riviouveur

Thread dicht, dan kan het niet meer mis gaan.

Groundspeak demande aux reviewers de ne pas toucher aux pages rédigées par les propriétaires des caches, sauf pour des cas extrêmes (contenu très désagréable, etc). En plus, ils ont dit à plusieurs reprises qu'il n'encouragent pas la création de copies "off-line" de la base des données. Donc, des mesures visant à faciliter cela, auront peu de chance à trouver du soutien. Ceci dit, tu pourrais éventuellement ouvrir une discussion dans le forum "Geocaching.com Web site". Une idée serait peut-être de pouvoir filtrer les PQ par date de publication.

Perhaps with the best intention(s), but this are not very well-organized/clear with very, very old stuf. Wellicht met de beste bedoeling(en), maar het wordt er niet overzichtelijker/duidelijker op. Ik heb de meeste van deze threads gesloten, want "gravedigging" (het weer naar boven halen van zeer oude threads) leidt inderdaad vaak tot confusie. De "history level" van deze forum is op dit moment "Show All", maar over een paar weken gaat deze terug tot de normale waarde voor dit board (30 dagen, geloof ik) en dan zullen deze threads verdwijnen (maar toch "searchable" blijven).

Daar weet ik niks van, maar verder heeft BBosman gelijk. Wat de modding betreft: zolang de diskussies redelijk "on-topic" en de toon "beleefd" en "respectvol" (nota bene t.o.v. de lackeys en vrijwilligers van Groundspeak) blijven, heb ik zin noch tijd om iets anders dan een "light touch" toe te passen. (Kritiek op de taalfouten van de moderator mag ook, mits beleefd en constructief... ik woon sinds 20 jaar niet meer in Nederland, kan ook zijn dat er af een toe een Duits woordje daartussen kruipt.)

Very occasionally, the nature of a puzzle is such that it makes sense to have the fake coordinates more than a couple of miles from the final cache. If the cache placer can convince the reviewer that there is a good reason, the reviewer may grant an exception. I make about one such exception per year, I guess. In this case, it appears that an exception was granted, by Erik, who was reviewing for the UK in a stop-gap role while a little local difficulty was being sorted out. Whether or not a current UK reviewer would grant the exception, I'm not sure. It might be nice if the cache owner were either to provide an automated solution checker, or to put something like "note: the final coordinates are further then the usual 1-2 miles from the start point, by arrangement with Groundspeak" in the text.

Reviewers have the ability to "retract" ("unpublish") a cache. This is mostly done when a cache is published by accident (fat-fingered reviewer clicks the Publish button when s/he means to do something else, such as write a note to the owner). I do this about once every three months, I guess. But unless the reviewer is very, very quick, the Insta-Notify©®™ mails will have already gone out. It is also occasionally used by the reviewers or Groundspeak when it's important that the cache disappear from the site altogether, for example if there are legal issues with the listing. This can be done at any time, even many years after the cache has been published. The good news is that the Found count of people who have found the cache does not go down in such cases.

That's the key. The "adequate permission" wording has been tried and tested over many years. That sentence, plus the disclaimer that "You assume all risks when looking for a cache", is apparently good enough for the most litigious country on earth. (Not everyone knows, perhaps, that one of the three partners in Groundspeak is a lawyer.) In practice, the reviewers will assume that you have permission, unless they have specific knowledge that it would be unreasonable to make that assumption. For example, if they look at the map and see that the cache is in the middle of the runway at Heathrow, they cannot assume permission. If the US reviewers see that the cache is in a National Park, they know - because Groundspeak has told them about a nationwide ban on caching on National Park Service lands - that permission cannot be assumed. If it's in a US National Forest, which is a whole different organisation which does not have a national ban on Geocaching, then permission probably will be assumed - unless the local reviewer knows that the local (state) branch of the Forest service has a different view. Etc, etc. For now, we can add to that list: if it's in a Royal Park, we know that the people with ultimate authority have said they don't want caches there. Note also that danger to the seeker - as raised by Kewfriend - definitely does not constitute a reason to deny a cache. If it did, then the reviewers or Groundspeak might become easier to sue, because they would be in effect saying "since we published this cache, we think it's safe". (This argument sounded weird to me when I first heard it, in a non-Geocaching context, but it becomes less so every time I come across it.) Groundspeak does not warrant or even remotely suggest that looking for a cache is safe. Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why reviewers are no longer called "approvers".

Not so. Reviewers are not banned from being FTF, but Groundspeak asks us to not do so in a way that might suggest that we got an advantage from our position. And the strange case of the BC reviewer being from Georgia is a strange bit of history. To return to the original questioner: the cache is in the queue and I'm sure your local reviewer will be along shortly. I notice that you don't have your home coordinates in the system; the review process will be speeded up if you add them by clicking here.

A Wherigo cache works like a Mystery with fake start coordinates. Saturation rules only apply to the physical cache. You can start where you like. Of course, a Wherigo cartridge doesn't need a cache at all.

Back on-topic: as Keystone said, this cache requires finding the SSID in a residential subdivision. From the aerial view I'd say that there are about 400 homes and 4km of roads. You're going to have people driving very, very slowly along there, hitting F5 to refresh their view of the available wireless networks. Hopefully the person in the passenger seat will be doing that, but in any case, I would fully expect law enforcement to be called at some point. The activity may or may not be illegal, but if it's a single male geocacher, that may be academic when he drives slowly past a teenage girl for the third time. There's also the possibility that people who want to take a shortcut might attempt to determine the home location of the cache owner and drive there. This might not be what you want, especially if the wireless network in question isn't in fact located at your home.

There's a multi-part answer to that: - People are allowed to post pretty much what they like here as long as they stay on-topic and are respectful. Apart from those two requirements, neither Groundspeak nor the moderators will tell people that they are not "allowed to post" (with definitiveness or otherwise). They might have some knowledge which enables them to say "in fact, you're wrong", but they won't stop you posting just because you're wrong. - The moderators are not the same as the reviewers (although some moderators are also reviewers). In this case, the true facts are between Nomex (who is not a moderator), Groundspeak, and the cache owner. It's very likely that the moderators of this section of the forum (their names are listed in the "Forum led by:" line on the index page) do not have any more information than anybody else. Incidentally, because of the limitations of the forum software, the "moderator" badge doesn't necessarily mean that the poster is a moderator in the forum in question. For example, under my avatar for this post you'll see the word "Moderator", because I have moderator responsibilities in a different part of the Groundspeak forums. In this section, I am just a regular citizen.

There is no exhaustive list of exactly what can be mentioned. Is a named platoon or battalion OK but a named division or army group or armed service not? I don't know. (I wonder why one would actually want to honour a specific battalion, but not its regiment or brigade, especially going three generations back.) You can certainly improve the likelihood that your cache listing will be accepted by some combination of the following: - Reducing or eliminating tributes in general (personally, if someone decided that the way to honour my life was to place a geocache, even a really nice one, I'd be rather unimpressed) - Avoiding language which invites the cache seeker to "pray for", "think about", "reflect on", "join with me in", etc etc. - Keeping tributes personal (meaning, about a specific individual rather than a larger group, and not about all the things which that individual believed in). Incidentally, most of the issues are to do with the wording on the cache page. To take another example, there is no general problem with a cache being placed at a church, even if the cache is located one foot from a huge marquee which says "Jesus Saves", and even if the cache placer hopes that the seeker will take note of that sign. What you can't do is to use Groundspeak's web server and bandwidth to advance your message, free of charge, via the cache listing page. (If you shell out a couple of bucks for a TB tag, you can - subject only to minimum considerations of family-friendliness - knock yourself out on the TB page.)

Caches to honour an individual (person, dog, etc) generally don't trigger the "agenda" guideline. Once you try to honour a group, and especially if the wording suggests that the cache seeker might like to do the same thing, it's fairly easy to cross the line. (In both cases, "YMMV" applies.) You might not think that anything as simple as honouring service personnel could be seen as an agenda, but that's generally how Groundspeak, the lackeys, and the reviewers will see it. The line between an acceptable and an unacceptable agenda has to be drwan somewhere (example: "this cache honours the gallant SS officers who fought to keep the Bolsheviks from invading our beloved German fatherland in 1945" ), and Groundspeak has made the choice to draw that line right at the top of the page. This means that a number of causes which almost nobody on the planet would object to are excluded, as are causes which might be controversial internationally but which 99.9% of the people likely to visit the cache would support. Groundspeak has absolutely no tree-hugging pinko liberal hippy peacenik agenda; indeed, the company President is an Air Force veteran. Keeping agendas - even great ones - off cache pages is the best guarantee of keeping this game free for everyone, in the same way that keeping established religion out of the US Constitution is the best way to guarantee freedom of religion.

I know of at least one reviewer who is a serving LEO.

To me, your two paragraphs say slightly different things, since if "using numbers off a sign" isn't "just using your GPS", then "opening a micro with a slip of paper inside" probably isn't either. (Sitting down to draw the grid for a Vigenère cipher, however, would push me over the line into Mystery territory.) But that's me being picky, so that I can say: the second paragraph - on its own, and with the interpretation of "just using your GPS" that I outlined just above - is a very good definition of a Multi, possibly with the addition of "and the cache listing" after "just my GPS". That said, if a cache owner submits a Mystery which looks like it meets the Multi criteria, but they insist that they want it as a Mystery, I will generally accede to their wishes. There may be something clever about the Multi stages that I've missed, or they just want to be Mysterious. The blue question mark is intended to cover many bases.

The reviewers are technically able to change the type of a cache, but they are also sensitive to the fact that in areas with relatively few multis or puzzles, people are keen for their stats to remain "correct". So once a cache of a given type has been found by a few people, your local reviewer may not be keen to change its type.

Il est vivement conseillé de marquer l'extérieur de votre cache avec la mention "Géocache" et, s'il reste de la place, "Contenu Inoffensif". Le marquage "Géocache" sert non seulement comme un peu de publicité pour notre activité (dans le cas où un moldu la trouve), mais aussi, dans le monde Francophone, à distinguer les Géocaches des Cistes. Les deux jeux ont beaucoup de points en commun, dont le fait que les endroits propices au placement d'une cache le sont aussi souvent pour un (ou plusieurs ) cistes. Toute confusion entre les deux risque de nuire à l'image et à la pratique des deux jeux, qui sont autrement parfaitement capables de co-exister. Il est aussi important pour le géochercheur de savoir qu'il a effectivement trouvé la cache, pour éviter non seulement des discussion du type "tu n'as pas signé le log", mais aussi que les objets voyageurs (TB, geocoin, etc) ne soient pas déposés dans des cistes, où leur espérance de vie est assez limitée. En ce qui concerne "Contenu Inoffensif": oui, si la cache se trouve dans une ammobox en face de l'entrée de l'Elysée, cela ne prouve pas qu'il ne s'agit pas d'une bombe. Mais ce texte pourrait bien rassurer celui qui trouveura la cache en forêt (et/ou ses parents).

That's pretty much the "meat" of the current framing of the commercial guideline, as introduced by MissJenn's post here. For example, you can talk about your favourite sports team even though it's quite likely to be part of a for-profit conglomerate. You can reference your favourite movie, even if it's only a couple of years old and available on DVD (as long as you don't tell people to buy the DVD). But you probably can't reference a movie which is currently running in theatres. It mostly makes sense, although it doesn't always make for easy reading. The "business names should not appear in a cache name" guideline exists in a little space of its own, away from the "intent" box. AFAIK, it's about addressing slippery-slope issues: if someone decides to place a cache at every McDonald's in their state, then after a while the corporate name is appearing quite a lot. There may not be any intent to promote the business, but it is sort of the net result. Or, maybe McDonald's is using sock puppets who write their cache pages discreetly, with reviewer notes saying "no commercial intent, honest". McDonald's is probably a bad example here, but the reviewers regularly see all sorts of "borderline" commercial caches; free advertising to an audience the size of Geocaching.com's membership base is something many companies would not sniff at. (As you say, negative use of a business name would most likely fall under the agenda guideline.) I would agree that these two aspects to the commercial guideline could be seen to be slightly mutually contradictory, if you want to take time to argue about the finer points of semantics. But then, there are lots of slightly contradictory things about the whole Geocaching.com experience. I call that "charm". By the way: commercial content on Waymarking? Knock yourself out. Another bit of inconsistency if you think that Groundspeak has a quasi-religious thing about advertising, but just a marketing decision if you see Geocaching and Waymarking as two different product lines.

Any references to logging online in "how to"-type documents are intended to encourage people to use the site (feel free to add "and click on the Google ads, buy Premium Memberships, visit the online store, etc"). They do not represent any official position from Groundspeak that failing to log your finds here is "not within the spirit of the game" or anything like that. This is one of those areas where the wording is intended to be informal and as such, may not stand up to extensive semantic scrutiny. From my experience, I would say that the number of cache seekers who do not log online is about 2% of the total. I even know of at least one reviewer who no longer logs their finds online.

Well, except people in whose language "Aug" isn't a month (French, for one, plus much of Eastern Europe).

Suite à la croissance du geocaching dans la région francophone qui comporte la France et la Wallonie, il y a désormais un troisième reviewer pour cette région. Ce nouveau reviewer travaille sous le nom de "miguaine" et a déjà publié sa première cache ce soir!

Reviewers are not required to check the cartridge at all, so in the general case, they will only check the final location. After all, you could publish the cartridge without a final cache and there would be no review process at all. Permission is mostly about people minding (or not) that a physical container has been left on their land. There are occasionally some bizarre cases where landowners have an objection to people walking around looking for virtual caches or waypoints in areas which are otherwise open to the public (and one or two less bizarre ones in very security-sensitive areas), but generally a reviewer will assume that if people are allowed to be somewhere, they are allowed to be there carrying a PDA. Actually, that's a thought - currently there are some places in major cities where you might look suspicious operating a GPSr, but with the increasing complexity of phones, I don't suppose many people would think that you look suspicious tapping away on an iPhone; they'll assume your are texting when in fact you are (shock!) geocaching.

The final of a Mystery cache should normally be within 2 miles / 3 km of the GCxxxxx coordinates. When reviewing, I regularly ask people to move their start coordinates to within that distance. Exceptions are rare.

As kohalas points out, it would be a foolish idea for the reviewer to include "colourful" comments about the cache owner, as the CO could potentially have saved every URL relating to the cache. Reviewers can see the archived logs on any cache without needing to have saved the URL. My main use of archived notes when reviewing, is if there has been an exchange of useful information pre-publication which has, for some reason, taken place via e-mail. Then I will typically take one of the RNs and post the important parts of the e-mail exchange in there, so that another reviewer can see what was discussed. But nothing is posted which I wouldn't want the CO to see. (I have a big sheet of paper on my wall for that sort of stuff. And a green pen, but only because I have pretensions to run MI6, bwahahaha.)

Oh knowledge one could you cite your sources? I think some of the reviewers here would disagree. The second point may or may not be correct: different reviewers go through the queue of caches in different ways. Normally I look at the new ones first, but if there's a series of 15 with half being multis, I might just go back to the "held" caches first to see if I can't publish one which was just missing a waypoint or something minor like that. The first point is incorrect. Groundspeak does not ask the reviewers to treat PMs any differently from non-PMs.