that can't be quelched. There will be puzzle people who will rail at the sky because they've been forced to realize that their best laid plans of men with mice (surfing the internet) have gone awry. They'll weep for the status lost of people who complete their puzzles (yet, those people won't even know it's happening as they remember the puzzles they've done). They'll decry those that would skip the puzzle to have the solution (yet, those people won't even care it's happening as they bypass the puzzles they've not done). Suddenly, the cache log isn't the exclusivity bible and it angers the puzzle makers. Too bad the people who truly enjoy the puzzles and couldn't care less about others and their actions won't be able to complete the puzzles that end up archived in a selfish attempt to define what it means to be 'exclusive'.

Oh no, she's a witch... Burn her!

I dunno, but without trying very hard to search around much, it appears that there are about 9000+ puzzles claimed to be listed in the database and probably no more than 20-40 have what even comes close to a full solution.

Of course. Those cheat sites help the sale of the videos and that's money! Are we in it for the money? No, so there goes your analogy. I create puzzle caches to give a person a challenge. How about this analogy: You have a 5-star cache. I will carry anyone to the cache. They can snooze or watch a video on their iPod, while I do all the work. We get to the cache, they sign the log. I carry them back. Was that your intent when you created the cache? No. You wanted to offer a challenge to the people to find your cache. That's why it's an analogy and not an identity. So according to you, their money is equivalent to what? Your satisfaction? I hope you know that most people aren't finding geocaches just to boost the satisfaction of the hider...just like people don't spend money on video games because of some desire to feed the video game makers. People play games for the fun they get out of it...same as geocache finders find geocaches for the fun they get out of it. If some people get their fun by doing what the book tells them, so be it. It's the "control freak" aspect of requiring each finder's experience to be some pattern you've derived in your head ("yes, yes, they'll do stage 1 then stage 2...and on to the final stage!") that has most of you mixed up. Get your satisfaction from putting out a good puzzle and knowing that some people will really get a kick out of doing it "your way" rather than from the continual flow of every single finder. If someone wants to be carried to the top of a mountain to find a 5-star terrain cache, more power to them (maybe more importantly the person carrying them). If someone figures out how to parachute to the location and avoid the entire hike completely, more power to them too. Hey, if they just happen to live next door and can use their private access road to drive to the top, even better. What do I care how they got there, since there are plenty of people having fun hiking there too? Besides, I'm too busy figuring out my next satisfaction-deriving 5-star terrain cache to care about the guy(s) being rickshawed to the top of a mountain I put a cache on months ago. Why would you let someone else's actions ruin your good time (especially since in this game you make your own good times!)? That's the crazy part.