Foinavon

I like industrial caches. i.e. caches placed near something man made used for the purposes of industry or transport. So much so that I made a bookmarks list of them. All in the North I'm afraid. http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=2c331670-f0ee-42ec-966f-17efd5241df4

I don't like big trails (whether you precede them with the word "power" or not is completely irrelevant). Those of you who know me know that its a subject I have debated quite a lot (in the early days on here, and quite lot on my local regional forum). What I am talking about now is in general. I don't know the caches that are referred to in the first post. I don't even know what part of the country they are in. As I say its a topic that has been well discussed down the years and if I placed a cache for every "If you don't like them don't do them" or "Everyone plays the game in their own way" response that I have had then I could set the mother of all power trails! Despite all this I have never advocated that people don't set them or don't do them because I know that many people like them. The problem I have is that I can't ignore them. Its not a feeble complaint at all (as one previous poster said). A figure of 500 was mentioned. That's a half a pocket query! Your PQ's are clogged up with caches you will never do. If you don't like puzzles, multis etc simple ignore them. You can't do that with trails. If you are not a numbers person who goes and gets every cache regardless then all you want to do is target caches on the maps that you think you will like. Its particularly true for me because I don't have much time to go caching. With so many crammed into a small space its hard to pick out the ones you like. It takes time. Its more than a "little inconvenience". As I say though I have never asked (as some people have done on the feedback system) for a "no power trail" rule to be introduced. What I really really would like is for an attribute to identify them. Then I can filter them out. But of course its a win win situation because those of you who like them can filter them in exclusively. You can go off and whack up those numbers to your hearts content. Regrettably its been suggested and rejected. But if anyone from Groundspeak had a change of heart then you'd never hear a word of complaint from me on this subject again. There's another somewhat annoying thing about some of them (which I gather doesn't apply to the caches in question as they were placed in a "blank space"). But imagine you have had a cache that you placed years ago. Its gets found about once a month but usually gets good logs. Suddenly a big trail appears nearby. Now you get emails every day saying "found 17/43 on the such and such trail". But its not part of the trail and never has been. Its rather annoying. There's not much you can do about it apart from asking people not to log individual caches as though they were part of the trail, it doesn't have to be a long log, just something different, otherwise the trail becomes the Borg of Geocaching world! I know one well respected cacher (someone who likes trails and has frequently disagreed with myself in the great trail debate) who is considering archiving a great many of his caches for this very reason. Anyway that's my two penneth worth!

This has been an interesting discussion. I too have my doubts as to whether the "silence" tactic is the best one. Its a similar thing tv policy is not showing streakers disrupting sporting events. It doesn't stop the wierdo's who streak just as it doesn't stop the wierdo's who have nothing better to do than trash caches. I have two anecdotes for you that I hope you find encouraging and in this case I hope the person in question IS reading. In Lancashire we had a cash trasher. There was a little more to it than just the cache trashing but I don't want to elaborate on here. Anyway not only did the police take it seriously they actually caught him and he was given a caution. So now he has a police record. It was co operation between local cachers and the police that did it. The other one is a related idea. I help run a scarecrow festival in our village. Every year some scarecrows get stolen. There are always misfits in society who because they have achieved nothing themselves want to spoil the achievements of others. Well the police took the scarecrow theft quite seriously and they actually recovered it. It was about 8 miles away in a supermarket car park. What I think is that when you report "trivial" things to the police you MAY get lucky. It depends on their mood and what kind of day they are having and what other commitments you have. If everyone reports it there is a drip drip drip effect. CurryKev will be right in that sometimes you may left laughed out of the station, and so might the next person. But the 3rd person to report it may not!

Also I feel that I should point out that I am not part of the North West 2012 Mega Event committee so when I say "we" referring to the North West these are actually my own views and are not necessarily representative. I take my hat off to anyone who spends the time and trouble organising a mega event where ever it is, especially as its not something I could do. Thanks!

Here's an olive branch! Let me say that if there was a Mega Event in London in 2012 I would be one of the first ones to make a will attend. I love visiting London and have really enjoyed my geocaching trips there. I am also looking forward to the olympics. My town Bolton has a bit of a connection as the olympic mascots (I like them but I am biased) were made here and its a Bolton firm that has got the contract to build many of the venues so we feel we are playing a small part. I will of course also attend the Mega NW event as it would be so close to home. There seems to be some kind of sacred aura about mega events that I don't understand. What are they? >500 geocachers in one place. Now in 2008 when Harrogate did it that was harder to achieve but there are so many more cachers around nowadays that its quite reasonable to suggest that both London and the North West could easily attract 500 people. Heck put a big power trail out and you will have had 500 people after a few weeks! Far be it from me to give advice to the SE committee but you SHOULD have it in London and use the name London with pride. A city with such an international recognition, its your trump card, use it. In the North West we don't have quite the same pull but we do have some great countryside so that's our trump card. If it was in London as I say I would be the one of the first to log a will attend. I would not worry about costs as I can stay with family. A selfish attitude maybe but no one should be put off by "If its here I will not attend because......" posts because you should concentrate on the people who will attend. A mega event in Milton Keynes on the other hand. Well no disrepect to the place but I would be as likely to attend that as some one from Milton Keynes would be to attend a Mega event in Bolton.

Sorry it was the thread title "LONDON MEGA 2012 would it be a good idea?" which foolishly lead me to believe that the proposed Mega even was in London. How silly of me!

I'd like this to be the last time I have to type this, so I'm going to use caps to make the point a bit clearer: IT HAS TO BE CLOSE TO THE DATE OF THE OLYMPICS IN ORDER TO BE REASONABLY ACCESSIBLE TO INTERNATIONAL VISITORS WHO'LL ONLY BE HERE FOR THE GAMES, and not, say, Easter. If someone can spot a hole in this logic, please point it out. We're not blind to sensible ideas and constructive feedback. Thanks Have I missed something here, is Geocaching now an Olympic sport? It would be great if it was, just imagine the events you could have! Power Trail Time Trials, 35mm film can scavenge hunts, extreme multis on top of mountain time trials, The Skeg to Ness Indy 500 race. Of course if it was an olympic sport you would need somewhere with some countryside, which kind of rules London out.

now its 900,824. I have never noticed how much it increases before. Is 915 caches a day typical? Could we have 1,000,000 active caches before the end of the year?

Oh yes I hadn't thought about it. How silly of me!

If you have any power trails planned then now is a good time to stick them out. The question is, is there anyway to actually tell which cache was the 900,000th one?

How many of you find your own caches under a pseudonym. i.e hide it with one account and find it with your most regular one? I think its very silly and I wouldn't do it myself but I certainly have no objection to others doing it. The thing I can never understand is why do it under pseudonym? Why not simply log your own caches as finds? Its not as if the owner will delete your log.

Your friend has done nothing wrong. If a multi has a virtual stage then the 550ft rule does not apply. The multi owner has no territorial rights over the area of any virtual stages. I had a multi with virtual stages in Bolton town centre. Someone (hello Steve!) placed micros at most of these stages. To be honest I was quite pleased as I thought it might encourage more people to my infrequently visited cache. In actual fact it did not, what happened was that most people who found these new micros still didn't find my multi even though they had in fact visited all its waypoints. I think some people filter mulitis out on principle and thus miss out even the easy ones. What I am trying to say (I think!) is that people who like multis will find them regardless and I don't think they are affected by other nearby cache placements.

No we can't be talking about the same person then - I just double checked their profile and they have hidden nearly all micros. There's a handful of smalls, but not very many. Why not boycott these micros? The way to get them out of favour is for people to stop finding them!

Just some points on this. For you NWCachers, this will be familiar reading 1) When I get a found log its nice to have one piece of information about this cache. "Nice easy find" is no good because the smiley face tells me you found it. (1342/67345) on a day out in surrey, is no good either because that's about the day in general not this cache. It doesn't have to be War and Peace, you can just do it in one sentance. 2) I only set individual caches, those who no me know that power trails aren't my thing, if I do them I have to keep my interest up by missing a few of them out along the way. I have never set any myself as I only set individual caches. Now what happens sometimes is that you can set one and later on someone else might stick a power trail around it. This is fine as just because I have placed a cache doens't give me any say on what happens >550ft around it. The only problem is that suddenly wether I like it or not my cache is suddenly logged as if it was part of the trail and the type of logs it gets changes from quite interesting ones to "123/323 on a day in the canal trail." I prefred it as it was before. I really would prefer it people would just log individual caches as individual caches! 3) A way to get more interesting logs is to set more puzzles and multis. Of course your caches will be found less often but the logs they get are generally much better. I think one interesting log every three months may be better than regular "TFTC TNLNSL"s. 4) This point was made earliar but when you talk about it on forums 99% of people seem to agree that longer logs are better. I have come to realise that the people who post messages on forums are the type who put interesting logs. 5) The final thing is why there's no need to bother about short logs. I tend to think about longer logs being just as much for my sake as for the cache owner. Its like an online blog of my experiences. It really can be great fun to waste some time and read your old logs. You recall things you had forgotten. Its just like keeping a diary.

Whilst I can see that plenty of cachers in the USA are clearly not happy about the removal of the GE Add in there is one area where it hits people outside America harder. That is the case of finding benchmarks (or trigpoints as we call them in the UK) nearer Geocaches. In America you can log your benchmarks on the geocaching.com web site, we can't do this but we can log them on this website uk trigpointing. Now whilst some of my fellow Brits are grumpy about the fact that we can't log benchmarks as geocaches whilst the USA can I don't really mind as I see it as two similar hobbies. I do however like to combine the two on one trip and find all the geocaches that are near trigpoints. Google earth was the only way to do this. It can't be done with pocket queries as you simply can't cover the required area with the allocated amount of pqs. Anyway that's me seriously inconvenienced, and do you know what? I could have accepted it if I had been given an honest reason as to why it was done. As an example I accepted the reasons that additional logging requirements were no longer allowed even though I myself would still prefer to have them. Fair enough let's move on. Now in this case if the official line was what must surely be the real reason i.e. "it's our database, we want you to look at it through our geocaching.com website". I would have thought fair enough even if the thinking was related to advertising space because that's the way the internet works. To put out this absolutely ludicrous idea that it was removed because only 200 people used it is quite frankly insulting our intelligence. Next time significant changes are made I would recommend giving us the real reason or at very least coming up with a more convincing falsehood!

You know those little yellow things you always try to wee on in pub urinals (well I do anyway). You could have a micro disguised as one of those. Pray tell, how are us girlies supposed to do these then...??? Hmm? Hmm? That occured to me actually, but to redress the balance there are certain things that you only get in Ladies Toilets you could stick a cache on (preferably not in) one of those. The "Aunt Floe is visiting" series. Of course male cachers could attempt these but I would recommend the stealth attribute on the cache page.

You know those little yellow things you always try to wee on in pub urinals (well I do anyway). You could have a micro disguised as one of those.

Are you ever "caught short" whilst caching? How about the "Spend a Penny" series placed near public toilets around the UK. This would answer this common caching problem.

Same people? Last year Interesting that both "attractions" blame bad weather as a reason for their troubles, one would have thought that cold and wind would make the "Lapland Experience" more authentic!

You know what, I think there should be more caches in the New Forest. Especially if this is the alternative!

Then best leave it to those in the know! As someone who has cached in the Forest reasonably recently and frequently, I don't know if there are enough or not, haven't studied the facts. Happy to leave it to GAGB and the landowners to decide. Fair enough, I tried to do a teeny bit of research by looking at Google Earth. Interestingly when you put New Forest, England into Google Earh you get the other New Forest. Did you know there was one? I didn't. It's in the North East! I'm sure it did. However you could put a large micro trail on contaminated wasteland and it would extremely popular and bring many more cachers to the area. Anyway I'll butt out now.

As an onlooker who has not visited the New Forest since childhood, could it be that 100 is enough? I imagine all the best spots will now be occupied. Could it be the case that anymore placements would just be "place fillers". Some places around my neck of the woods are becoming a bit saturated, imho these upper limits are quite a good thing.

These are caches with a difference and one day I would like to try them. However I never like caches directly outside peoples houses (be it placed on their property or not). I tend to skip those. This is the case wether its Moss Side or Henley on Thames. The only ones I occasionaly do is when people set caches outside their own house and I still feel a bit awkward about those!

I've been in email contact with currykev and our Fozzie avatars are going to peacefully co-exist :-) He says to tell you he'll see y'all in 3 days . Rgds, Andy Well if we are talking Ursine Avatars then feel free to use Rupert anyone, just don't tell the Daily Express!