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What about those of us who are a hiker, smartphone user, gps user, geocachers??? I don't hunt, and I don't blog. I find them equally as repulsive. I know that was directed at thebruce. But my point was this.... CAN a smartphone replace a dedicated gps? (Wasn't that the question, afterall???) For those of us who are a mix of both (all?) I think the answer is obvious... Talk to me after you've actually found a geocache with either a smartphone OR a GPS. Then your opinion might have a tad bit more merit...as it is now...every dedicated gps cacher has that opinion. When you've found a few hundred with each, then we'll talk...

I don't keep it a secret, but I don't tell everyone I know either. Most people in my life know I geocache, and I have gone caching with many of them. I've even converted a friend to caching. I also mention it in my blog. I tend to only talk about it with people who I think will understand what it is. I absolutely hate trying to explain it to people who I know won't understand, or care, about it. Come to think of it the above is true for most things in my life. I am not the most social of people so I tend to only talk to people about things I think they will actually care about, and stay silent for the rest of the time. Based on this I would say I talk about caching about as much as anything else hobby-wise in my life.

Ok, sure, if it bothers you that those options are not natively available when creating a lab cache listing, then I'm confident Groundspeak would value that feedback. The same feedback has been offered by many people for the challenges and nothing happened at all. Regarding the possible addition of online logs to lab caches there has been a reply saying that logs might be added, but with respect to the restrictions of the lab cache form, no such reply exists and also the reply I obtained in the blog comment section from Jeremy was just that lab caches are different to normal caches and have a different form. Actually, I do not understand this thread as a thread uniquely about experiences with I <3 lab caches as the thread has been opened up many days before the launch of the February experiment. I always looked at this thread as a discussion about the option for PMs to place lab caches (see the thread title) and the February experiment as an abstract concept and not only its concrete implementation. If we talk about this general topic, then the issue how the experiment is promoted also plays a role and then the connection to the "future of geocaching" shows up. In my opinion, the promoting of the experiment with respect to the future of geocaching is what is very confusing and indimitating for people like me (if I take it seriously what I did). The development of geocaching comes in because I personally would see a great potential for another type of lab caches that PMs (or also basic members - that's not the issue here) could be able to create in the future. These lab caches should be directed to many cachers and should be able to found more than once and should allow for something that one could do with the old virtuals (to which I'm passionately attached). Does it now make sense why I talked about the local development and about issues like the future of geocaching? I never ever thought that the February experiment in itself will have essential impacts on the future or on the present of geocaching. I never ever would have raised most of the issues I talked about in a thread named "Your experiences and feedback with respect to I <3 ... lab caches". I think the unfortunate thing is the mixed audience in this thread. Not everyone wants to talk about the same things. As the style people come up with comments, problem reports etc is regarded, cultural differences play a big role. This forum is dominated by the North American and UK style which is much more indirect than say the Central European style. What is regarded as an insult also depends a lot on where someone comes from. I'm sure that what many people in Germany and Austria thought that when they tried to submit a lab cache is that the form sucks and that would be a way they would voice their feedback locally. They would not reformulate this in a way like people from the US definitely would do. Cezanne

Hi all Myself and my 8 year old son are going to a local event in about a month’s time, it will be our third one and we still haven’t quite gotten the hang of these things, both being fairly shy people we tend to skulk in the corner and talk to each other My other half might be able to make it to this one, for once, which will probably mean I’ll just skulk in the corner and talk to him In an attempt therefore to get my son to talk to other cachers and not be a wallflower like me, I thought I might make him a Travel Bug t-shirt, like the one Erika Jean made on her (excellent) blog: http://www.erikajean.com/2010/05/tb-tee.html I figured if people come up to him to “discover” his t-shirt then he’ll get chatting and we’ll slowly as a family get the hang of this socialising malarkey. A few questions though – how exactly would this work? I presume I would need to paint/stamp the public tracking number from one of my unused sets of “real” dogtags on the back of the t-shirt? And shall I put his geocaching name/handle on there too? Or the name of the bug? Also – do you think people will actually respond to the t shirt and “discover” the travel bug? He might get a little disappointed if nobody does I know that these kinds of mobile travel bugs (cars, shirts, tattoos even) are popular in the States, but have they caught on in the UK? I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this at the two events I’ve been to so far. all input is welcome Sarah (Mrs Chaos)

I don't see the issue here as being "nitpicking", but rather a lack of trust. Rather than accept the word of those who have used these devices for years and have even gone to the lengths of doing additional testing to confirm, you seem to be insisting on some kind of incontrovertible proof directly from authoritative sources. If that's the only thing that will convince you, then you've come to the wrong place. You'll need to talk to Garmin, but you shouldn't be surprised if you find you get far less useful information from them than you have here.

[ Since I apparently have to say this, this is not a post as a moderator/volunteer of Groundspeak. Your mileage may vary. Some assembly required. yadda yadda. ] Google employee here within Geo. Gitchee-Gumme's answer is the closest so far to "right". The definition of "correct" is fuzzier than you might first think. If you really want to engage in conversations of orthorectification and survey data and such, but be prepared to talk science and reality instead of smack talk. Coordinates are somewhat ambiguous if you associate them with a precision (which few do). Flat pictures of a non flat object (surely we'll agree the planet isn't flat...) are subject to distortion.

Sigh... thanks for making *us* do the search instead of explaining "TAPA talk" to the rest of us... glad you assumed that we already knew or were intelligent enough to figure it out. TAPA talk About 95% of what I see in that search is just like your post... "Would you please enable TAPA talk?", "Have you considered adding Tapatalk support to the forum?", "Check out http://www.tapatalk.com for more information!" , "Supposedly you guys can enable tapatalk for free". Judging from the forum posts we've already seen from "smartfphone" users, unless TapaTalk can expand abbreviations and capitalize sentences and proper pronouns, I sure hope not.

Thank you, Mountain Woods, for making the trip from Missouri, and Thank you, Vulture1957, for making the trip from Oklahoma. Thank you, Benchmark Blasterz, for NOT taking that trip to Colorado. We enjoyed your company, and listening to your talk. Yes, the Event at J & J Pizza, ended up being a training session for Geocachers. Many of them came to learn more about Waymarking and we couldn't disappoint them. Next year, the Texas Challenge will be at Seguin, TX. It is located about 25 miles east of San Antonio on I-10. I am in charge of the Committee that will be planning that Mega Event. I will be very busy for the next year. I will be too busy all weekend to host a Waymarkers Gathering Event. If someone else would like to take charge of setting something up, I will do what I can to get it in the schedule. I still have Waymark Stickers available at $1.00 each. I'll pay the postage for delivery within the US. You can contact me at 8nuts1@gmail.com Edit to add the last line.

Thank you. He hasn't tried to talk me out of much, but if he had I'd listen. Some days are good; some days you come out of treatment and sleep 10-12 hours to recuperate.

My experience today tells me this is all fine. Most people don't bother with NM's and NA's or even mention the state of the cache in their logs and anyone who cares enough to post NM or NA has to trail out to the cache first to see what state it's in no matter how much evidence there is to support that it's a piece of unmaintained junk. Ergo all this talk of the CHS and all the effort of integrating it into the system seems, to me at least, to have been a complete waste of everyon'e time as the net result will ultimately be that nothing will improve whatsoever. If this is the party line I'm going to surrender to the party line and just log my find and move on, regardless of what's at GZ. The race to the bottom is complete.

You must not be as suspicious looking as I am then. I've had 3 major incidents in 10 1/2 years, including being called in for suspicious activity on a bike trail the next town over, and that town sending an LEO from my town to my house to talk to me about it. Except I wasn't home, so he had to talk to Mrs. Yuck. But the best one is when I was detained for 20 minutes by 5 squad cars from the Clark, New Jersey Police Department. A town since made famous for being where internet celebrity Kai the hatchet wielding hitchhiker murdered a Lawyer. That is famous, right?

I think you've nailed it. A 6-hour odyssey is likely to get old before I'm done with it, but each of several shorter multis can focus on specific elements of the area, leaving me in that "what's next?" state of mind as I complete each one. And when I run out of time before I completed them all, which seems likely, I'll still have accomplished something. That doesn't make the 6-hour multicache bad, just less attractive to people like me. In particular, if I'm with my non-caching associates, they won't let me even start a 6-hour multicache. But if it's supposed to take an hour, I might be able to talk them into one, and if they like it, I might be able to talk them into another. On a personal level, I'd totally agree. I'm not likely to do a 6-hour multi (especially if it ends in a micro). I'd rather be taken on more, shorter tours. But, we forget that this is the owner's perogative. Geocaching.com is a listing service, and owners can hide as they please within the guidelines. That said, the guideline is 0.10 miles between physical geocaching items. Making that distance shorter just to allow a cache to squeeze in is still not a good idea IMO. Personally, I'd rather see caches spread out like this guideline requires. Then again, I'm not out caching with the hope to add numbers to my "score" every 250 feet.

I think you've nailed it. A 6-hour odyssey is likely to get old before I'm done with it, but each of several shorter multis can focus on specific elements of the area, leaving me in that "what's next?" state of mind as I complete each one. And when I run out of time before I completed them all, which seems likely, I'll still have accomplished something. That doesn't make the 6-hour multicache bad, just less attractive to people like me. In particular, if I'm with my non-caching associates, they won't let me even start a 6-hour multicache. But if it's supposed to take an hour, I might be able to talk them into one, and if they like it, I might be able to talk them into another.

Well, I think I originally misunderstood completely what you meant with newbie. Feeling new in a certain group or just not belonging to that group/community is not what I had in mind when I read newbie with respect to geocaching. In view of the development that has taken place over the last few years, I do not feel part of the local community any longer (that was different ten years ago). I see myself more as someone who likes to hike and be in the nature and uses geocaching as a means to select targets and to battle my weak inner self. I have never been interested into the search for containers, clever camouflage, special equipment and all these sorts of things. I regard geocaching as an activity that one can engage in entirely without any personal contacts. I referred to your number of finds because what I had in mind were beginners who do not know the principles of geocaching (for whatever reasons) and not people who are new to the (local) community and might wish to establish personal contacts or even wish to be integrated into the community. I'm not new in my area, but like you I do not like to attend events that much and if I happen to attend an event I typically just talk to those I have known before and to whom I like talking which of course implies that I will hardly ever talk to cachers whom I do not know, regardless of whether they are new or very experienced, but just from somewhere else. I noticed that over the years the focus of topics discussed has become much more concentrated on geocaching while in earlier years geocachers met, but at least 50% of the time one spoke about non geocaching topics (hiking, traveling etc as opposed to what is the best UV torch, which night cache is the coolest, how to solve Puzzle cache X) something I appreciated very much. Today the average geocacher in my area has not much in common with me. It is much more likely to find equal minded persons outside of geocaching (or among former geocachers back from the old times). I agree with you that many events are not well suited to establish new contacts, but if a newcomer comes with a particular question, I'm sure that he/she will get an answer. Cezanne

I think this sums up my problem. COs are what makes the game happen. As much as we owe the reviewers that have to put up with COs, we owe the COs more. So if they whine, we should listen. But you talk as if you're thinking, "How dare they whine. They should be grateful we're finding their miserably little caches." The longer this goes on, the more I think that this big push for "quality caches" is a big reason why there are fewer quality caches. The better a CO is, the more likely being called "whiny" will make them lose interest.

Personally I don't give a rip one way or the other. If it's crammed full of crap that I don't want to read...I just sign the log and move on. The object of the game is to FIND the cache. There's nothing that says that you have to look at (or agree with) the contents. We have one here W.W.J.C. that clearly states what it is. The cache owner tells you up front that if you're going to turn into a fiery pile of dust by handling religious literature...don't bother hunting it. It's actually one of the more fun caches in the park because it's hidden very creatively. As long as there is nothing illegal in the cache I have no problem with it. The Geocaching guidelines ban items that are already made illegal by most state laws (unattended guns, alcohol, and porn) or items that threaten the longevity of a cache (food and scented items). I will talk to people about the taboo subjects of politics and religion and I've noticed something. Now this is in no way a scientific study. It is simply my personal observation and YMMV. I've noticed that when I talk to people who are confident in their political choice and/or choice of religion there is nothing I can do to sway them away from their convictions (assuming that I would want to do something like that) during a short conversation and I highly suspect that a little pamphlet wouldn't have any greater success. I've also found that I learn more from those who are comfortable with their convictions because they speak frankly about the subjects without try to silence anyone else. On the other hand I've found that when talking to someone who isn't confident about their opinions and are having doubts and/or questions of their own tend to range from simply not wanting to talk about to wanting to ban all talk about the subject. Instead if allowing others to have their opinions they want everyone to have no opinion or at the least not to express their opinion. I suspect those who want to ban all political and religious objects from caches are simply uncomfortable with the subjects. I don't think that a discomfort of a subject or idea is a good reason to ban certain items from a cache.

Brutalfly, I helped a local teacher who wanted a grant for GPS units and to teach geocaching to her students. The caches would just be for those students, so there was no need to publish them on the GC site. We walked around the school, chose different cache types for different hiding spots. She did a great job planning this activity for her students. On the flip side: I was asked to talk about geocaching (specifically latitude/longitude) to my son's 3rd grade class. I informed the Principal and secretaries in advance what was planned, so they wouldn't panic if a kid reported a suspicious container. Everything went great until it was time to go outside and find the cache, only to learn that the kids who were just outside during recess found it first and were so excited to show everyone else. "Put it back, put it back, quick quick!" Haha.

I just want to reassure you guys that I talk with my principal all the time and we have nothing but the safety and security of the student we teach in mind. We briefly chatted about this and would never make things public so other can come onto the school property. What we normally do is form a committee and discuss these types of ideas to the fullest extent we eliminate anything that could put children in danger especially with all the school things going on. I do have 3 children of my own and would never do anything to put them as well as my students in harms way. If we did do something like this it would be kinda like an Easter egg hunt but just for our school and our students only. There would be no tracker for anybody to come onto the property. Just wanted to clarify all that. We do fully exhaust all good and bad things that could happen before we decide to do anything.

Umm...yeah. Neither of those discussions would happen. Are these hypothetical families also going to talk about the "Friend League", the parents humbly admitting that most of the people listed as "friends" are people they never actually met? "But Daddy, it says they're your friends! My whole existence is a lie!"

I really need someone that has a Garmin 700 to try to talk me through some steps on setting mine up for Geocaching. I have googled all the help and watched the youtube videos but I am still no where close to getting the gps to where I can use it. If anyone could and would help me I really would appreciate it. Thank you. I am replacing an Oregon 450

I have just bought a Garmin 700 and I am having all kinds of problems trying to get it set up. Can someone direct me to someone that might can talk me through setting it up. Google is really not much help to me.

It sounds to me that you didn't understand what was going on. Without seeing the exchange, I don't know what's going on, either, but if the reviewer had to ask what was wrong after you posted your NA, then you should start with discussing privately with the reviewer how your NA could have been more complete. Well, I'm betting you were using the new user interface, so your actual NA was just the modern canned NA, and the reviewer was having trouble figuring out what the problem was based on the Found or DNF log, but all the more reason to talk it over with him.

Well here is my thoughts. If a group of caches head out together to cache what are you expecting them to do? Are they supposed to stand there and quietly ponder the answers or given that they are caching together do you expect that they are likely to talk to each other trying to figure it out? If they talk to one another generally speaking I would assume that they would arrive at the same final conclusion. I think that you should expect that they will have the same answers and given that, it seems likely that someone will mention that they will send in answers for the group. As a group they learned the lesson that you presented. This happens nearly every time in my group of friends. On top of that I am usually asked to check or further explain a topic if someone has a question. I would hope that the cache owner wouldn't mind, the point is to learn something about geology and if I am having to clarify or help on site I know that one of my friends "got it".

meh, this is not Fight Club and if it was you know the first two rules #1 - The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club. #2 - The second rule of Fight Club is, you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. not at all what i meant, and even if they choose to do so its none of my business and i don't judge them i hunt for LPC's and anything else that some consider lame, each hide has its fun...what i meant is that when you do go hunting for the LPC's there is not a lot of exciting stuff to talk about, maybe just the fact that one was on the north side and the next on the south...by contrast most of the other hides will afford a good conversation/discussion

I must have missed the evidence that answers are being copied. All I saw the OP mention was a flood of interest in the cache, which I assumed was just the cacher asking his friends to take a look and offer suggestions. Again, the evidence I see is that this cacher does desperately want to solve these puzzles. In that case, I suggest you talk to that particular cacher and make that clear. Perhaps he can explain what's going on in a way that will stop you from being excessively suspicious that any interest in your cache must be nefarious. Then by all means, stop wasting time in this thread and talk to the cacher you think is responsible to make sure that doesn't happen. I've been looking at your puzzles -- I hope you've taken this thread into account and aren't ascribing the additional attention to that particular cacher -- and although I've only solved one, I haven't looked too hard at the others because, I have to admit, some of them appear to be driven by moon logic. I'm not at all surprised that people's explorations are going all over the map. I think you should make friends with this particular cacher that's so interested in your caches and work with him to find ways to help people focus their efforts rather than forcing them to investigate an infinite number of possible approaches. The one I did solve is pretty clever, so I think it would be great for you to work with someone to help you learn how to drop more hints in order to make the other puzzles more accessible. I assume the puzzle solvers in your area aren't as rabid as the ones out here, but if a puzzle cache were unfound for over a month in the SF bay area, that would be a clear indication that there's something seriously wrong with it.