niraD

I would expect a Top 10% system to prevent anyone from listing more than 1 cache in 10 as one of their Top 10%. With a simple 5-star system, I'd expect some people to give a 5-star rating to more than 10% of their finds.

The main thing I like about the Amazon.com system is its recommendations, and a big part of what makes them work is that the average user doesn't need to do anything extra. The recommendations are based on information that Amazon.com already has: the purchase histories of its customers. I'm not sure how to build a recommendation system on information that Geocaching.com already has though. Actually, I can see how this histogram could provide useful information in situations like that. I wonder whether you'd be able to do that, or whether you'd have to search based on the average rating. Searching on complex criteria like the ratio of 5-star ratings to total ratings or the distribution of the ratings would confuse a lot of people. On review sites, another feature that can be useful is rating whether a particular review was helpful or not. Reviews that are rated as more helpful will bubble to the top. When combined with positive/negative ratings within the review itself, the site can display the most useful positive reviews and the most useful negative reviews together. I find this kind of information even more useful that simply listing the most useful reviews. I'm just not sure how to apply this to Geocaching.com.

Also, Premium Members can create bookmarks to track their caching milestones.

Because people like numbers? I find such simplistic ratings pretty useless myself. So are we talking about reviews, or are we talking about a 5-star rating system? I find reviews useful. I find "you may also like" recommendations useful. I find personal recommendations useful. It's simplistic 5-star (or n-star) rating systems that I find useless.

Sounds like fun! One word of caution about caches with high difficulty: make sure the location can withstand repeated intense searching, including some searching by inconsiderate "scorched earth" cachers. If finding a cache is going to take many people "a good portion of an afternoon" (3 stars) or "multiple days / trips" (4 stars), then there is going to be some wear and tear.

You are not alone. After my first four finds using a borrowed GPSr, I found 328 caches without using a GPSr (using Google maps and satellite photos). I finally bought a GPSr, but I still don't use it for every cache hunt.

I wouldn't go quite that far. I found a number of multi-caches before I started using a GPS receiver. Initially, I would find a stage, look up the postion of the next stage in the online satellite photos, then return and find the next stage. Eventually, I started figuring out the distance and direction to the next stage in the field, and then pacing off the distance to find GZ. But yeah, it can be a lot harder to find multi-caches if you can't enter coordinates into your GPS receiver.

How about... Mathematical Advocacy Through Hiding Geocaches, also known as MATH Geocaches.

From a thread that was just closed as a duplicate of this thread: Be careful with decoy containers like that. I've seen "replacement logs" added to more than one decoy container. Future seekers sign the "replacement logs", not realizing that they found the decoy rather than the actual cache. It's basically a variation of a throw-down cache.

The advantage of using pairs of coordinates is that it's easy to get the math right. You take the first set of coordinates at an obvious landmark. Then you take the second set of coordinates at a location the same distance from the cache, but in the opposite direction. It's easy to tell if the second location, the cache, and the first landmark are in a straight line. It's relatively easy to make sure the distance from the cache to the first landmark is the same as the distance from the cache to the second location. If you get that right, then you can just average the longitude values, and then average the latitude values. If you try to use 3 or more readings that are not arranged in pairs like this, then things get more complicated. You need to convert between longitude/latitude and feet/meters. You need to measure the angles between the cache location and the measured coordinates. You need a bit of geometry/trigonometry to get the coordinates of the cache from the measured coordinates. The complexity of the measurements and calculations increases the chance of error.

Around here, the calibration of the Google Maps satellite photos is very good. I use them for a lot of my searches, and I use them to help get the coordinates for hides. But the final test of my coordinates for hides is to take my GPSr to the cache site. I approach the cache from various directions, and make sure the arrow is pointing right at the cache no matter which way I approach it.

A while back, The Rat offered a puzzle-solving class as an event cache. His slides are available here: http://thegba.net/resources/general_information.php Among the tips he offered: Identify the theme. Check the cache title, the hint, the HTML source, the graphics (including names/URLs), any links (including URLs), whatever is at the posted coordinates, etc. If you can figure out the theme, then you should look for numbering systems that are associated with that theme (zip codes, area codes, telephone keypads, episode numbers, etc.). Around here, coordinates will have 15 digits, and will look like "N 37° xx.xxx W 122° xx.xxx". So when I'm solving a nearby puzzle, I look for a group of 15 things, and then I look for ways to get the digits 37xxxxx122xxxxx from them. In general, I look for ways to get the number 37 (or the digits 3 and 7) from something near the beginning of the puzzle, and the number 122 (or the digits 1, 2, and 2) from something near the middle of the puzzle. (Of course, you'll need to adjust this for the coordinates near you.) Another useful resource is the Puzzle Solving 101 Series http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...ef-901807ba9c98

There are various ways to get good coordinates even if you can't get reception at the cache site. For example, you could get coordinates for a location 100' north of the cache, and for a location 100' south of the cache, and then average the results to get the coordinates for the cache.

For the record, here's the size scale used by Geocaching.com: http://www.geocaching.com/about/guidelines.aspx#sizes Micro (35 mm film canister or smaller – less than approximately 3 ounces or .1 L – typically containing only a logbook or a logsheet) Small (sandwich-sized plastic container or similar – less than approximately 1 quart or 1 L – holds trade items as well as a logbook) Regular (plastic container or ammo can about the size of a shoebox) Large (5 gallon/20 L bucket or larger)

I've found a couple "fake rock among the real rocks" caches that were done well. If you stepped back and observed for a moment, you could notice that "one of these things is not like the others" and identify the fake rock. Of course, that still doesn't stop some geocachers from turning over every single rock in their search.

Thanks for posting the photos, knowschad and Kit Fox. Those "good evil" caches are wonderful! (If you haven't posted those photos to the CCC thread yet, I encourage you to do so.)

You wouldn't happen to have any photos, would you? That would be great to post on the CCC thread. And yes, that sounds very "good evil"!

Many of the folks I know call such needle-in-a-haystack hides "bad evil" hides, to distinguish them from the "good evil" hides that involve creative camouflage. With a "good evil" hide, there's an "Aha!" moment when you finally figure out what it is. With a "bad evil" hide, you were pretty sure it was one of those rocks, branches, knot holes, bolts, or whatever, and you're glad you finally examined the right one. I love "good evil" hides. I'm not a fan of "bad evil" hides.

According to the saturation guidelines, the cache container and all physical stages of your multi-cache must be 0.1 miles (528 feet or 161 m) from the cache containers and physical stages of other caches.

I recommend that you wait until you know what kinds of caches you like, and what kinds of caches you don't like, so you can be sure to hide the kinds of caches you like. It also helps if you've had time to figure out what kinds of containers work well, and what kinds of containers work poorly.

For the record, some non-puzzle caches have "Aha!" moments too. Except for those of us who prefer saffron pistachio ice cream, and who don't care about "chocolaty goodness" or the ranking thereof.

My favorite so far was the one I saved for my 500th find milestone: ANX: The Angle of Eternity It's part of workerofwood's Assume Nothing series (ANX = Assume Nothing 10), and is a puzzle multi-cache. It starts with a clever twist on a cliche hide style, and then you go from stage to stage, finding and solving physical puzzles, and finding cleverly camouflaged non-puzzle stages. It's a great adventure for a small group, and can easily take a few hours, start to finish. I've heard from geocachers I trust that AN11 and AN12 are even better than ANX. I'll probably save one of those for my 1000th find milestone. Another fun puzzle multi-cache for a small group is Venonium 263. In the "evil camouflage" category, I found The Brink of Insanity as my 666th find. 'Nuf said.

If you want simplistic 5-star ratings for geocaches, then you can have them now with GCVote. I like blinkers on interesting public sculptures, puzzle caches with great "Aha!" moments, and caches with 4-star camouflage. My ratings are not going to be useful to a mom who likes caches with "treasure" for her kids, or for 4x4/kayaking/scuba/rock-climbing enthusiasts who like 5-star terrain. And vice versa. I find simplistic 5-star rating systems useless. But systems that compare my preferences with others, and that recommend items based on the ratings of others who have preferences similar to mine, those are useful.

Is it supposed to be a quick find? If the difficulty is low, or if it's a puzzle final where I expect the difficulty rating to refer to the puzzle itself, then I grab a free newspaper (they're always in the racks for the free newspapers, not the paid newspapers), tuck the cache into it (there are only so many places for the container to be), and go somewhere else to sign the log. When I'm done, I reverse the process to replace the cache and return the newspaper to the top of the stack. But if it's 4-star camouflage, then I try to search when there are fewer people around so I can spend some time examining everything more carefully.

As others have pointed out, this is a workable approach. There is a wide range of capability among those who use wheelchairs. The 1-star terrain rating just can't cover the entire range. There are more specific accessibility ratings at http://www.handicaching.com/ for those who need more detail, or want to provide more detail.