fizzymagic

Which is why elevation is tricky for non-traditional cache types. I personally store the final locations of all my finds but gc.com does not. I would prefer it if Project GC used the final coordinates for the elevation instead of the posted coordinates, but I understand there might be Technical Difficulties with that.

The wireless beacon refers to a product that was made by Garmin called a "chirp" that would transmit a message containing final coordinates to a compatible device. It used a battery and the Ant+ protocol. The battery would last "up to a year." I do not believe that Garmin still sells them. As a finder, if there is a beacon indicator on the cache and the owner has not performed maintenance in over a year, forget it. The battery is dead. I suppose the attribute could be used for a wifi hot spot or even bluetooth. RFID doesn't really fit the definition, but there are probably some that are out there. Read the description to get more details. Unless I know that it is well-maintained, I steer clear.

An Owner Maintenance log is not an acceptable response to a Reviewer Note.unless the maintenance has been completed. This bad information has somehow gotten out and more and more COs are using Owner Maintenance logs inappropriately. Please don't spread it further!

Where, exactly, is this "rule" documented? It doesn't exist. A well-placed, suitable container can last a long time in perfect condition. I have 4 caches (all ammo cans) that I hid in 2002 or 2003 and have never revisited, Finders report that they are in perfect shape. Given that I am now 20+ years older, I may never visit them again, as they are all quite difficult to get to.

What the other cacher did is indeed unfair. However, your virtual cache requirements do not meet the guidelines and your, well, aggressive enforcement of them is inappropriate as well. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Time zone problem. If you read the fine print it probably started on September 4 Pacific Time. For some reason gc.com has all kinds of trouble with time zones.

I've seen a lot of these recently.

I tend to also look for older caches, but even if that were not so, missing a small number of "should be favorited" caches in order to avoid swathes of broken pill bottles in utterly unremarkable places seems worth it to me.

It only affects which Traditional caches I search for. Since the vast majority of trads are terrible, it's a way to introduce a little variety on caching trips, where we usually focus on non-traditional cache types.

I think I speak for the majority here when I say we marvel at your cache-owner awesomeness.

When I do maintenance, I will be glad to note any missing trackables. But I won't undertake a maintenance visit for that purpose. So yes, we probably do agree.

Well, then, the Help Center is wrong. As a cache owner, I try to discourage cachers from leaving trackables in my caches, but I am completely clear that I am not responsible for other people's property in my caches and I will not keep track of the cache's contents. I don't particularly care if you agree or not. I will not do it, and I have no plans to start. I don't play the game to keep track other people's stuff without getting paid for it.

And you said it much better than I did. I did not mean to imply that the cache owner cannot deal with the trackable inventory, but I seem to have done so.

Not me. The cache's inventory of trackables is not the cache owner's concern. If a trackable owner wants to see whether their trackable is in my cache, they are welcome to do so by visiting it themselves. Otherwise, I don't get involved with trackables, which are not my property like the cache is.

It was a pretty well-designed experiment. Each participant was assigned 25 caches to find and report on the condition, etc. Participants had over a month to find all of the caches. I personally went back multiple times to sites at which I could not find the cache, and even contacted the cache owner to inquire about the cache's status. I expect that others did, as well. The caches I marked as missing were truly missing. And not one had a DNF on it! From that random sample of caches and the logs of the participants in the study, one can statistically estimate the overall rate of missing caches. I would use slightly different terminology than the video did, as I would say that (assuming the other participants worked as hard as I did to find the caches) the estimated rate of missing or unfindable caches is considerably higher than the DNF rate. In my case it was 3 out of 25 that were definitely missing. So by encouraging us to log DNFs, HQ is saying that the rate of missing caches is so high that the examples being used in this thread are a small problem in comparison. And, from my own experience, I agree. Yes, I have DNFed caches that turned out to be there, but, far more often, my DNFs reflect truly missing cache containers. I know that the others in the thread believe that DNFs are over- not under-reported, but an experiment to measure the effect was performed and the results were clear. You're wrong.

I am worried about a challenge involving multis, so I have been purposely finding fewer multis this summer. Probably not what the challenges were intended to do, but since I generally hate multis, any that I have final coordinates for are potentially precious.

I realized yesterday that the unique and annoying thing about this month's challenge is that the "easy" souvenir only requires finding one cache! The others are an event (not a cache) and an AL stage (not a cache). So most of the "easy" effort is non-caching. You'd think that the geocaching site would promote, you know, finding geocaches. This week I did a fun trip with a friend. We found the following types of caches: Traditional Multi Letterbox Unknown Wherigo Webcam Earthcache Virtual But was that enough for the souvenir? No. Because an event is required. Blecch.

I hope you don't think that is the user's fault!

I think you missed the conclusion of the study. It did not find that DNFs are over-reported, as you seem to believe, but the converse: DNFs appear to be wildly under-reported.

Hmm. Never did get mine. Maybe I should do something about that.

What kind of report? What did the player say? perhaps they tried to do your Lab previously, and reporting has only just been enabled so they could not report it when they were trying it. I've been tempted to report ambiguous and poorly-worded questions myself.

Yes, please keep up with the thread. I was remarking on the Canary Islands being Spain, and sloth96 replied with an observation about the Azores and Portugal, and I responded with a comment that perhaps it was like the US and Hawaii. We are all perfectly aware that Hawaii is a US state, and nobody was proposing that it needed a country souvenir. Seriously, reading these forums can be quite frustrating. A certain number of regulars feel the need to drop in on random conversations, and, without even bothering to read them, dispense kindergarten-level pearls of wisdom like the above. Sigh.

Yep. Same thing. I suppose it's the like US and Hawaii.

I remain astonished that the Canary Islands are still considered Spain.

The extremely low maximum zoom, along with this feature, represent decisions made in the app development in which the user experience was intentionally downgraded in favor of something else. Maybe some bandwidth thing? It does not make sense to me.