cache_test_dummies

Its a darned good thing he didn't also know that you are an evil copyright violator!!! Watch while GC send round a swat team to blow up the geotar! I'm completely lost. Waht are you guys talking about? It's a spun-out reference to the discussion going on here.

Well said.

I have a TB that was dropped in a cache in July 2006 and then vanished. It turned up in September 2011, 5 years and two months later. Quite a surprise!

Bummer.

I never said anything about a Charter membership. Since I hadn't joined this site until 2008, it's not unreasonable for me to have thought the cost for new members could have risen since it's inception, especially when this post says $12.95 a year. WRASTRO was kidding. WRASTRO is a kidder. Premium memberships cost $30 per year, and always have.

Yes. In my experience, once a cache has been found by profanity-wielding locals, it may be time for the CO to consider moving (or perhaps archiving) the cache. I would explain what you found in your on-line log. Let the CO know that the cache has been compromised, and that they may want to consider moving the cache to a slightly different location, or archiving it altogether.

Geocaching in new places can be rewarding. Trying to understand why people complain about any given thing in the forums is difficult, if not entirely futile.

I found geocaching to be much more enjoyable once I learned to ignore everything in the cache except the log book and the trackables.

Groundspeak could completely hide your archived cache, but they won't. Your archived cache provides a historical record of previous logs, and as such, should remain available for viewing. We can see your 4 active caches and your 1 archived cache, including the logs.

Not in the current implementation, no. However, according to the Challenges FAQ, support for verification questions is one of the ideas that is being considered for the next phase.

Well, what is and isn't caching is really up to the individual. In general terms, I personally think of geocaching as an activity in which I put coordinates obtained from the Geocaching.com web site into my GPSr and then, after going to that location, logging something on the Geocaching.com web site that describes what happened next. But others have a different view of what caching is. Which is ok with me. I think it's finding a hidden container which of course negates the whole point of virtuals. Too bad. If I had to choose between two. color me old school. It's fine with me if you don't think of Virtual Caches as geocaching. I don't even consider geocoins to be travelers. Fair enough!

Well, what is and isn't caching is really up to the individual. In general terms, I personally think of geocaching as an activity in which I put coordinates obtained from the Geocaching.com web site into my GPSr and then, after going to that location, logging something on the Geocaching.com web site that describes what happened next. But others have a different view of what caching is. Which is ok with me. I think it's finding a hidden container which of course negates the whole point of virtuals. Too bad. If I had to choose between two. color me old school. It's fine with me if you don't think of Virtual Caches as geocaching. Speaking of old school, I can still remember the first virtual cache I found (Four Corners Monument). I "found" it during a visit to Arizona in 2003, although that particular virtual cache had been listed on Geocaching.com about a year earlier. The earliest virtual listed on Geocaching.com that I've been able to identify is Rift Valley, which was listed in June of 2000. Still active, by the way.

Well, what is and isn't caching is really up to the individual. In general terms, I personally think of geocaching as an activity in which I put coordinates obtained from the Geocaching.com web site into my GPSr and then, after going to that location, logging something on the Geocaching.com web site that describes what happened next. But others have a different view of what caching is. Which is ok with me.

Virtual Caches never left. You are just no longer allowed to create new ones. You can now create Challenges, which are kinda-sorta like the Virtual Caches, in the sense that both concepts have you capturing coordinates for a containerless location and then you ask people to go there and do something. Two big differences: Once you publish a Challenge you no longer own it. When someone completes a challenge (kind of like logging a find on a Virtual) it doesn't count towards their Geocaching.com "caches found" count.

Let's try to remain serious here, shall we? After all, this is the Geocaching Topics forum, not Off-topic. Ah. Interesting question. With respect to patterns of acceptable behaviors within any social group, there are three types of "norms". The first type are behavioral norms. These are the most common behaviors actually exhibited by most or all members of a social group. The second type are attitudinal norms. These are the generally shared beliefs or expectations in a social group about how other members of the group ought to behave in various circumstances. The third type is the beer drinking guy from Cheers who always sits in the same place at the bar. Since most people don't log finds on their own caches, and because most cachers don't expect them to, not doing so is both a behavioral norm and an attitudinal norm. Therefore, it is unlikely that this particular social pattern will change. The guy from Cheers has little to do with this discussion. I only mentioned him because his name was raised earlier in this discussion, back when the topic was off-topic.

You're having a bad dream. Go back to sleep.

Which question are you responding to? There are several in the OP: has anyone ever thought that a cache owner ought to be GIVEN THE number just like any other cacher? if it were not for cache owners how could the game go on? long after the other folks have added and added to their numbers??? (that one wasn't really a question, but there were 3 question marks at the end of the sentence, so I've included it in this list because it really looked like it wanted to be a question) dare I say the shark food word; NUMBERS??? So will someone let us know if a cache owner can claim a log/find on their own geocache without negativity why can cache owners not claim the number for the hide they give

Dang it! Now all my off-topic comments have been made visible in the on-topic world! I feel inappropriate. Guess I'll go take a shower and burn my clothes.

Norm thinks that that would get locked pretty quickly, unless you disguised the discussion in some clever way. Like "Would telling people to count wheels of cheese before logging a find be considered an ALR?" or something. edited to add "Norm thinks that"

Good question! Personally, I find it disturbing that they are wearing shirts but no pants.

Back in 2005 I found a cache (traditional ammo can, hidden in a clearing about half a mile into the woods) that hadn't been found in more than 6 months. There had been only a single DNF during that time, and the person who logged the DNF mentioned that they thought the cache was gone. 4 months after the DNF I searched for the cache and located it in about 5 minutes. That felt pretty good. I don't know why the cache hadn't been found during that time, unless people were taking the "must be gone" DNF log too seriously. There must have been quite a few people keeping an eye on that particular cache page, because the cache saw a flurry of activity starting the day after I logged my find. In May of this year I found a cache that hadn't been found since last October, but dry spells during the winter and early spring are not unusual for this particular cache due to its setting, deep in the woods and above 4K feet in elevation. The funny thing is that someone else found the cache later the same day, and they were surprised to see a brand new signature in the logbook. Funny to me, anyway. Not so much for them!

Kinda like the same issues that marginalized Waymarking. At least Challenges were fortunate enough to still be listed on the geocaching.com web site, and share the same forums.

I would think that signing a cache container would be considered disrespectful to the cache owner. Didn't someone else do that on a number of caches during one of the early 24 hour record attempts and get raked over the coals for it?

I don't know of a way to do it directly on Geocaching.com, but a formatted Google search should work. You can use the "site:" search operator in a Google search to look for challenges on the Geocaching site that include your keyword someplace on the page. For example, to locate challenges that have the word "Washington" in the page, Google "Washington site:http://www.geocaching.com/challenges/". I tried to use the Google "allinurl:" operator to further restrict the search to challenges that use the search keyword in the page's URL (which is a variation of the challenge's name), but Google's allinurl operator doesn't seem to work if you include the "/challenges/" text in the site filter.