FireRef

I've posted several in the last couple of months, mainly because of issues with non-responsive owners. For one, the owner posted on the cache page that they knew it was missing, but it wasn't disabled. I posted the NA log, stating that I wasn't looking for it to be archived, just disabled, since the owner didn't respond to any requests to do so. Another was for a cache that was reported missing by multiple people over a long period of time, and the owner hadn't responded, so I asked that it be disabled, possibly archived. Finally, the last was for one I was sure was missing because I had found it before, and the owner didn't respond to any messages stating it needed to be disabled. All of my NA logs just politely asked for the reviewer to intervene so players didn't have caches showing up in searches - disable, archive if necessary. I was nervous about doing them, but got more comfortable when I realized that is what they are there for - to bring them to the attention of a reviewer.

Thanks for everything - i used it a few times, and it was a very worthwhile project!

Very reasonable. I know we tried for a couple of numbers runs back before they opened up these power trails. One time we went to Erie, PA. Every one said how great the caching was. "Get your numbers up with some really great caches." they said. After an hour we were thinking every one was off their meds. Nano on stop sign. Nano on speed limit sign. Nano on no parking sign. LPC after LPC. A few guardrails tossed in. Yawn. Chasing mile after mile of cut-n-paste caches sounds the same, but worse. Now this fly in and hit a few states with a group of friends sounds much more interesting. I am intrigued. It may be a great way to meet some of the degenerates I've come to know and love through these forums. You must have filtered out all the good ones - there are some pretty cool ones in my hometown, and maybe 10-20% at most fall into the categories you listed.

I guess I just don't see why these parks should restrict us, when they don't restrict the wildlife that is in there. Obviously, we can do more damage when in large groups (well, maybe not - look at like a herd of anything moving through an area - lol), but it just seems silly to say "come enjoy nature, but only the way we want you to." I understand protecting sensitive species, but we also seem to forget the whole concept of evolution, which involves extinction. We probably do more damage than most animals, but some invasive species have done far more damage than humans ever could. When will people realize we are a part of nature, not apart from it? I always laugh when I see all of the people who say if you use the bathrom (#2) in the woods, you're supposed to bury it, or carry it out with you. When has an animal ever done this? Protect nature? Yes - somewhat. Live in the world? Well, yeah - we have to. Fighting against evolution and natural extinction processes is ...well, a little silly sometimes. Nature will do what it wants - we often can just sit back and watch, or often make fools of ourselves when we try to stop/change things, and see how nature reacts. Maybe this is why I was a biology major, but never went into environmental stuff... nature takes care of itself, except where we screw up bad (like the oil spill currently happening) - but even then, nature will eventually recover, with some damage, and life on the planet will go on.

Maybe its just me, and maybe it's just in my area, but this "stay on the trail" thing I see all over the place here isn't something I ever seem to run into in the areas of northern PA and western NY. What is the problem with going into a set of woods, like our gamelands, and walking around "off trail"? Many times there isn't a trail. And I know animals make their own trails - why are we so different, if we don't leave garbage behind? Not trying to start a flame war - just don't understand why we're allowed into natural areas, but restricted in where we go in them.

qef - quick easy find, but usually only use this in my notes for myself. I usually write paragraphs for my logs anyway.

I'm actually looking more for someplace I can upload a set of coordinates, not type in them individually.

I know there are programs out there that can optimize a route between or among a series of waypoints. Is there one on a website that anyone knows of? I'd like to be able to upload a waypoint file (GPX would be great, but any format can be figured out), and then have it take those points, and tell me what the optimum order of going through them for distance. Is there such a thing out there?

I noticed the same thing - I didn't try any addresses, but I did try the zip codes, and got nothing. Did it get broken along with the field notes in this release?

I'll add my vote, if I have one, to removing the banner.

Hi - a friend recently borrowed my Magellan Explorist 400, and it worked great for me for a long time. It still works fine, but seems to have an interesting bug. When he marks the caches as found, and then restarts the GPS, sometimes it saves them, sometimes it doesn't, but more often than not, it doesn't. When he looks again, it shows caches he marked as found as not found. When I looked at the memory card, it shows a second file, which I remember as the one which has the "found" information for that set of geocaches - so it's creating the files, but it's not using them for some reason. Any ideas?

Two very good ideas, and I think I have the problem solved. Thank you VERY much!

I follow the idea that one cache=one smiley. I'm not really looking for any debate on this practice. I would like to know if anyone has a quick and easy way (or quicker and easier than manually checking every one) to figure out which cache I double logged. I have been going out with some newbies showing them the ropes, and log my new finds as finds, and old finds as notes, to keep telling the story of my adventures. Sometime in the last roughly 100 finds, I managed to log as found a cache that I had found before. I know this because of running the findstatgen macro for GSAK, telling me I have 1949 finds on 1948 unique caches. The last one I saved was around 1850, and the two numbers matched. Any suggestions? I want to go back and change that find to a note to fix my count.

Is the website running really slow right now?

Well thank goodness virtuals are no longer getting listed, as that goes beyond "Take something, leave something, sign the log". As I said - they are inconsistent. If we go back to that, virts, webcams, multis, mysteries, events, earthcaches, locationless, and any others which are not "traditionals" should go too. Do I want to see that? Probably not. But if we reverted to that rule, they would have to. We went so far away from that rule that some of the rules are just plain silly. I won't elaborate, because I have in multiple other posts.

Never mind that each and every one of those guidelines and restrictions came as the direct result of some situation that required it. The guidelines are a compilation of stances taken to prevent geocaching from being forced underground. And Dave Ulmer quit for reasons quite different from guideline changes, I assure you. Would you please elaborate, since the website which has a "history of geocaching" has been purported to be skewed against this website? I know you are one of the people who would be considered to know this history, so it makes sense to ask you. (or ask you for a source where that question could be answered). And "required" is not a good choice of words here. I highly doubt that any of the rule changes were "required" by anyone other than the person in charge of this website deciding that they were good for his version of the game.

Maybe a better example would be a law requiring new cars to have smog equipment. The law "grandfathers" cars already on the road. You don't hear people complaining, "Why can't I have a car without smog equipment. It's inconsistent if you allow all those old cars on the road." When the NHL adopted a rule mandating players wear helmets, veteran players were grandfathered and could opt out of wearing a helmet. And neither of those make sense. Lets allow the people with polluting cars continue to pollute the environment. And when we add a safety rule to a sport, lets let the players who want to put themselves in greater danger than the current rules allow do so. Come on - I live in a state where seatbelts are required for all passengers in a car, but within a year or two of passing that law, they passed a law allowing bikers to decide if they wanted to wear a helmet or not. Inconsistency. That is a major problem. (also considering I am one of the people who has to scrape the bikers off the road when they get in an accident... helmets SHOULDN'T be a choice... the bikers don't have to scrape themselves off the road...) Inconsistency is bad. Period.

I agree - most of the reasons it has become complicated is because the owner of this website went beyond "Take something, leave something, sign the log" and made it WAY more complicated than it had to be, by setting up guidelines and restrictions which lessen the game from the perspective of these original rules (to the extent that the originator of the game quit playing).

I need for you to stop pasting this quote into any thread you wander into. Your posts to this thread are disrespectful both to Groundspeak and to the volunteer whose actions are being discussed. Cache Drone was not acting arbitrarily, but rather enforcing a specific written guideline. Groundspeak is not writing new guidelines and the reviewer did not "do it anyway" and ignore any rules. Here are the virtual cache maintenance guidelines in the form in which they existed in November 2003: Pretty much the same thing they say today, in substance. I used to archive unmaintained virtuals way back then. A five-year old rule is pretty consistent and is not a "new one." Groundspeak moved earthcaches to Waymarking. There was a strong outcry against that move. They were moved back. Groundspeak originally proposed to archive all the existing virtuals at the time when Waymarking launched. There was a strong outcry, so it never happened. Darn that Frog for being silly and listening to the community. It sometimes results in perceived inconsistency. No - no perception at all - reality. As for the quote above, I am not being disrespectful to anyone. I am pointing out the way that some people see the way that GS.com makes their decisions. See my signature file - Everything is objectionable (or can be interpreted as disrespectful) to/by someone. It was not intended to be disrespectful - it is a statement of fact. The guideline says "may be archived" - this means that there was an arbitrary decsision by that reviewer. He made a decision which I disagree with, and which I have every right to disagree with. There has been a loud outcry for the return of virtuals on this website. It has not happened. (and I'm sure there were people who supported, and still do, the archiving of all virts and webcams) There was a loud outcry for things like the return of archived caches to the geocaching.com google map. It was decided they would do it. As usual, no timeline was given, and it has not happened. (and been a long time). And for the person later in the thread (and right above this post) that pointed out the GC.com policy that there is no precident, that has to be the most inconsistent policy of all. That isn't a rule or a guideline - it just gives them the ability to be able to do whatever they want, instead of being consistent. This isn't Calvinball (from the old Calvin and Hobbes comics), where you can make up any rule you want anytime you want, it just has to be different from any other rule already created. But it is certainly looking more and more like it. Rules (or guidelines, as you always seem to like to say) change. I understand that. But they need to change for a good reason, and they need to be consistently enforced, and they need to apply to everything. If the old speed limit on a road is 35, and they lower it to 25, I don't get grandfathered in because I drove on the road before, so I don't need to go that speed limit - I can just use the old one. Or a new stop sign - I always went through that intersection because it was not a stop in my direction - they made it a 4 way stop - so I can still ignore it, because I'm grandfathered in. This doesn't happen. (and when it does, from past experience, people get hurt or killed) Giving the reviewers the latitude to sometimes enforce the rules whenever they feel like it is like saying to a police officer "Feel free to pull over anyone you want whenever you feel like it - give tickets to some, let others go, and sometimes, give tickets for things that aren't really in the laws, but are your interpretations of the laws." Oh, and the person can never go before a judge to argue - they pay the ticket or go to jail regardless of what any other police officer would do. Consistency. How hard can it be? A lot easier than "The Frog" is making it out to be. Even just how reviewers contact people. Some like email, some like reviewer notes or regular notes on pages. Some prefer other methods. Our area seems to have 2-5 active reviewers at any given time. I can't pick who reviews my caches - it appears to be random. Some hassle you when you have an inactive cache for a short time, some for longer times, and some, appear to never do this at all. Some want email updates - some want cache page updates, etc. Some give 2 weeks to hear from you, some 3, some 4, some say "shortly". Another inconsistency would be the lack of answers for when things will be done. I ask for my lawn to be mowed by a lawn mowing service, they give me a couple day range when it will be done. I am asked by officers in the FD to get something done, I have to give them a date it will be done by. I call customer service for a refund, I expect a response indicating how long before I receive the check. I purchase something, the place I buy it from expects me to pay under some kind of circumstances (Cash now, check now, credit card over time, etc) with a set time frame of some kind. Ask GS.com to do something? They don't call you back or email you back under any kind of schedule when you call their office, and they don't give any kind of time frame when they will do things, even when they agree to do them (see above). I guarantee they woulnd't continue to be in business if their web hosting company or ISP said "you need to pay us by this date" and they said "we'll pay you sometime in the future, but we're not going to say when". You can't conduct business this way and expect to keep your customers happy - or even keep your customers. Consistency. That's all I ask. It's not that hard. As Nike would say, "Just do it."

Then Groundspeak needs to police the people who have the virtuals - not punish those of us who would like to see them return, or those of us who would like to do them by removing them. And yet, when a reviewer does just that, and enforces the established written guideline for virtual cache maintenance, you call this a very bad decision. It sounds like... gosh, what's the word I'm searching for... I know I've seen it in some posts this week... oh, yes... inconsistency. The problem is the inconsistency of the enforcement. Some will let it go a few weeks, some a few months, some for years - some will email the owner, some will post a reviewer note... some give a few weeks to reply, some give a month, etc... Some reviewers actively go looking for caches which may not quite perfectly meet the guidelines, some give way more latitude, some don't look unless somone points it out. It was a bad decision. The fact that the inconsistency in the way reviewers do things is not addressed by Groundspeak, or that they even make decisions which force reviewers (oh wait, they tend to do things how and when they want... no force there... maybe... who knows) to remove perfectly good caches or not allow the posting of specific cache types, or "accepted" cache types with certain words or phrases in them (the "agenda" garbage)... sometimes... is not good for the game. His choice for when to enforce it and how to enforce it was the bad thing - the fact that he enforced it because he wanted to, not because of a complaint... we have tons of caches in our area that you don't know there are problems with because you don't actively go looking at 10s of thousands of logs and find the caches with problems. Some reviewers seem to make this witchhunt a part of their job, others choose not to because either they feel they don't need to, they choose not to, or the sheer number of caches makes that impossible. Who knows - no one seems to have any consistency in how reviewers are supposed to do things or interpret rules.

Then Groundspeak needs to police the people who have the virtuals - not punish those of us who would like to see them return, or those of us who would like to do them by removing them. How hard would it have been to add a software requirement to the logging process that the owner was notified by email of a "pending" log, and something to click on to approve or deny that log entry, for the cache types which require it. Virts and EC's could easily be regulated by this system. Wow factor aside (and again, my argument against that is it was an excuse to get rid of them... mainly by the reviewers who said they received too many to sort through, or like Keystone said, too many people that complained when they turned down submissions), Virtuals would still work. They can be done. They don't have to be thrown out, as evidenced by the Earthcaches. But GC does whatever they want, regardless... so who knows. If you think you have the answer, this is the wrong place to post it, you're just peeing into the wind here! Why not make the software, send the idea in and see where it floats? I mean, you made it pretty clear it should be simple, right? Yeah, I know - but maybe some people will start to see there is a better option, start pushing for it like I am, and maybe, just maybe, Jeremy will listen. It should be simple - I haven't been a programmer for 15-20 years at this point, but was decent when I did it. Or at least should be something that can be done if they would take the time to do it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is no solution just because it is easy...

Here's some real stats. After much effort (because the site is a pain to navigate) I found the dozen closest waymarks to me. After I eliminated stuff like McDonalds and other pointless items, it left me with about a dozen items that would be substantial enough to have been a virtual on the gc site. Out of the dozen, NONE had visits, and all but two were placed by out of towners. There was NO local interaction at all. As far as being a pain to navigate, I think all you have to do is type in your address in the search box which is located on the front page and it will display all waymarks within 100 miles of that address... does not sound like any serious navigation to me. I don't know where you live in Kansas City however of the 902 waymarks within 100 miles of Kansas City exactly 9 are McDonalds. If I use your BBQ waymark Arthur Bryant's Barbeque "The single best restaurant in the world" as the center I don't get to another food or other chain waymark until I get to another BBQ restaurant and that is 80 waymarks from yours and to find the first McDonalds I have to go 10 miles and nearly 200 waymarks. And as far as local involvement from what I see most are placed by people really far from there like Olathe, Overland Park and Liberty or all the way out in Basehor, KS... oh wait those are suburbs of KC. But until they develop PQ's for that site (which has been promised, like the return of the Archived Caches to the GC.com google maps, but never appeared, and it has been several years), there is no way to be out there without a phone with good internet access and see what waymarks you happen to be near to visit and check out. I tried it in my area, but because I can't download batches, I can't efficiently play the game. Waste of time. We have tons of stuff I'd be happy to play around with and waymark, but it took several months for us to even get a list of categories we could download so we had some idea what kinds of things to look for as we were out there. Maybe if they actually finished developing the site, it would work well as an alternative to locationless caches - but not virts or webcams - those need to return here.

Then Groundspeak needs to police the people who have the virtuals - not punish those of us who would like to see them return, or those of us who would like to do them by removing them. How hard would it have been to add a software requirement to the logging process that the owner was notified by email of a "pending" log, and something to click on to approve or deny that log entry, for the cache types which require it. Virts and EC's could easily be regulated by this system. Wow factor aside (and again, my argument against that is it was an excuse to get rid of them... mainly by the reviewers who said they received too many to sort through, or like Keystone said, too many people that complained when they turned down submissions), Virtuals would still work. They can be done. They don't have to be thrown out, as evidenced by the Earthcaches. But GC does whatever they want, regardless... so who knows.

Grandfathering was allowed out of respect for and the benefit of active virtual owners. I don't think they would agree with you on this point. Grandfathering allows those owners to decide when their individual virtuals will go down for the count. Once owners are no longer active or don't otherwise keep to the guidelines then the virtual cache should be archived. I don't agree with that either... and I wrote it. The point I'm making is that GS needs to start being consistent and stop being "We're gonna do whatever we want, even if our rules (sorry, GUIDELINES) say otherwise. If the rules (sorry again, GUIDELINES) don't agree, we'll just write a new one to make it fit, or do it anyway and if people realize we're not following our own rules (GUIDELINES), too bad." You can't have new Earthcaches allowed (which are virts) and not other virts. You can't allow virts and webcams to remain, if your rules say they don't. They should exist - they should be allowed to have new ones. My point is that they are not consistent, and don't seem to care that they're not. See signature file below.

Funny thing is, I have noticed a trend in the several threads in which I have been participating - although it seems to take a few replies, a number of people have started to indicate the same fact - they are not happy about, or at the very least, don't agree with, a number of decisions made by GS.com. Yes, there are good things about the website... but there are problems, and the more people that indicate they have problems with some of these decisions, maybe they'll start listening to the people who use the website, rather than just making arbitrary decisions.