sdarken

A sense of adventure and/or sense of fun is a must-have in my opinion.

For a long time I had the same concern as the OP but hanging around these forums convinced me that it's OK for different people to play different variations of the same game. I no longer find every cache and I don't bother driving around for hours doing suburban geocaches anymore because I don't generally find that fun (especially by myself). One thing that I do think changed quite a lot over the years is how much each cache is valued. When there were a lot fewer caches people appreciated each cache a lot more. There are so many caches now in most urban/suburban areas that each cache seems to get a lot less attention. Caches are treated more of a commodity and less like a gift. If you hike to the top of a hill or mountain for one cache I think you appreciate that one cache a lot more than if there are caches ever quarter mile (or more) along the way. When there are a lot of caches your appreciation gets divided across all of the caches that you find along the way.

I have a cache that requires 10 miles of hiking in a very lightly used area including 2 miles on an abandoned overgrown fire road and a 500ft scramble down wooded hillside where there's no trail at all. My cache was discovered and logged by people looking for mushrooms. I had another cache that required 10 miles of hiking in a lightly used area. It was well hidden off an obscure social/deer trail that was reachable by a similarly obscure social/deer trail. That cache was visited once or twice over a few month period and then it disappeared. After those experiences I believe that it's possible for any cache to be muggled.

**Oops. I see there are duplicate threads. Moderators can delete my answer or merge threads as they see fit. ** I grew up in Australia and remember Roses chocolates in a tin. Is that what you're asking about? If so, I'd say, no. It wont work. It's most likely not waterproof and I'm guessing it's also going to rust over time. A bit like what happens with Altoids tins on a smaller scale. If you want to check if it's waterproof, submerge it in a bucket of water and see if it comes out dry. As for size, I'm pretty sure that would be called a regular sized cache if I'm remembering the size of those tins correctly.

I've found that in some situations, the less I concern myself with what other people are doing, the more I enjoyed the game. You can't do much to change the way other people choose to play the game. Having said that, people that are new to the game often don't realize that cache owners generally prefer longer logs. (I don't think you really understand that aspect till you go to a lot of trouble of creating your own cache). I have information on my profile page that I know newbies will sometimes read. That's a form of passive education. If you speak to newbies by email or at events, this kind of topic is a good one to reinforce. People will often copy what they see other people doing. With so many drive-up caches that generally only get terse logs it's understandable why people will get into a habit of making short logs even for special caches that warrant a lot more feedback.

Thanks for the tip. I grabbed a set. Ammo cans are still my favorite but these containers have their place too sometimes.

I stopped caring about my find count and my friend's find counts some time ago. Things changed quite a lot when I got to that point. Now I do geocaches that seem interesting or are convenient at that particular moment. Geocaching challenges have the potential to provide additional enjoyable activities in my life. G.S is going to need to be some tweaks to ensure they don't get completely out of hand (and continue to produce worthwhile activities) but I'm willing to wait and see how things play out. Lots of people here are way too serious about the whole thing. More specifically on topic, one of the major reasons Waymarking never took off was that the Waymarking activities didn't contribute to people's find counts. It's pretty understandable why G.S made the decision to include them. I'm glad they did so that challenges would actually get some adoption and we can at least give them a chance to see where this takes us.

Good post Toz. I hope to see community ratings come into play with challenges. I think that will improve the usefulness of them greatly. (Personally I would be happy to see crappy challenges disappear from the site entirely when some kind of threshold is reached. It would be miserable if we end up with thousands of poor challenges that exist for all eternity.) The importance of expecting people to actually visit a location seems important and I really hope people dont use these things to duplicate/replace places where a traditional cache could work just as well. Using challenges to encourage a new experience or to take people to a location where physical caches are not allowed seem like the most valuable uses of these things.

If this new feature and/or the deletion of feedback topics is enough for you to cancel your premium membership it seems as though you were ready to go anyway. Bye. As for the devaluation of the value of smileys, I dont get that argument at all. Last week I did 22 miles of hiking up a mountain for 2 smileys. On the way home I spent 5 minutes to get two PnGs. Smileys have never been equal. Until people get over the concept of it being a competition they will continue to get themselves worked up into knots over this kind of silly stuff. IMO challenges have potential to be useful and interesting. Lots of the ideas suggested by the community already have the potential to shape challenges into a worthwhile addition to the current range of ways to play the game.

I've hidden a couple of those. In both cases I put them in a full-size backpack (not a day pack). I couldn't close up the backpack so I put a garbage bag over the top. In one case I rode several miles on a bike with one on my back. Challenging, but not impossible.

Going off-topic for a second... Where did you get that figure from Coldgears? I doubt G.S would reveal such information and if it did, I'd be shocked if you were remotely in the ballpark.

I'm sure some people in these forums would file this piece of "art" to be a waste of good containers

I left $20 bills in caches for milestone finds a few times. For one of those finds I got a FTF on a cache and left the $20 for whomever was the 4th to find so that I could enjoy the logs of the 2nd and 3rd finders too.

Funny series of caches though I I'm surprised that anybody would be OK with a photo of themselves posted in a public place with the word "loser" scrawled over the top. That seems a little much. If the ex's also got into geocaching, things could get verrry interesting.

I found a chocolate bar in a cache once. I ate it. It was delicious.

Someone once asked whether people would bother hiding caches if there was no online logging. My guess is that a people would still place caches but there would be vastly less caches in existence. I doubt that many people would bother placing more than a 2 or 3 caches without some kind of feedback. If everybody just logged with a "TFTC" it's hard to believe that too many people would continue to go to much trouble to hide lots of interesting caches. While there's no rule about requiring longer logs, I think it's pretty clear that cache owners prefer them. For new cachers I think a little education can go a long way. I put some of my own preferences for how I play the game on my profile page because I know that some newbies will read it. When I was new I enjoyed reading other people's profiles and I learned from what I read. Most of my caches take some effort to reach so the percentage of short logs that I receive is probably lower than many people but the total number of logs I receive is also lower. Short logs used to annoy me but I've learned to ignore ways that others play the game that don't agree with my preferences.

As a general rule, I would advise you against uploading spoiler photos. The cache owner is the person that should decide how much information to give to finders. Most cache owners enjoy seeing photos but don't upload photos of the actual hide location and, if the cache container is special, don't upload photos of that either.

The cost of shipping ammo cans generally makes them unsuitable for buying online so you should search out your nearest military surplus store (assuming that you're in the U.S) for those.

As a cache owner, there's an audit log of everyone who has viewed your PMO cache. Some people (particularly puzzle owners) like to see who might be working on their puzzle.

I agree that there must be more that is being left unsaid. Having zero active caches of his own doesn't help the OP's position. (In addition to only logging a find on one single cache in this year). It doesn't seem as though the OP has any interest in making the game better in his own area if he is willing to contribute so little. Back on topic - sorting the list of nearest caches based on favorite points would definitely help locate some potentially interesting caches in whatever area the OP is intending to visit. (Around here, if I only looked at the nearest 100 caches, I would be within 2 miles of my starting point.)

If you spend a little more time around the forums you will find that for many people geocaching has nothing at all to do with hiking. While many of the earlier geocachers were also hikers, that's much less common these days. In urban areas I'd guess that 75% of new geocachers never walk further than to the other side of their neighborhood parks to find a cache.

While posting Needs Maintenance / Needs Archived notes on caches in disrepair is the usually the right thing to do, I'd advise you to tread carefully when suggesting that very old caches get archived. Some geocachers will get upset if "historic" caches get archived. Also, there's a fine line to tread between helping out and becoming a geo-policeman especially when dealing with owners who are active but not necessarily good with cache maintenance. By the way, if an cache owner agrees to have their cache adopted over to you, you can use this form to do the transfer.

OK, we get it, you guys have a problem with the introduction of smartphone users to Geocaching, although I'm not sure why. Sounds like a broken record. Smartphones lowered the barrier of entry quite considerably so I'd say it's true that Smartphone users are more likely to drop out sooner though it has also allowed more people to try the game so I presume that overall the number of obsessed cachers must be continuing to grow. I dont agree with My Yuck's comment about Smartphone users not hiding. Smartphone-or-not, the most common pattern I see is that people will find between about 2 and 30 caches then hide one of their own then drop out of the game altogether. I don't mind the game going mainstream but having more and more caches by absent owners isn't doing anything much to enhance the experience of subsequent new players since most people's first attempt at cache placement is a learning experience and those caches tend to have very slow deaths. In my area, I see lots of people trying the game but very very few of those actually continue. I really wonder if it has something to do with the large number of easy-to-get-to uninspired caches. Most of those newer players never get to experience the really interesting caches/locations. (Yes, I know there are going to be exceptions to my generalizations above). I can't think of any other hobby that a new person can try for one day and leave something behind the impacts future players (positively or negatively) for years to come.

I think it's called Tozainamboku's Law - If a a GC forum thread runs long enough eventually someone mentions ice-cream. I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page about it.

Learn from your mistakes perhaps? Don't take a rental car off road and watch out for ditches. Don't take trips with complete strangers.