Doctroid

<---- See my forum title

benchmarks are a US thing only, until they are recognized all around the world it will be unfair to count them as finds What? That's like saying until there are as many geocaches per square mile in Uzbekistan as there are in Seattle, it will be unfair to count geocaches as finds.

Huh. I didn't. How very special. How come it doesn't show how many benchmark finds you have? Oh, right, because TPTB would like everyone to forget the site's benchmark features exist.

You know, I think they were. Just now I looked and it looks to me like the avatars are smaller than they were a few hours ago. Definitely smaller than they are on the forum posts. At least in my browser. And I think I've figured out why they made this design change. It makes the minimum vertical size of a log larger, which means if someone enters a "TFTC" log or a blank log, the huge gulf of whitespace will stick out like a sore thumb. That space just screams "fill me with some words!" Or not...

But there is a reviewer. Or rather, there are THOUSANDS of reviewers. Someone is bound to see your challenge, say to himself "that's a geocache, not a challenge," and hit the flag button. If enough people do it, your challenge disappears. So if that's such a great idea, why aren't geocaches done that way? Because of land ownership issues and the physical container. Exactly! So why have TPTB now handed us a sanctioned way to circumvent all that troublesome reviewing? A challenge can be (until it's flagged enough times) an un-reviewed geocache. More generally, a challenge can be anything — regardless of considerations of land ownership, environmental impact, personal safety, suitability for families, and so forth — and can only be "reviewed" by a crowdsourcing mechanism after its publication. Is that a good thing? If so, why not do traditional caches that way? If not, then geocaching.com's abdication of reviewing challenges needs to be rethought.

But there is a reviewer. Or rather, there are THOUSANDS of reviewers. Someone is bound to see your challenge, say to himself "that's a geocache, not a challenge," and hit the flag button. If enough people do it, your challenge disappears. So if that's such a great idea, why aren't geocaches done that way?

People still use printers? I like having the avatars there. But an account preferences item to turn them off would be good.

Well, I think challenges are pretty bad, but mostly I agree that ignoring them is better than getting all bent out of shape about them. But that's not what this thread is about. This thread is about TPTB declining and deleting negative feedback. Are the challenge-haters who are complaining about them a small but vocal minority? Who knows? What we do know is, TPTB are not only rejecting the complaints but purging them within an hour or so of their being posted. That bespeaks an arrogance and contempt for the customers that I find very disturbing.

Zing!

Given that people are making suggestions on the feedback site that challenges should move to a separate site or at least not count toward total finds, and those suggestions are being declined within an hour or so, while they're still racking up hundreds of votes, I would not bet on that. Maybe I'm wrong, which is why I'm not cancelling my premium membership yet.

Another way would be to overload the system with a gazillion garbage challenges ("Take a picture of your armpit") until TPTB realize what a bad idea this was. Or is that what everyone's already doing? Hard to tell.

Good policy, but I thought the cache was still some distance away, and the biological imperative was getting urgent.

Earlier this year I went into some woods and was about to hunt a couple of caches, but before doing so I stopped to take a leak. When finished with that I started to get out my GPSr to get a bearing on the first cache... and then noticed a plastic container at the base of a tree, partly hidden under some debris, about six feet away from where I'd stopped. The log WAS damp, but that wasn't my doing.

And? You as the CO must provide coordinates for finding. But finders are under no obligation to use them.

It happens. Generally I believe the accepted unspoken code is that you can log a find on it after FTF happens. Or if you aren't comfortable with that just email the CO when it publishes. It may have been a letterbox, or a cache listed on another site.

Bingo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a playground hide. The location needs to be taken into account when considering what kind of cache it should be, how one should hide it, how one should look for it, and even if one should look for it, but that's also true of every other cache. If you don't like playground caches don't hide them and don't look for them. But if it's not violating a guideline, leave it at that.

I checked the guidelines and apparently you are permitted to hide a cache on the moon. Problem solved.

Right, the point is not to identify all beginner-friendly caches, but to identify a set of caches that are likely to be beginner-friendly. And of course no script can do that perfectly, and one can argue about the criteria for that; but the idea is to try to exclude beginner-unfriendly caches, not to be comprehensive. A 1/1 that has recently been hidden and not found yet may be good for a beginner — or not, if the CO has messed up on the coordinates. One that's been found is more likely to not frustrate a beginner.

I'd stay away from that one. There are a couple of plagues on that home.

More likely because it has NM attribute set.

Don't know about other platforms and software, but on my Android phone, using Barcode Scanner, it displays the URL and you have to press a button before it goes there. Ditto, and I can use an antivirus app to check the link before I open it <3 my android phone. To the OP, keep us posted on what the CO has to say? I'm curious. I just encountered Microsoft tags; apparently Barcode Reader doesn't do them, and the Microsoft Tag Reader app for Android does push the link direct to the browser without first asking the user. So I was going to delete it, but maybe I just need the antivirus app you alluded to? What is it?

Yep. Obviously someone's tweaking the algorithm with a sledge hammer.

No, we have more than that. We have a general description from TPTB, and simply by looking at what gets highlighted and what doesn't we can narrow down the specifics. So far it seems: - non traditional caches are excluded - micros and "other" sizes are excluded - caches with difficulty higher than 3.5 are excluded - caches with NM attribute are excluded - caches not found in the past month are excluded That's probably most of it; are there any caches with any of the above attributes that are highlighted, or any with none of the above attributes that aren't?

It could definitely use more tweaking. I noticed that there wasn't a single "beginner friendly" cache on the first page of my local search results. The most recent find on any of those caches is three days. Two of those area listed as micros and one a "not specified" cache type. The rest of the caches on the first page haven't been found in over a week. I tried looking for caches near Ithaca, NY, and indeed none is highlighted on the first page. But it's not because they haven't been found in 3 days. Of the 20 on the first page, 15 are micros or "other" size. (I know they reject micros and I assume they reject "others".) Of the five remaining, two are multis and two are unknowns. The one traditional, non-micro, non-other cache is marked NM. On caches in my area (and I assume everywhere) it highlights caches found up to a month ago, which seems not unreasonable. And if a cache is rejected because the owner failed to clear an NM attribute, I don't see that as a problem. Better that than to disregard the NM attribute. Obviously a human being can give better recommendations than any script; any simple criteria a script can check will give some false positives and false negatives. But a good script should be able to keep both to a reasonable minimum. Cutting on DNF/found ratio makes some sense, but might not be feasible. The way the script is set up, it may not have easy access to individual logs — and you'd want the recent DNF/found ratio, not the ratio over the life of the cache. After all if there were 200 finds all in 2002-2009 and 5 DNFs all in 2010-2011, it's probably not beginner friendly. Still, evidently the script needs further thought. Apparently it accepts difficulty up to 3.5, which I'd say is too high.

Not good! Or install Barcode Scanner and use that. I don't think it even has the option to go directly to the site immediately.