yumitori

I just wonder why Groundspeak would bother supporting such a one-way street, as you put it. There would be a certain public relations value to the move, but I am unconvinced that such a benefit would be significant. There's folks out there that will only be satisfied the day geocaching.com dries up and blows away, and Jeremy has to get a job working the window at McDonalds. No matter what GC.com does, it will always be viewed as the evil monopoly by these people. For the rest of the community I don't know that such a system would be overly prized. Of the interfaces I'm familiar with, my opinion is that geocaching.com blows everyone else away. What would another site offer to attract loyal users? Would multiple listing sites would spread the server load enough to matter? There would still need to be daily updates between sites, and with a number of locations to exchange information with the bandwidth might even increase for GC.com. In the end any move towards sharing cache listings would require the management here to take time away from all of the other great ideas folks in the forums have come up with. I don't think that sharing cache information is a bad idea, but it's way down on the list of things I'd like to see implemented.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bf.html

Let's see... Personally I would gain 1 cache within 100 miles. No wait... that one was listed here as well before it disappeared and was archived. But it's still 'available' on another listing service. I can certainly see the benefit to other sites, but any advantage gained by geocaching.com seems minimal at best. If a cache is out there that meets the standards here, most folks will already list it here. Those that don't usually have a reason why they don't, and it's unlikely those reasons will go away with open sharing. So tell me again why geocaching.com should participate in this brave new experiment? Ron/yumitori

I suggest you read the threads about why geocaching.com asks that items like knives not be placed in caches. It has less to do with a misguided attempt to protect children than one to protect geocaching from overly concerned land managers. If you find a way to change the attitudes of all those folks who can ban geocaching in their local areas, the website's administrators might reconsider their stance. In the meanwhile, protecting our sports seems prudent.

My utilikilt is heavy enough to turn thorns quite nicely.

This is a good example of why one should use the new 'Note to Reviewer' box on the cache submission page. Real coordinates for mystery caches, all of the locations of multicaches, answering questions about land ownership and/or permission before they are asked... Stuff like this should all go there, and I imagine can speed up the approval process. In your particular case, have you e-mailed your approver at any point except to answer questions, or have you just been waiting for them to respond to you? It's quite possible that there are issues behind the scenes that you are unaware of.

Typically. There's a few that save images to the web, and allow you to search by date and time. Those you can just go through until you find yourself.

Licking County actually has some wonderful parks. It's a real shame the land managers took things to the extreme. But in that they aren't alone. Here's the law regarding knives in New South Wales. Check too the link for what consitutes a 'knife' under their laws.

When this has been discussed before regarding literature some folks objected to, the concensus was that you should trade what you think the item you are removing is worth. So take the offending stuff, leave something worthwhile in its place.

I enjoyed Angels & Demons. Harder to turn into a geocache though. His books aren't great literature, but they are nice escapist stuff. I'm going to read his others when I get a chance.

I thought Dan shut down his site himself. He couldn't keep up with it.

But taking the attitude 'You work for me, park boy!!' is not likely to gain you sympathetic ear when it comes time to discuss geocaching in local recreation areas. Ignoring park rules, calling managers morons, and similar actions are not going to endear us to the people with the power to shut down our fun. I still have a pocket knife in my box of geocaching goodies, but it's not going into any containers any time soon. We need to work with these folks, not butt heads with them. Given the choice between geocaching without knives and no geocaching at all, the decision is obvious.

In this specific instance I guess it depends on what you means by 'purposely placed incorrectly'. An off-set is a valid type of cache. So too is one where the owner warns you that the coordinates are only estimates and the cache is somewhere in a much wider area than we would normally expect due to the built in error. But I've occasionally seen folks give coordinates that are deliberately off without any sort of note to that effect on the page. I think that kind of 'misdirection' can only lead to hard feelings. If my coordinates are off, I want to know. As far as photos and other spoilers in logs, I generally don't mind them as long as they are clearly labeled as such. I've only once asked a finder to change their log entry, when it mentioned the container's specific hiding place. Ron/yumitori

Guys, let it go. The thread is about an article on geocaching in a Jeep magazine.

I try to phrase things in a way to avoid insulting the inexperienced person who left the contraband (though I don't know if I always succeed), but make it clear I was getting something out of the cache that doesn't belong there. Ron/yumitori

Ah, but how? There may be more geocachers who take vacations in Montana every summer than there are those of us who actually live here. We still few if enthusiastic. If each of those cachers leave even just two or three caches each year on their trips (and some have left more), that's an additional two or three every year for each of us to adopt, to run out to if a problem develops, to take time away from our own planned hides and weekend hunts to fix. Why would you wish that on us? And if your solution is that they are recovered if a problem develops instead of being adopted, I encourage you to search for the numerous discussions about who owns a container in the woods. There's those who reject the idea of anyone except the owner removing their cache, no matter in how bad a shape it's in. How would you fix the problem of unmaintained caches? Please. What solution do you have that will satisfy everyone?

I found a home-burned CD of 'geocaching songs'. Unfortunately I traded it into another cache down the road and didn't keep a list of the titles...

I think the answer is brilliantly illustrated by Yumitori's post. It's sad that geocaching has become as rule-bound as it has. However, there seem to be a number of people who just aren't happy unless every possible contingency is covered by some regulation. Instead of getting a job in the government, like most good petty tyrants, they have chosen to plague us here. Cool! I'm a sycophant! Does that come with a non-paycheck like the approvers get? Fizzy, what I'm failing to see acknowledged by the 'too many rules' crowd is that all of those rules/guidelines/dictates/good ideas came about in response to some problem. Contrary to some folks' beliefs, Jeremy doesn't wake up on Mondays and muses 'What should I ban this week?' If geocaching.com disappeared tomorrow and the wonderful neo-anarchist freegeocachingforall.org is created in its place, in a year or two it would have many of the same rules/guidelines/dictates/good ideas because the problems aren't going to go away. I'll ask you what I asked CoyoteRed - given that these issues exist and need to be addressed to keep more land managers from banning geocaching, how would you write rules/guidelines/dictates/good ideas that satisfies all parties?

Fortunately, the one we did last spring was in a side channel. Check the logs for May 26, 2003.

Some folks would rather ask forgiveness than permission. Some would rather be safe than sorry. Some even like to call land managers moronic if they make too many rules (as defined by the person calling names). In my opinion, this approach is unlikely to change managers minds, whether or not they are actually morons. I like the suggestion to check with the locals first. Not every well-known regulation is posted at the gate.

Agreed. Unless there's more to the story, I'm not seeing the problem beyond the possible issue over trespassing.

Unfortunately, no. There's too many cachers around here whose regular non-puzzle cache pages read the same way...

You need to read your own thread much more closely. The answer's already here, stated several times. You've even been given solutions, both for listing them on geocaching.com and elsewhere. Why do you demand that there must be geocaching.com-listed one-time caches under your rules, besides 'I want it'?

There's downloadable documents on this page. Adjust the formating to fit your particular containers.

What is this? Trolls "R" Us? Those who scream the loudest are not the only 'customers', though they seem to forget that over their own noise. There's been numerous attempts to get away from the 'restrictive' limitations on geocaching.com. From what I've seen it rarely ends up involving more than a few disgruntled folks. Perhaps the guidelines are not as horrible or widely hated as some believe.