Ragnemalm
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Posts posted by Ragnemalm
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On 12/29/2021 at 4:55 PM, cerberus1 said:
IIRC, community volunteer tags were trackables that would either be handed to cachers at events by a Groundspeak volunteer, or they'd drop one in a cache as swag.
I have one, given to me by a reviewer at a mega event, where I was cache builder. It happened when I was out checking the cache stages for maintenance needs. Very nice, and I almost didn't know what happened in the dark.
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I have had past goals like getting a higher D or T average than any earlier year. They are not allowed as challenge caches since they make me skip caches to achieve the goal.
Another one was to log more than one cache per day on the average. Also not allowed as challenge cache since... oh well.
This year, I had two goals: Full calendar with traditionals (fulfilled today) and double calendar (can be finished two weeks from now). Both are allowed as challenge caches despite that they make me skip even more caches to achieve the goal! Challenge caches are weird so I make my own goals.
I make no goals that require long travels. I don't want to waste resources on long travels that are made only for caching. If I have some other, more important reason, then the caches will be a bonus.
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19 hours ago, cerberus1 said:
We still have a lengthy paddle-to, and because it's a longer trip, it's lucky if it gets visited once or twice a year.
A consideration if lots of logs are your goal. Also, once locals finally hit it, the odds of people "just passing through" dwindles considerably.
- Though for some it may be the reason they picked the distant destination.
That is very much the case, the ones that takes some planning and effort to reach get few visits. I even missed more than one myself in my area since they were challenging to take on. Pity when it sounded fun, but it takes the right day, usually summer, nice weather etc.
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7 hours ago, humboldt flier said:
Maybe, just maybe ... reviewers are filtering out *(giving less weight)* to "one hit wonders" who are posting NM / NA.
"My Baaaadd"
You mean newbies? Of course, they will use NA, NM and DNF differently that we expect.
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Like others have said above, the feedback is important. Good logs which tells me something, not just "we logged 100 caches today and this was one of them". Just a few relevant words and it makes me feel happy. Photos often make it even better, not least for the more daring ones, high T ones.
FPs are nice, but I think the really good log tops it. Of course, the two often come together.
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On 12/18/2021 at 10:15 AM, arisoft said:
I put a single CR123A lithium battery to my gadget cache ten years ago and it is still running.
Indeed, a battery can last a long time if it the contaner is well built.
I made one with a 9V in 2016 and expected it to last, maybe a few weeks since the insulation was very improvised, mostly a matter of wrapping some plastic around the electronics. I might have changed the battery once, not more. It just keeps running.
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I have several of these. Over a certain distance, I do not recommend swimming and then it is a T5, boat only, otherwise T4 or T4.5 and swimming attribute. If it is possible to wade, the wading attribute will be used.
Also, if you need to cross dangerous water (much motorized boats, dangerous streams) I would think twice. Maintentance can be tricky, of course. It takes extra time to maintain this kind of cache unless you have your own boat in the water.
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On 12/18/2021 at 3:16 PM, Mausebiber said:
No, I don't think this statement was from a reviewer. Everyone can log a NA and in the past, reviewer reacted in a reasonable time. 4-6 weeks later, when there was no reaction from the CO, the cache was archived.
It was indeed from a reviewer. It was well documented that the cache was in a bad shape and that the CO did not respond to multiple attempts and was inactive since a long time. I was told that it was not OK, it should be NM. The cache was archived about three months later (not 4-6 weeks).
So the rule that the reviewer gave me was only to log NM in such a case. IMHO, NA is a strong recommendation for archiving, not just reporting of violations, but that was not the case.
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16 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:
I have a cache hidden in a dark place inside a cave. It's based around a halloween toy I bought that does spooky sound effects that are triggered by the searcher's flashlight. I'd have liked to have made it solar powered from a small panel outside the cave but couldn't see a way of concealing the power cable, so it's simply powered by AAA lithium batteries which give me about an eight or nine month life. I replace them every six months, which is a bit expensive, but for now I'm happy to keep doing that.
How about using rechargeable batteries?
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On 10/30/2021 at 5:23 PM, frostengel said:
There are different kinds of preforms (in Germany we say "PETling" more often but I am sure we are referring to the same). For the normal ones (usually about 9 to 13 centimeters long and 2 centimeters wide) the others are totally correct: these are micro caches though many cachers list them as small.
But there are much bigger versions and the biggest may hold small trackables so if you use a big one as seen in the picture small should be correct.
The picture is taken from a geocaching shop (no link, no advertisement, just google "XXL Petling" or "big PETling" or something like that). The container seen here has a width of about 4.5 centimeters and a length of 18 centimeters.
Jochen
I find the "XXL Petling to be an exception. The normal ones are definitely micro.
I have logged a "Petling" that was about 5 or 6 meters long and big enough to crawl into, and you needed to be three people doing that. It was called a "Mega PET". Amazingly, it was classified as micro... but I guess it referred to the container with the log book, inside.
So, there are exceptions, but the common ones are micro.
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According to reviewer comments, it seems to me that NA is only supposed to be used if there are complaints from locals or the cache is in violation to laws.
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1 hour ago, BunHeads said:
Smart cache owners what type of power supply do you use to power your caches?
Thanks!
You mean electronics caches, obviously. I have used three different methods:
Fixed battery, 9V or 18650. Can last for a long time if the container is well built so it doesn't take in moisture. Should be in placed where the maintenance is reasonably easy since you need to check it fairly often.
Visitors bring their own 9V. Bad, positively needs a proper protection diode to protect the circuitry from getting the power in the wrong direction. Also, the connector is likely to rust if it sticks out (I have a friend who did this and it didn't last well).
Visitors bring their own power banks. This has worked very well. I have used this for four builds. A slight risk that the connector will wear out if visitors are careless but that has not happened yet.
A fourth method is to use a solar cell. I have seen one that used that to charge a battery, which has worked remarkably well. I never used that myself. However, I made one that was powered by a solar cell directly to drive a motor. I can't really recommend that since the power was too low and it broke down multiple times.
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18 minutes ago, palmetto said:
https://www.geocaching.com/my/geocaches.aspx?archived=y
Link to page where you can see unpublished archived caches in the right pane
Title Strikethoughfor anyone who owns some.@Ragnemalm I looked at your unpublished archived back through 2017. Most were archived by you, a few by reviewers. There are 3 created in 2017 that were HQ 'bot archived 10 months later in 2018.
So all that was easily visible? Interesting.
The "few by reviewers" should be quite a few just the last two months. After that, I archived four myself just to avoid more irritation.
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8 minutes ago, Isonzo Karst said:
6.16. Unpublished geocaches may be archived
"....older than ten months may be automatically archived..."
Thank you, that was what I was looking for!
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Let me bring this thread to life. Obviously unpublished caches will be archived after some time, and I can prevent it to make comments to keep it alive, but what is the rule for how long I can leave it without having it archived?
In the past this has happened once, I think, and that came from Groundspeak and seemed automated, I think it was after six months. But I recently had a whole bunch of caches archived, and it seems the limit is now three months. I think it was much higher before. Is there an actual rule?
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On 8/21/2021 at 8:29 PM, niraD said:
One of the things I appreciate about Groundspeak is the way they have resisted creating any incentive to hide a cache other than the desire to own and maintain a cache. If they were to offer points for placing caches, then caches would be placed by people interested only in the points, not in owning and maintaining the caches.
I can see that it would be tempting to make a challenge with the goal "make more caches for me to find" (and I guess some old ones exist), but placing caches for fulfilling a challenge or souvenir would most certainly result in many boring, simple and unmaintained caches.
It is not legal for challenges, and for the same reasons not included in souvenirs. Not all rules make sense but this one does.
However, assuming that such challenges exist, can we see that the result has been bad?
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3 hours ago, The Kent Crew said:
As a disabled person (not in wheelchair) I go to search for lots of T1 caches that end up not being disabled friendly. To me the Adventure Caches have given me another way of enjoying getting out and about. They also have a lot of interesting facts about them that are missing from 'normal' caches. I don't like the Wherigo's, or the multi's and Earth caches, therefore I don't do them. It's a simple exercise of if you don't like them, don't do them, but don't spoil it for those of us who like doing them and find it makes a change from having to bend and search for inaccessible cache boxes.
A T1 should never, ever be inaccessible from a wheechair. Have you told the COs? They are breaking the rules. Such violations should be reported to reviewers. Do these caches belong to the same CO? Maybe part of "DT bombs"? For the latter, the COs tend to put bad ratings on the caches just to fill the DT matrix. Don't accept it. For most of us COs, we make an effort to verify that a cache is wheelchair friendly before putting a T1 rating on it.
What bothers me with ALCs is not that they exist but that they are made in collision course to Lab caches. Imagine if T1 and T5 were changed to be the same thing! Confusing, right? But now they make physical+temporary+potentially hard = virtual+permanent+easy. Makes sense?
However, I see nothing in the ALC guidelines that require them to be wheelchair friendly. Unless I am missing something, you should run the same or even greater risk of finding an inaccessible ALC as a badly graded traditional. Right?
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One more thing... This forum states "Formerly the Lab Caches forum, this is a place to discuss playing Adventures. ". Is that implying that Lab Caches (not ALCs) are so dead and buried that they don't even have a forum any more?
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I guess this would fit pretty well into one of my birdhouse caches. However, there is a matter of security. We live in a time when we are getting more and more wary about unknown websites. Scanning an unknown QR that is not part of the cache, which sends my phone to an unknown website... Is that what we want to do?
Wouldn't it be better to upload the photos to the cache in question, and project is given links to all participating caches? The best solution would then be that the project makes a script to "scrape" the images from the paricipating caches. Just some ideas.
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I am pretty sure this has nothing to do with the reviewer, since it is violating several rules from Groundspeak. Pokémon itself is a commercial trademark, Pokémon Go is a competing game, and Pokémon images may be copyrighted. Pretty clear IMHO.
The caches you refer to are several years old, and by then Pokemon Go was very new and these conflicts may not have been put into reviewer guidelines yet. "Past publication of a similar geocache is not justification for publication of a new geocache."
Furthermore, the rules state:
No commercial content
Cache pages perceived as commercial will not be published. Commercial content includes any of the following characteristics
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Name, links, or logos of the following
Businesses
Commercial products
Competing games or cache listing servicesSo it is all in the rules. Sorry, many fun ideas are blocked by this.
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I used iOS 6 for a long time with L4C. Unfortunately, I don't think that any application has been updated to conform with the new API and still supports iOS 6. Apple very much pushes developers to only support recent version, so as developer you have to fight to keep supporting the old versions, and to do that for a rapidly shrinking audience.
I used to write games for the Mac, and I was extremely good at supporting old systems, both old OSes and old computers. That was a totally meaningless effort. Nobody cared. Same thing here, it is not worth the trouble as developer.
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On 7/30/2021 at 2:08 PM, niraD said:
For me, DNF means I reached GZ and searched, but did not find the cache. If I don't reach GZ, or if I reach GZ but don't search for some reason, then it's a DNS (Did Not Search), logged as a Note.
Absolutely. I would log DNS or DNR (did not reach) as a Note.
I only log DNF if I think I have reasons to believe that the cache is gone, after searching thoroughly.
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On 7/25/2021 at 10:22 AM, barefootjeff said:
Or maybe a bonus for the Difficult Climb and Climbing Gear Required attributes?
Yes, why not? And as long as it is a bonus, and not a requirement for completing the souvenir, nobody is excluded.
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9 hours ago, Aprilscherzen said:
Do you have an example for this?
I do (more than one) but I can't post it here without pointing out specific COs and reviewers, and I don't think that is OK.
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Is It OK to Immediately Disable an Approved New Cache to Set Up Hardware then enable.
in General geocaching topics
Posted
IMHO the cache must be in place when it gets published. I have been hunting FTF on caches not in place at least twice. Published = available.
But this can be hard to do for a beginner. In both cases, this happened to beginner COs. A beginner simply can't predict how reviewers work. I fell in that trap myself on my second cache. I submitted it, got a no from the reviewer, it was too close to an ancient remain. So I went out to take it in, and asked the reviewer what to do, and that the remain was completely overgrown and not visible, expecting some kind of instruction about where to place it. Suddenly it was approved! Oops! I ran out and met the FTF hunters with the cache in my hand. (Don't look while I place it!)
What I am not so fond of is that the cache must be in place when I ask for a coordinate review. I can't see why it should sit there for weeks before publishing.