trippy1976

I agree completely. I think the main tenets are good. Overthinking will probably result in something less perfect than what is already there. There's about a million do's and don'ts in geocaching and in any given situation one will override the others, etc. This list serves as a great statement of "this is what we generally hold to be ethical behavior in geocaching" without dictating and without having to build a flowchart of Is there a barbed wire fence? --> NO --> Proceed | | V Yes | V etc Clear, concise, and hard to argue against. "I think protecting the integrity of the gamepiece is WRONG!" lol. Would love to be there when someone says that at an event Anyway. Looks done to me. The minutia discussion could run into eternity.

Would be happy to make a place for it on Geommunity and provide CR with the means to maintain it there if requested.

I thought your sudden absence from this thread and purchase of a new FTF Mobile added up to being too busy with your new Geo-girl to check in DRAT!

1. In MI caches do not get archived just because their owner has gone dark. Unless there is an issue with the cache, we think it's better to keep it out there and keep people going to it. If it becomes an issue, people generally try to reach the owner or make good use of the Should Be Archived button. Action gets taken by a reviewer to archive it. If the cache is clearly missing, it's not added to our rescue list but otherwise it is (if not apparent danger/legalities appear to exist by doing so). Owner inactivity is not a consideration. 2. So long as the cache is in good shape, it's best to leave it active and on everyone's collective radar. 3. We encourage people to repair and re-place it under their own account if possible and if the owner cannot be reached. Recycle it. If the owner wants it back we encourage people to return it if there is anything left. 9 times out of 10 there is nothing but garbage or the container's totally missing. Every now and again someone will find a good ammo can. 4. I don't know if anyone is going to sign up to babysit every listing service out there, but if a cache is in poor shape and needs to be archived here - it needs to be there also. This also relates to the previous comments about guidelines between various listings. Just because soemthing can't be listed here doesn't mean it's not listed somewhere else and therefore out there. You can only do so much. In the case of wrecked caches - it'll be caught as wrecked or missing by users of the alternate listing service and reproted eventually. 5. As part of our rescue mission we require that to get credit for the rescue. It helps the owner, gc.com and the reviewers understand what eventually happened and serves as documentation that it's been removed and is not litter. I once heard a quote from a Supreme Court justice on the topic of "indecency". When asked if they could define it they said, "I'm not sure if I can define it but I know it when I see it." I completely understood what they meant (I may be paraphrasing there, but it's the essence) and think the same can be said about ethics and this code. Everyone will know if someone is flying in the face of ethics, with or without this code. The community will, let's hope, apply appropriate peer pressure to ensure that the unethical behavior is not encouraged with or without this code. The code is more of a"marketing tool" in my mind. A clear, accepted statement of the ethics we all know that a geocacher generally holds. Now that something is there, acceptance is key. I don't know if the delving into minutia is a process for brainstorming, but when it comes to community acceptance, I think there's some dangerous ground being tread on in the minutia. It could be interpreted by many as dictation. Things like "Don't place..." sound like directives. Anyway, the comment near the first post states Which leads me to wonder if that's just a way to encourage brainstorming on the short, concise text or what? And if so, at what point will it be accepted that the code of ethics itself is "done".

The order of the list should not be an assignment of priority. All these points are equally important. This will not, ultimately, dictate to a cacher how they MUST act but indicate how geocachers in general act. This should not be used as a license by anyone to dictate to others how they must participate. i.e. "You should have asked permission to put a cache there. You violated the code of ethics, I denounce you and have taken your cache." etc. I look at the bulleted list and I see copy I really can support. I'm not interested, to be honest, in the minutia. The outdoor code is a long code with much supporting documents, but I have always remembered it and taught it as "Leave the outdoors better than you left it." This sums up ALL the other documents relating to it. I'd rather see the code get nailed down and then let everyone who wants make their own supporting documents or whatever. I think to noodle on it much further would result in something less perfect as a result of over-thinking. edit: still learning to talk... apparently

I can't point you to a specific reference in the guidelines, but they are reviewed for content and linkage during the review process.

You would find support from a local organization, I'm sure. MiGO is in the beginning stages of planning a charity thing. We will, of course, not make it an event cache to post here but hopefully through word of mouth and letting our members know, we'll get enough interest to make the results worthwhile. I can understand the hard line on including charities in event listings though. The KKK post really does sum it up.

PMing about the shirt order. They are still available though. The first anniversary is coming up in March. Still think I'll try to swing a "Get A Life Day" celebration meet and greet thing locally. The clip is in the news piece on the MiGO site: http://www.mi-geocaching.org/modules.php?n...rder=0&thold=-1 Should still be up, but the link may be dead. We never got any kind of response about this and although I continued to call for a while, they continued to blow me off. It's still infamous here and every now and then someone will show up with a t-shirt at an event with a home-made iron on of the newscaster with a no smoking type circle over it. We have more fun with it these days than angry feelings about it.

On the topic of trading, "Be considerate of others" already encapsulates trading fairly.

I really like this. I'll apologize in advance for not wading through all the posts, but has there been any discussion of when this particular piece (the actual code) will be considered nailed down? And where after that it will be "kept"? It would be very good if everyone adopted and evangelized the exact same version of the code. The blowout text is another subject, but this is a very clear, very concise statement of the values I think geocachers actually represent. It's a great idea who's time has come. Thanks for starting this CR. A code of ethics should be just like this one. Clear and very concise. There are a lot of details associated with the concepts like "Protect the integrity of the gamepiece" but a statement of ethics is not the place to put the detail. It's not meant to be the bible for geocaching to teach you all you need to know.

what's the sunrise desktop?

Joe, PM or email me the coin # and passkey. I mis-labeled 5 of the coins, I caught all but two I think before shipping - maybe yours is one of those.

Yes, well - a $35 event fee for a group of 100+ people converging on a location in a day is one thing. Requiring an individual to pay a $35 event fee for placing a box in the woods is another thing. Trying to prevent 9 groups of 100 coming to a park in a given day is probably justified. Applying the same overcrowding logic to geocachers does not make a lot of sense. A single cache gets 60-100 visits per year I would guess. That's 1 visitor every 3 days. Having an event for geocaching in the park is well within the event permit arena as it WILL draw a significant number of people to the park at the same time. I doubt the DNR can even say for sure if the permit fees from geocaching are significant. If asked to guess, I'd say they are probably sorely dissappointed by the result. I know they lost $20 from me last year and will lose it again in 2005. I won't pay for a permit to the state parks while this policy is in place. I had a cache in a state park. So they are down $5 on me. I wouldn't pay the $35 fee and I won't pay a dime to use their parks while they require geocachers to pay to play. I would encourage others to do the same and to make their complaints known to the DNR as appropriate in polite letters. Polite. I know most of the people involved in this policy are not decision makers so I'm not about to take anything out on local officers or rangers. They don't deserve it, they do their job and do it well. We need to work with the policy makers to see what their concerns are and to help work on an alternate means for addressing them. I think we can find a better solution for everyone. We're organizing our next set of interaction right now and will be re-engaging them soon. We've addressed the guidelines and our involvement with them. That is what got us the first step down this road. Hopefully now that we're a well organized, 501©(7) nonprofit group we can show that we're really not a flash in the pan and that they can feel comfortable in working with us. I think part of their concern stemmed from the fact that our organization was so young. We've come a long way in the past 8 months. Hopefully they'll embrace us more fully. We've also made some contact into the Michigan Mountain Biking Association so perhaps they will be willing to share some of what they were able to acheive with us over time.

I've been there as well, but IMHO they offer little in the way of features. I wouldn't go so far as to say they are "competition" lol. But an option that's out there.

I also collect the dirty golf balls. I clean the ones that look playable and stamp them with my borg logo, put them in a plastic bubble, and give them a designation. They then get sent back out in the world as my sig item. I hate dirty golf balls in caches. I used to trade them out just to get them out. Then I had a pile of them stored up so I made them my sig item. I figure it makes them more tradeable and welcome in a cache. (check out my sig.)

We'll get a lot of valuable information from the study that is currently underway in Michigan and we're also hoping our co-sponsorship of a keynote session at the Michigan Parks and Recreation Association Annual Conference will turn enough heads that they'll reconsider. MiGO and Geocaching has a lot to offer them. Other parks have embraced it to mutual benefit - we're hopeful the DNR will also.

I had changed miles to my "distance". Problem, it turns out, is that PhpMyAdmin doesn't like YOU to add the "limit" part on it's input field. Works fine from code though. Still slow as heck though. Think it'd be faster without an inner join? I could update the member table to include their lat/lon periodically to eliminate the join to the zipcodes table.

If you're not sure what was going on, maybe you should have hung around and found out instead of huffing off? Or were you sure of this as the purpose prior to your exit? Oops. Read the whole thread. You shouldn't have huffed off. You should have asked around or stayed instead of jumping to a conclusion and posting it here. As a general question, this would be a fine topic for discussion, but you're singling out a cacher and an event that you have no idea about their intent or the outcome of the event.

hmm. I keep getting an error, but not right away. I think MySQL might be timing out. I have an inner join going on to get the lat/lon for a user's zip but oi... didn't know it would be so bad. No real error comes back from mysql... just dies.

Maybe a stupid question, but do the formulas above require lat/lon in decimal format? I have a similar need on a smaller scale (state-wide). Actually, what I want to do is allow MiGO members to plug in a zip code of somewhere they want to cache. Then find all the people nearby that zip code up to a limit of like 50 miles or 100 miles. I have a database which has lat/lon for all the zip codes in decimal format. Would be neat to have distance/bearing from the given zip code to the resulting member in the listing. I'm assuming that either lil devil or prime suspect's example will work with decimal coords? Maybe you can begin to see why I dropped my math major

and if you lived in MI you would have gotten $9.10 for that! Great job, put it in the new GPS fund

It's easier than learning and deciding how to manage a new activity. I think that's all it was.

Eggsellent. Hey Torry, I saw this terrible pig platter thing the other day. Ugly as sin, but so pigarrific I thought you'd totally dig it Guess I should check in on the event planning thread

Yes, for State Rec and Park areas we discuss it with Parks & Rec Bureau. The other stuff is with the wildlife people (I forget their dept. name) but it's all limited by the Pittman Robertson stuff (apparently) and unfortunately is not really up for discussion without changing that law at a national level. They did cite budgetary reasons for the need to charge for permits. Our POV is that the entry fees will more than cover the cost of administration from park to park and MiGO is in a position to monitor most of the placements. We do this with Oakland County Parks already and monitor each cache placed there for adherance to the guidelines in place there. We could do this for the DNR also. Well, we could get reps involved, but my impression of the person we have worked with in the past with the Parks and Rec Bureau (I'd have to look up their name also) is that they are generally very nice and seemed to appreciate our input. They also seemed to be THE policy setter in this respect, so until our work with that person leads to some kind of stalemate - I'd prefer to continue working with them. Will produce a better relationship and results in the long run than convincing a rep to stuff it down their throats I think I'm not sure on the State Forests. As far as I know, you have summarized their policy. We know of several park rangers and conservation officers who know of caching in State Forests and keep an eye to make sure it doesn't get out of line but otherwise have kind of a laissez faire attitude about it.

If you're in Michigan Team CoyChev is the resident ammo can peddler. They've found a place in MI that sells them for $2.50 each and they are in great condition. They buy them by the hundreds and then will drop them around the state at events at their cost. Pretty cool stuff. Would probably work out for anyone near to MI also. He'll also give you directions to the place if you want to pick them up yourself.