riviouveur

You may well have more finds and hides than the account which your reviewer uses when reviewing, but I would bet a large part of my (non-reviewer) pay check that you don't have anything like the numbers that on the account which they use when they're out caching. However, "it's not (just) about the numbers". Reviewers need other qualities, which are outlined here.

The first part of your statement is right, the second part "not so much". Caches in the countries which don't have their "own" (local) reviewer are reviewed by some of the oldest and most experienced reviewers, and generally get looked at quite quickly. Dropping a TB or coin in an unpublished cache is a slightly risky business, especially if the cache is being placed a long way from your home area. Reviewers regularly turn down caches which have been submitted by people on holiday, if there is no coherent maintenance plan. Sometimes there's a TB in the cache. Sometimes the cache placer attempts to use this for "moral blackmail" purposes to get their cache published.

No need to refresh Geocaching.com - you will receive an e-mail when the cache is published. Sunday night is the busiest time of the week for the volunteer reviewers, so it may take a day or two. Your local reviewer knows more about local conditions than I do. However, looking at your cache, I can see that you stated that it is placed "in a black bin liner". This is generally a bad idea. Bin liners (garbage bags) are designed to bio-degrade, and that's exactly what they do, even if thorns and animals don't get to them. By the time your cache has had three visitors, there *will* be a hole in the bag, which will allow moisture in and then keep it right next to the cache box (and attract insects, snails, etc). It's best to place the box without a bag; that way, the outside may get rained on, but it will be able to dry out.

When using irony in electronic communication, it's generally a good idea to sprinkle smileys around. Otherwise, when one comes to plead "sorry guv, I was being ironic" later, the casual reader is entitled to wonder how sincere they are now being. The word "faceless" in the original post strikes me as fairly borderline (yes, I am being ironic here; what I actually mean is "gratuitously rude"), especially since the identity of the three UK reviewers is widely known. If Deceangi or Graculus or Alba15 archives a cache then it says "Archived by <their name>" and I'm sure if anyone sent the reviewer in question a polite e-mail asking what had happened, they would get an explanatory answer. On the substance of the OP's request: archiving of apparently abandoned caches is done by the same faceless, uncaring, inconsistent reviewers who publish your caches (with the same degree of faceless, uncaring inconsistency) and is not centralised by Groundspeak. To do so, with the thousands of caches which the reviewers archive every month, would take an enormous amount of effort to coordinate. "Forced" adoption is no longer possible, at the direct request of Groundspeak to the reviewers. The reasons for this have been dealt with above by my learned reviewer colleagues. In general, if a cache owner has left the game but their cache is not causing any other problem, perhaps being maintained by the community, the reviewers will not generally intervene. Indeed, they probably won't even be aware of the situation.

From the reviewing point of view, a 16-stage multi is, in effect, 16 separate caches. That's fine, but by placing it you are asking your volunteer reviewer to put many times more effort into reviewing it than a traditional cache. Reviewers organise their time in their own way, but I, for one, review the easier caches first, before settling down with a non-alcoholic beer to look at the complex ones. When a cache or a multi stage is too close to another, the question of whether or not the pre-existing cache or stage is active is not relevant. The owner of that cache still has the "monopoly" of the zone around that placement, until they either reactivate the cache (which they might do later today), or it gets archived (your local reviewer will perform periodic sweeps to prevent inactive caches from hanging around for too long). If you don't want to move your stages, my suggestion would be to scale back your ambitions a little, and accept that not all of the stages can be published. A 6-stage multi will have a substantially higher number of visitors than a 16-stage one. Oh, and if the reviewer felt that the military theme of your cache constituted too much of an agenda, he or she would have let you know by now.

If you are a non-premium member (that is, if you haven't paid any money to The Frog yet), you can only download .LOC files and they don't have hints. When you get addicted, shell out for a premium membership and you'll be able to download .GPX files, which have the entire cache description, hint, logs, etc.

That's why it's so cool that the word "Geocaching" is not a ™ of anybody, and anyone can list their caches at any one of several sites, many of which do not have a minimum distance between the caches, or indeed, in some cases, any form of review process. How they handle the subsequent issues with landowners, who said "sure, you can place a geocache in our park" only to find 100 separated by 3 feet each and a very muddy geotrail where grass used to be, is up to them. Geocaching.com has determined that there are various good reasons to insist, in the general case (exceptions apply, both up and down), that there be 0.1 miles between boxes. These reasons include, but are not limited to, the possibility of confusion between the caches (sure, not at 0.1 miles, but at some value below that it gets interesting), an assurance to land managers that there is some natural upper bound to the number of caches that might ever be placed on their land, and, yes, a desire to keep a minimum of quality in the game. (The most common criticism I hear is that are way too many lame caches being placed, and that the reviewers should be tougher on 'worthless' micros.) If the person who was speaking felt particularly strongly in agreement with the last of those reasons, then it seems reasonable for her to emphasis it. Perhaps she had just had to archive 100 caches submitted 3 feet apart and wanted to give a "c'mon, people, we can all do a little better" message. It's good that you and she both feel strongly about the game. It's perhaps not quite so helpful to report hearsay in here.

I have been told, by someone who bought one and does not post here, that in the area around his home, some of the "lamer" caches are missing. I do not have any information about the formal criteria which were used. Perhaps it was based on average log length - that's quite a good way to weed out "throwout" caches.

Using the term "outsider" could be taken by some to suggest that there's some kind of qualification which you have to meet to become a geocacher. Maybe up till now we were an intrinsically restricted group because you had to have bought the geeky gadget, but the writing has been on the wall for that model ever since GPS chipsets dropped to a dollar each or whatever it is they cost, so that pretty soon every PDA, phone, and Oregon 550 digital camera will have one. We're all going to have to get used to the fact that a bunch of people who we consider to have had things made easy for them are about to join the game, just as people who were members on the day that you or I signed up probably did. Have a look at some of the past threads in here about there being too many caches; I bet there's some from 2004. Actually I think that someone who has been out and found 1 (one) cache with a Geomate.jr might well probably be a much better geocacher than quite a few of the people who submit caches for my colleagues and me to review. To give one example, we've started to see quite a few cache submissions from school students: the teacher might be a cacher but more likely will have just read about the game or picked up on the idea of a class assignment from a colleague. S/he will bring a GPSr into class, and the assignment will be for the kids to place a cache and get it published on Geocaching.com. So the hardware and bandwidth barriers to entry are effectively zero; creating an account with a cute name in NoNsT0pC4m3lCa5e takes 30 seconds; placing the cache takes another 30 seconds (because they walk 200 feet from the classroom door, tops); typing up the listing page takes 2 minutes tops; and explaining to all of them why none of their caches can be published (proximity, school property, oh and dude, a cardboard shoe box is not an appropriate outdoor container) takes the reviewer several hours and earns him or her some pretty "classy" replies ("my kid is going to get an F if you don't publish this cache" sets the tone). Most of the kids aren't remotely motivated by the game, and I can well imagine one or two of the more unruly ones taking their revenge by borrowing the GPSr and trashing a couple of local caches ("take that, nerds!"). From what I've read here and been told elsewhere, it seems like the quality of the caches in the Geomate.jr (actually, I wish they had called it the McGPS) is well above the average of what's currently being published. Given that most people's first few hides are heavily influenced by their first few finds, maybe this will actually lead to an improvement in overall cache quality. (Those of a paranoid disposition may choose to interpret this as "Groundspeak is planning to abolish micros", of course.)

If you don't know your home coordinates and the cache is 4 blocks away, just add .100 to the N and W values of the cache coordinates and use them. Nobody, least of all the reviewer, needs to know exactly where you live. Add .200 or .300 if you want. The reviewer just wants confirmation that you don't live miles and miles away. However, I do hope that you noted the coordinates of the cache with a GPS receiver. If you're trying to read them off Google Earth or a map or whatever, prepare for some disappointed logs from cache seekers. Edit to add: It appears that you have listed an exact street address in your forum profile. If that isn't ironic and does, in fact, correspond to your home address, I suggest that you change it very quickly.

Groundspeak has asked the reviewers not to unarchive caches that have been out of circulation for a long time, with a suggestion that 3-6 months is the right sort of time frame. If it's the cache which I'm thinking of, it had been archived for about two years when you asked. Other factors also enter into consideration (as usual, this can be considered "flexibility" or "inconsistency" ). For example, the cache which you wanted to have unarchived was owned by somebody else, and the reviewers have been specifically asked not to unarchive caches just so that they can be adopted.

Substantially. We will no longer have to check the ALS any better than any other wording in the description. If it suggests that you might like to compose a full four-movement symphony in the honour of the cache placer and post a link to the MP3 of the première with your log, we will no longer feel morally obliged to decide whether this is a reasonable restriction to impose on the seeker. No and no. A well-done Wherigo cartrige is like a guided, multi-stage mystery-virtual, and a well-done Wherigo cache combines that with a physical cache. Since a logging requirement for a Wherigo cartridge is typically the upload of a completion code, it's reasonable that this requirement should extend to a Wherigo cache find. If you're referring to the fact that to find the Wherigo cache or complete te cartridge you have to solve some puzzles, then that's just the same as a Mystery cache or a challenging multi.

Suite à une plainte reçue du Ministère français de l'Écologie, de l'Energie, du Développement durable et de l'Aménagement du territoire, les reviewers pour la France demandent aux géoplaceurs français de: - Eviter de placer de nouvelles caches sur ou a proximité immédiate des mécanismes des ponts hydrauliques, écluses, etc; ceci non seulement à cause des problèmes techniques que cela pourrait occasionner (aimants près des actuateurs, etc), mais aussi parce que la présence du public près de ces mécanismes est interdite pour diverses raisons (sécurité des installation, risque de blessure, soupçon de vandalisme, etc). On nous a signalé que nous ne pouvons pas présumer que la permission pour un tel placement aurait été donnée. - Revoir vos caches actuelles qui pourraient se trouver dans des endroits sensibles mentionnés ci-dessus et éventuellement les déplacer vers un endroit où la présence de la cache et/ou du chercheur qui "fouille" serait moins gênante. Merci...

Having participated in the drafting of the new guideline wording, please let me assure you that the first sentence of the section, to which you are referring in this (and a couple of your previous posts in this forum) are not indicative of any change of policy towards cache logging by Groundspeak, whatsoever. They are simply there to clarify that, following the removal of ALRs, there is now no other requirement beyond signing the log to be able to say, online, "Yes, I found this cache". That sentence contributes a degree of redundancy to the language of the new "Logging of All Physical Caches" section of the guidelines. The inclusion of this redundancy was a deliberate choice during the drafting stage of the new guideline paragraph. When writing words that you hope will be clearly understood by one million people (yikes!), you have a choice: either state things very precisely and elegantly, or use lots of redundancy. The former method creates words that appeal to the aesthetic sense of those who can appreciate it (classy people, like you and me); the latter reduces the number of people who fail to get to the basic message, but may cause the lovers of elegance to read other motives into some of the thudding prose. On balance, given the choice between a few people reading too much into the redundant wording and reacting in the forums, versus tens of thousands of people not understanding the idea because they don't read every word in detail and e-mailing or calling for support as a result, I think that the former is probably the more economical choice. Now, having established the case for redundancy, I'll reiterate : the wording of the new "Logging of All Physical Caches" section of the guidelines does not indicate any new Groundspeak policy towards physical logging, online logging, log deletion, or anything else, apart from the specific change to the publication of caches with ALRs. There really is nothing to see here. Whatever mechanisms there may be to "punish" (brrrr...) people who don't comply, are the same as the ones which were there last week in cases where the CO deleted a log because the finder's name had too many consonants in it.

Guideline changes are "generally" grandfathered if they are likely to affect an existing situation on the ground. In the case of ALRs, all that has to happen in the short term is that cache owners stop deleting logs. The updates to the cache listings can be done over time. I don't expect the jackbooted GeoStashPolizei to be breaking down anyone's door in the next couple of weeks. As an analogy, think of what happens when the law changes about what equipment an automobile has to have (seat-belts, airbags, etc) versus when the traffic regulations change. In the first case, you generally don't have to take your car in and get seat-belts retrofitted. But when they change the rules about who has to yield at an intersection, the new rules apply to everyone. On the basis outlined above, the main "inconsistency" would be that virtuals were grandfathered whereas locationless caches weren't. But I can live with that degree of inconsistency. A couple of weeks ago, I was eating at my favourite restaurant and they offered me a schnapps on the house. They didn't do that before, and they didn't do it yesterday evening. Guess I should complain about their inconsistency too.

Folks, don't get too hung up on the bit about "the physical log has been signed". This guideline change is all about ALRs. Any redundant wording about signing the log is simply to place the ALR changes in context. Please keep the discussion on topic about the ALR issue. Groundspeak and/or the volunteer reviewers are not starting a campaign to force everyone in a group to physically sign the log in person in a verifiable way that will stand up in a court of law. Nor is this an assault on Earthcaches or grandfathered virtuals. Cache owners can, in practice, delete any log they feel like. The main change here, as I see it, is that doing so because a specific task has not been achieved, will no longer be considered "acceptable". For those who like everything in black and white, this may pose some questions at the margin. For what I hope is the majority who just want to go geocaching, it should bring some of the fun back into the game in the longer term. One of the groups pushing for this guideline change was a substantial majority of the volunteer reviewers. It's not much fun publishing caches where you know that almost nobody - including the cache owner themselves, in many cases - has the slightest hope of ever meeting the ALR. Quite a few of the ALR submissions which we see border on the vindictive. This guideline change is a shame for one or two of the cooler ALRs like this one, but it was getting to the stage where the ALRs were totally unrelated to geocaching and just becoming a platform for people to manipulate others. Of course, there could be a guideline saying "Your ALR should not be manipulative", but then people - probably the same people who want to impose the manipulative ALRs - would say "this is giving too much power to the evil, arbitrary, inconsistent reviewers". Guess what? Most reviewers don't like exercising their discretion all that much, partly because we know we are always working with incomplete information, and partly because we get, er, "feedback" when we do it. Just a clarification: Nothing new is being introduced here, at least not on a global scale. Challenge caches are an existing variant of Mystery cache in North America. The most common is the "Delorme Challenge", where you typically have to find a cache on every page of the Delorme atlas for your state. Up to now these have not appeared in Europe, but perhaps one or two people will make them. One of the hard things about the ALR guideline rewrite was allowing these caches to continue while limiting the non-geocaching related ALRs and also not suggesting that people should e-mail the cache owner for the coordinates before seeking the Challenge cache. You don't. How much does it cost you if someone does it? If your cache is really awesome, there will be two classes of people who claim a find: the ones who made the climb (and get bragging rights) and those who avoid eye contact and admit that all they did was hold the safety rope, or the phone with 911 pre-dialled and ready to send. But hey, the carpenters and Mr. Pitt's PA get a credit at the end of the movie too. Quite a lot of proposed solutions for various issues in the game contain statements like "one could have simply written requirements". The problem is that when thousands of cache placers start to push the envelope, with the force of those written requirements behind them, the reviewers end up having to publish large numbers of caches best described as "piles of carp". I have no doubt that a few people will come up with ways to specify an optional requirement which is theoretically within the new wording yet totally unreasonable. But hey, it's optional, so everyone can just ignore it if they want. The last thing we need are new rules saying "if you can find some form of semantics to fit your cache into this wording, then the reviewer has to publish it". The reviewer's equivalent of Godwin's Law is when a cache placer or forum poster resorts to quoting a dictionary definition (with the funny pronunciation symbols and a pompous italic "v." or "adj.") to prove that they're right.

It's a nice idea, and like probably every reviewer I have a few changes I'd like to see made to the wording of the guidelines. However, I'm not certain that being too specific helps, because it can lead to people saying "this isn't specifically included in the do-nots, so I can do it, ner ner ner". Groundspeak is not "the legal system" and doesn't have the resources, nor the need, to draft the kind of texts that would be required if you were passing legislation. It would also make the guidelines many times longer than they already are, and I don't see any hands raised for that option. I'd prefer to see a situation where people can accept that the reviewers are just honest people trying to do their best, and who occasionally don't get it right - kind of like most of us in our day jobs. In discussions between reviewers, you might find 25-year law enforcement veterans arguing that the wording in a cache at a memorial to fallen police officers is over the line, or a non-believing reviewer defending certain uses of Bible quotes in a cache description. If you want a recent take from Groundspeak on what's expected from volunteer reviewers (and moderators), check out this post.

The fact that it's been done close to a million times, including the caches which have since been archived (I wish we had ready access to the number of caches which have ever been published!) would appear to suggest that this statement may be just a tad over-simplified. I publish about 98% of the caches which are submitted to me for approval. 90% of are published with no discussion; perhaps 7% require the placer to address one point; and 1% take a little longer. Sometimes, one of the points to be addressed is the wording. I ask the owner, as politely as I can, to remove a few words or a paragraph, and they generally comply. Occasionally it takes a couple of exchanges of mails to explain why I'm insisting on it. About once a year someone avails themselves of the possibility to contact appeals@geocaching.com to ask for a review of one of my decisions. Groundspeak asks for both sides of the story and makes a decision. It really is that simple, if you want it to be. The bottom line is, if you want to be able to write anything you like in a cache listing, be prepared to be slightly surprised about where Groundspeak has chosen to draw the line. (If running a site with a million members coming from almost every country in the world were easy, we'd all be doing it. One of the major complaints I hear as a reviewer is how people in my part of the world think that Groundspeak is waaaaaay too US-centric.)

It's one of the agendas which comes up the most often, and is most widely discussed among the reviewers. There's no special rule about it. The President of Groundspeak is a proud US Air Force veteran, by the way. That would be easy. But defining the word "agenda" (which goes way beyond "social agenda") is not the issue. However you define it, you will still have the problem of determining whether any set of words which might be used on the cache page, constitutes an agenda. Two rules of thumb which I use when reviewing are: - Does the wording contain an imperative verb or emotion-laden adjectives and nouns: "Take a moment to think about our fallen heroes". Simple, declarative statements of fact are more likely to pass muster: "A number of US soldiers are buried here". 99.9% of Americans will fill in the "fallen hero" bit for themselves. - Would anyone object if the sentence in question were negated: "Ignore the stupid dead people" would not be a good thing to write. And yes, these rules of thumb are neither universally applicable nor complete. That's life.

Le nombre de reviewers par territoire varie en fonction du temps disponible chez chacun[e] (il n'y a pas de semaine de 5, 35, 135 heures), les types de caches qu'on y trouve, les contraintes imposées par les différents propriétaires des terrains, etc. Quand on voit que pour la Californie (61.000 caches) il y a 5 reviewers, pour le Texas (30.000 caches) un seul, et pour le Royaume-Uni (38.000 caches, plusieurs types de parc avec différentes interdictions ou limitations sur le géocaching) 3 reviewers, la région "Franco-Belge" n'est pas la plus mal lotie. La politique de recrutement des reviewers relève de Groundspeak, ainsi que toute question concernant leurs performances. L'adresse pour toute réclamation: reviewers@geocaching.com (ou pour une cache spécifique: appeals@geocaching.com).

It took me some to discover that reviewers were unpaid volunteers (my first few caches were published by Crow T Robot, who I initially assumed was a piece of software until he wrote me an e-mail one day ), and a lot longer to work out the implications of that. (By the time I fully understood those implications, I had become a volunteer. Moral: learn faster than me and avoid my mistake.) You actually get far better service than if your cache was bring reviewed by a minimum-wage drone; all your reviewer asks for in return is a little respect for their unpaid status.

One of the things which the OP perhaps has yet to learn in his short caching career is just how dedicated the volunteers are to the neutrality of the site with regard to agendas. There are Christian reviewers who regularly turn down caches which invite the reader to contemplate the wonders of Jesus, and NRA member reviewers who refuse to publish second Amendment-themed caches. Ex-military reviewers often find themselves accused of lack of patriotism for asking for certain words to be removed from cache descriptions. This European, liberal, pro-Obama reviewer went to the Democrats Abroad victory party in London and even ordered a "Lipstick on a Pig Strawberry Margarita". But I would still not publish the OP's cache as it stands, both for the proximity issue and also for its political content.

I am one of the reviewers for part of Belgium (to a first approximation, "the part where the road signs are in French"). The previous reviewer for that area made a little more use of the "Lock" feature than some other reviewers. If you wish to log some archived caches in that part of the country, please feel free to contact me via my profile, giving the GCxxxxx numbers. If they're in "the part where the road signs are in Dutch", have a look at a recently published cache nearby, which will give you the name of the local reviewer.

Well, that's a debate that goes back three years, and I think it's too late to do anything about it now. The slow demise of virtuals by attrition is, and always was going to be, an inevitable consequence of the decision which was taken then. (If someone wants to accuse Groundspeak of consistency then I'm sure they'd be delighted. Usually it's the opposite.) My use of sarcasmrobust irony was directed at the idea that Groundspeak lackeys are somehow setting out to selectively accelerate this process, probably deriving sadistic pleasure from it as well. Groundspeak could have archived every virtual in November 2005, or at any time since. They chose not to do so. To send the reviewers out on a semi-random hunt for "easy to kill" virtuals would be a rather strange combination of sociopathy, irrationality, and inefficiency. Actually, if you remove the 48-state-centric remark within commas, I don't think that's too far from the truth, depending on which level you choose to look at the "rules". The maintenance requirements for virtuals have always been inherently different from those for physical caches because there is no possibility of independent verification of the log book. A lot of older traditional caches are successfully community-maintained, and as long as the cache is dry and the log isn't full, it's pretty unlikely that they will come to the reviewers' attention.

Yeah, that's it. Groundspeak lackeys sit around all day discussing the exact form of words which they can use to hoodwink site members into not noticing that virtuals are to be archived by any means possible. The slight flaw in this argument is that they could have archived all of the virtual and webcam caches at the same time as locationless caches went, but for some reason they chose not to do so. Once again, Groundspeak's plans for world domination are thwarted by their own tendency to be moderate. Drat and double-drat! Most people who are actively maintaining their caches, log in fairly often to the site. If a cache owner hasn't logged in for almost a year then that's a pretty good case for thinking that they might no longer be active in the game. But guess what? We do some more digging before we decide! About one month ago I had a case somewhat similar to the one under discussion. I contacted the owner - who hadn't logged in for over six months - through her profile, and she replied very quickly to assure me that although she hadn't logged in for some time, firstly she hoped to find time to do so in the near future, and secondly she was reading all of the e-mail copies of the logs on her caches. Problem solved, nothing archived. At no point did the Evil Corporate Machine tell me that "if they haven't logged in for a few months, we have a perfect excuse to archive their caches and the forum people are all so dumb that they will readily believe our cover story, bwahahahaha". I would bet a substantial part of my reviewer's salary for a month that Erik similarly tried to contact the cache owner in this case. Of course, the fact that he didn't mention this explicitly in his note could lead some people to suspect that he, too, is part of the conspiracy (and anyway, everyone knows that there are only two reviewers, Erik and mtn-man, and the rest of us are just their sock puppets).