MNTA

First they do occasionally need maintenance. Signs disappear all the time. I have found this once and I don't do a lot of them. Second I did not start this hobby to get excited about virtual caches and a lot of ECs annoy me as I don't want to get a PHD in the subject matter. I do them but only out of necessity or curiosity. My opinion is for ALs really need to be integrated into the same platform both website and app. I should be able to be at a location and see stages available near me and physical caches. I use the website to plan my outings specially on longer trips. I also enjoy seeing where I found all of my caches. Reminds me of past trips and experiences. How does AL work in areas with spotty or no cell coverage? Also like physical caches there are good ones, ok ones and poor ones. At least with a poor physical cache I feel like I accomplished something I can't say the same thing about AL. At least with a PNG you got to get out of the car. I did one AL recently where all I needed to do was stop the car.

We have lost the connection to latitude & longitude

I'll second the wish for more old style challenges. Though I'm far rom qualifying for my states DeLorme challenge but will continue to slowly work on it. From the various maps our cellular providers show coverage, there are in fact a lot of dead spots out there and I truely wish the offline maps of the app could be improved so getting into and out of some remote areas these guides are invaluable. Since these spots are my happy place I have two different guides in my car at all times. Hope you enjoy your new caching territory!

Easy solution "ignore list" If you don't want to do them or can't do them. No one forces anyone to do a challenge let alone a LPC, but we have them both. There are challenges I will never qualify for and that is ok. There are also challenges that I never thought I'd qualify for which due to circumstances I can do. But showing consternation on a challenge that is difficult seems like entitlement to be able to get them all. Which is impossible. Personally I want more difficult challenges as it gives me something to work on.

Agreed mine is 300 miles from my home location. Middle of nowhere.

Went from 1 away to 7 away.

Was searching for a cache once and heard my dog yelp. Almost immediately felt a sting to my leg. I could not react fast enough and one of the wasps followed me running to my car .25 miles away, and I don't ever run, Well got hit 12 times and heard 3 yelps from my dog. Benadryl was our friend that evening (got appropriate dosage from his veterinarian mom) sound and early sleep that night. After the next searcher got hit, CO moved the cache.

This assumes you planned ahead and downloaded in advance. Would be great if the app would store some info of the immediate area so if you went into a blind spot you aren't #$#@#

Personally I agree with previous comments. The challenge should be finds of cachers that WERE charter members not that their current status is charter. But I suppose that is not up to me. Having worked hard to get to within 1 find to qualify would be disappointed to find I'm now much further away. BTW love these challenges just not moving targets. Can you please tell us who you added. I have 9 different bookmark lists with all the caches of charter members would love to update the list and maybe I might get lucky and find a cache nearby, IMaybe less interesting to me but maybe others whom you removed.

Now I have a personal challenge goal. My 10 mile radius shows 7/8 found though 25 miles 8/19 and 50 miles 16/53.

I too have noticed the trend. Fortunately no longer care about the F2F streak. If able I'll still try but that game is few and far between now. In the 2827 sq. miles (30 mile radius) surrounding my home location there were 22 new caches (2 currently disabled) this past month. Only a few within 10 miles of my house. The funny thing is currently 22 caches within 10 miles that are currently disabled. 123 disabled at 30 miles. Now some will not be archived but the trend `appears to me going down. This does not include the caches on my unsolvable (to me) ignore list. Granted this is still a small percentage of the active caches 6000ish.

Great idea In the US the boy scouts have a geocaching badge. See if there is a local troupe and contact their leader. Maybe you have a retirement community in the area.

I don't think it has to do with laziness at all. Looks like maybe a 3/4 mile hike but the terrain rating may be impractical for a lot of cachers. Lets say a family with small kids, or someone less sure footed. You hit the problem on the head. You hide caches you'd like to find, that is not the same as hides other cachers want to find. So a variety is needed and the easier ones and easier to get to will attract more than a T3 or T4.

My opinion is most new folks are not going to go far and wide to find caches. They care about maybe short radius around their home maybe 50ish to 100ish sq km if my math is correct 4km radius or 2.5-5 miles. It is not about empty area so GS suggestion is if the locals have found all the caches in the immediate area refresh the cache, give the locals more opportunity to find one nearby rather than forcing traveling hours to do a single find. Those are great but nearby ones are better. Personally I have one cache that just hit 100 finds in about 4 years, reviewing the logs i can say most of the regular local cachers in my area have found it. When it goes missing again I'll probably archive it and hide another one somewhere else in the park. Bring those locals back for another try and more opportunities. Every time a new cache is published nearby the same 10 super active cachers rush out to make the find before they go missing as a lot of them do, folks should really find more than 5 caches before hiding a cache, and despite the ability to travel further away from home.

Your town has caches owned by several different folks that are at least logging into the website in the last few weeks and granted 200ish caches within 30 miles is not a large amount I bet the number of folks that feel similarly are higher than you'd guess. My point is business as usual is not going to change things so try something different, all we hear is doom and gloom. From old GS blog: "`But there might be one you own that most local geocachers have already found and the location is not frequented by tourists. It could be time to archive it and free up the area, or you might consider creating a new and improved cache!" As I recall this blog post was not well received here, but I agree with it. Talk to the local hiders. Try something new something different. Encourage your unknown neighbors to hide new caches. Not everyone goes to events so they may be out there. Take that rusty tin with mushy log and throw it away and replace it with a shiny new cache. I had a local cacher approach me if I wanted to join their competition to find lonely caches as I had recently found 2, do something with hides maybe. Click on any new finders and see if they are local and encourage them to join. Just trying to help

Man that stinks and I'm assuming the combo was on your cache page. Which means ..... My opinion is most trackables don;t last long folks don't log them, if they do they pick them up on their first find and do log them but never cache again. The cooler the toy the faster they disappear. This reminds me of my father who got annoyed when he wanted to attach a cache to a power pole which is considered private property by the reviewer despite the pole being on his own property as an easement.

If the number of caches available is limited why don't you and your buddies start hiding more. That may trigger more new folks to joining and then they hide more. Or archive your existing caches and refresh them possibly moving to a nearby location as GS recommended a while back. Instead of adopting/maintaining abandoned caches, get them archived where appropriate and then hide your own. Refresh the area. As an engineer I solve problems for a living. It irks me when we just hear problems without trying to solve the problem. Try something new and if it works keep going. If it does not work try something else. Start a forum thread bouncing ideas off each other. Look at maps and collaborate on desirable locations. Hide a power trail on a great country drive, I am slowly working on finding the caches along a forrest road the long way around Mt. Hood last weekend I found 3/6 had a wonderful day could have stopped for more if I had wished. Personally don't care if a cache is at an amazing location. If it is great , but most of my day to day finds are not. Some days I have 10 minutes to spend, a GRC or LPC is more than enough to get my fix. Sometimes a 5-10 minute walk in a park does the trick, my dogs like these a lot. Others an afternoon of driving in the mountains, you get the point I hope. Start hiding all different kinds of hides. If folks start caching but not hiding in your area lots of prolific hiders in my area do very little finding and more hiding. One of my dumb hides which unfortunately archived as I moved out of state was titled "Why? Because every park should have a cache!", I really liked that silly little nano. Had tons of finds from all kinds of folks. But hides that are far away or multis that take a day or an afternoon will not encourage folks in my opinion. My amazing location virtual cache I published 2 weeks ago so far only has one finder, 8 hours from my home, 4 hours from the nearest major city it is not going to draw a lot of finders.But my silly nano in a park gets a find every week or so sometimes more. Good luck!

Changing the subject a bit... How would you design. a promotion that would be interesting to both the casual cacher and the experienced? Also to not disincentivize people from their normal caching. - Find a cache in a new county? - Find a T3 or higher cache traditional? - Find a cache X miles from your home? - Find multiple caches in a day Seems to me nothing would work well. Personally what I liked early on that is no longer there for me is focus on maps my challenge caches show my interest there. Focus on the GPS features lat/lon is impossible to even search for any more. Using your compass maybe add tools to project courses or more letterbox type instructions. Rethinking challenge rules may be a start, can't tell you the number of logs on grandfathered or difficult challenges are from lackies, hmmm maybe listen to your own staff. Maybe more stats and web features or better milestones. Slicker websites. Just some ideas.

100%

I agree with most of what has been said above. These souvenirs are really targeted for the casual cacher or new cacher to give a reward for getting out there. I suspect GS has data to back this up otherwise I'd be a little disappointed. It's a bit sad I think but they have a business to run and this type of marketing promotion someone thinks works even at the expense of their loyal customers. For me I too noticed they caused me not to want to go out specially if it was a weekend before the reset. But then I decided that was dumb and I also did not care about them as I probably would get them regardless of what I did or didn't do. SO I try to not care. The funny thing I see is all these promotions are time limited challenges that are against their own rules. At least with challenge caches you could do it on your own timeline or ignore them. Maybe a rethink of the reward systems is in order.

Visited GC25 wow what a trip to get there and great view from the top. Would never ventured anywhere near there without a cache being there and being a challenge addict the oldest in Idaho. Reason for this post is noticed someone posted a NM log and several trackables. Hmmmm

Today I found a cache hidden by a CO who had been deployed to Afghanistan, and owned a cache there. Curious I clicked on a few caches there and all the recent finds appear to be bogus. Big surprise. The last finder had finds on Sunday with caches in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Czechia, Ghana, Chile, and Argentina. Maybe there is a logical explanation to this. Maybe. New cacher 48 finds first find in Florida back in March. Maybe GS could help by identifying questionable behavior. Challenge caches make this difficult but not impossible. They could also probably archive caches with poor finding behavior or request CO attention. To me though it is pretty obvious that some of the relatively new cachers who've found my caches may not have visited. Is it worth calling them out and maybe disinsentivise them from joining the game properly in the future. As several posts have pointed out wish GS would do a little more, but I'm not going to loose sleep over it. Best part of my day today was finding a cache on a lonely country road just before sunset.

Having found this cache let me give my $0.02 Remote forest caches in the PNW are always tough even for local experienced cachers. In my case I found and signed it a week after a local filed a NM log. This cache is not for the faint of heart the forest road down/up to the cache is not the best I only remember doing this near the end of March after hitting snow blocking my planned trip nearby. Summer is not the best time of year for these caches tons of seasonal growth as you mentioned the dreaded Devil's Club, personally ran into some last week myself ouch. So bush wacking is not for the faint of heart, specially in shorts. So personally fall/winter/spring is a better idea and the problem with caches that draw tourists which we have a lot of due to GC92 GC12 GC17 GCA5 to name a few. Is that if you have driven an hour outside of town then an 45 minutes up a forest road and walked maybe 15 minutes you really really want to get the find. Add to that you probably never are going to return. Personally I'm ok with returning another day as forest caching is my favorite activity just not in the summer besides its hot on most summer days give me a nice and cool 60s with a light mist any day. The scariest muggle you can run into is a logging truck on a dirt road. Most COs place forest hides in a way to make it easy for folks (maybe just locals) to find specially since you usually have lots of tree cover and in the case of this cache probably lack of cell coverage. So your GPS is rarely accurate, one day coordinates can be spot on and the next finder complains they are off by 30 feet or more. Head to the obvious, stumps, logs, trees. The garden tools seem to be pretty common, I don't use them, mostly for black berry vines which can make a GZ inaccessible. Though I donated a lot of blood to find some caches. Now if foliage has grown up for the summer any man made path through waist high growth can cause a little distress usually there is a well worn trail to follow. As you said forest caches rarely go missing, the exception being ones near hunters campsite, wildfire, or logging. In the case of this cache a finder will find it soon enough. Sounds like the CO has health issues and this cache will either be adopted or archived soon.

Oh my check out the first picture ....

I don't disagree with you at all. It's called integrity, but again how do you know and even if you did how does it harm you if they don't follow the same guidelines you follow. You have the prerogative to delete online finds when they don't sign the logbook. I've done this twice when it was very obvious. I've suspected a few others but those folks seem to cache for a week then never return, so why bother. There is no actual proof of someone else signing a log for someone else so why does it bother you. Control what you can control and enjoy the game the best you can. My point is if folks wish to cheat how does that diminish my entertainment. I know someone who enjoys caching at times but has very little desire to touch a cache or sign a log. Specially when there are spiders or other bugs present. Does that somehow diminish other cachers enjoyment of the game?