AWESOME WAFFLE

I just read a story about Shelby. It seeems his family is fighting over who gets permission of his remains. How weird.

Alright! #8

Heck yes, sign me up

In order for a Country based souvenir to get on the list, and to be awarded to those that have found a cache (or attended an event) in a specific country it has to be "released". There are basically three things that must be done to release a souvenir. First, the graphic artwork must be created. That includes a thumbnail image and a full artwork image and is done by graphic artists that work at Groundspeak. The artwork is original and will represent in the country in some way, which may require a little research about the country. Secondly, there would be a small amount of programming/configuration that would be required to recognize that the country is has a souvenir so that anyone that finds a cache (or attends an event) in the country is awarded the souvenir. Finally, a software process has to be executed (which has already been written) which will retroactively award the souvenir to anyone that has found a cache (or attended an event) in the country in the past. This process can take awhile to run when you consider that it must check every user profile and then check if that user has logged a find/attended for the country. Groundspeak has been reluctant to release too many souvenirs at one time as this process is quite compute intensive. A couple of other things... The countries which currently *do* have souvenirs were chosen based on voting in the old Feedback site. Countries like Poland and Slovakia have souvenirs simply because more people voted for them. A while back (sorry, don't have the exact date) Groundspeak announced that they were going to put the release of new souvenirs on the backburner to work on other things. There have been a couple of event based souvenirs since then but none that were region based (countries, states, provinces). However, there's a flickr page that that has been posted here a few times which shows the artwork for *all* of the region based souvenirs, including some for quite a few countries which have not yet been released. I don't think that China or Guam were included (which is too bad, as I've found a couple of caches in China) . About all we can do is let Groundspeak know that we want more country based souvenirs and perhaps they'll eventually start releasing them again. Thanks for the detailed info. Hopefully one day there will be more souvenirs.

I am pretty sure this has been discussed before, but why are countries like China and places like Guam not on the Souvenirs list? Mahalo

Aloha, This is my first post. I picked up a travel bug in ALaska that wants to find it's way to New Zealand. If anyone is traveling farther west soon please let me know. Aloha, Awesome Waffle