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Another way to work around it would be to block cookiebot.com, say at the firewall or HOSTS file. I've done this for a few years, and the site works fine for me, including the message center. Also keeps the site from asking me about cookies, don't ever talk to me about cookies.

Not a naive assumption, but, yes, I did take for granted that you hadn't talked to the COs because if you already had reactions from the COs, I would expected you to present those in order to make that the topic. The responses you've now told us about are the real problem that we can talk about solving. It's far less productive to start with the unsupported claim that the NM attribute is useless because you don't think it's being used correctly. But, I see, this way you got to call someone innocently trying to help you with your problem "naive", so that's always fun.

I am glad our countless hours of research through logs and plethora of photos mean nothing to HQ and zero attempts are being made to keep our data available in an archived format. All this community talk is nothing but lip service to the corporate machine and bottom line.

If this is based truly on non use (vs cost cutting which I believe it is) then get rid of other things in geocaching that get little use such as caches that require special equipment such as Wherigo or project APE caches. You guys talk out both sides of your mouth!

Looks to me that the proposed category is very similar to the elongated coins category (aka Penny Smashers) in the aspect of an automaton creating/selling a touristic token. T0SHEA told me (not a week ago) that we should strive for inclusion if we have similarities to another category. So you should have a talk to the category leaders / officers first if they are willing to expand their category to accept these touristic tokens also.

Hello everyone! Here is a great place to post that you want your score updated, talk about high scoring caches, ask questions, etc. Have fun with the game, and check out the rest of my "Let the Games Begin!" series caches! GeoEskimo

So there are threads about crazy caches you have been to or stuff you found in them....but what about caches you have hid? Which is your favorite? What kind of swag do you put in them? What size is your favorite to hide? What general area are most of you caches in (woods, public, outta the way places, etc..)? Camo Job? Basically just talk about YOUR geocache containers. Even brag a little if you want. We all wanna learn some other cache hiding/creating techniques.

The approach I've used for locations that haven't already had official geocaching policies has been to ask who I should talk to about getting permission. I don't ask "random employees" for permission. But I do my best to find someone who might know, and then ask that person who I should talk to.

Yeah, I agree with you about that. That's one one the reasons I didn't seriously think he was interested in newbies: he was just using them as an easy way to talk about the perceived unfairness of challenges that allow history even though the newbies themselves wouldn't notice it.

Regarding that we can also have a fourth option : 3a. Wayfrog promotes some other officer (perhaps the active one) and I have to talk again to the new leader. Or we could make it completely different and create a single category for each of the seven remaining countries (but for that option I would like to have a poll with at least two-thirds majority in favor for the split) ... Or something else that the community wants - just say it here. (This may include the (in my eyes really bad) idea to not have any new categories any more - but I think that should require a full approval with at least 95% of all waymarkers in favor ... And then we should close this recruiting part of the forum ... ).

왜 무조건 영어로 대화 하나요!! 한국어로도 대화해요! 무조건 한국어로 대화하는 창입니다 꺄하하하 ㅋㅋㅋㅋ 포럼에 나밖에 안노는건 아니겠쬬? ㅠ_ㅠ 완전 슬픔! 날씨 좋은날에는 모두 함께 지오캐싱을 하러 갑시다!

Come watch Geocache Talk on Sunday night - this podcast show's topic is desirable attributes, which may include talk related to identifying gadget caches At this point though, the Field Puzzle attribute is most relevant to identifying potential gadget caches.

I feel like a total dummy... I know I need a pda...I looked above at the FAQ, only the wiki link worked and I felt overwhelmed by all the info. I use a garmin etrex legend, I think it's H? It's the blue one. I do not have the cords so I have to hand enter each cache, if that matters. I also use an apple macbook. And I do not have a smart phone. If I were to get a pda...what should I get? I'd be looking to get something used, or on the cheaper end (as much as possible...), and am willing to save up to get one if I have to (I am going to start saving up for a new gps with cords too! This one by one thing is too much). I know I'll have to become a PM for PQs, and then do I HAVE to have GSAK? or no? And then I'll need another type of software, too...am I right? So much to know... Thanks for any help!!

Hi! I have a newspaper assignment on geocaching and need someone to talk with to add "local flavor" to the piece. Is there anyone in Green Valley, Arizona willing to help (either with or without real names)? I'm also an absolutely new member (just getting ready to order my 1st GPS unit) and want to get started. Would love to talk with locals about that too. Are you out there Green Valley? annette in gv

Better plan! Open enrollment is ON. Join, talk with our Wayfroggie about becoming leader. Throw out the deadwood. Invite some active Scandinavians to the group (there are a few here). Have one of them take it over, as a Scandinavian is a better choice as leader than a Canadian. Keith

would like to discuss with local geocacher about geocaching & how to go about hiding them

Some people talk about High D/T ratings. Some people talk about solving a difficult puzzle. Some people talk about the cool places they go. But I'll be honest, I'm still chasing that high from the first time I submitted an EC to the Geoaware and said "looking for feedback on what needs to change" and he said "I can publish it right now." Whoosh. Blew. My. Mind.

Since my response is to the moderators of the site and Groundspeak et al., I will post this here weeks after the main discussion has passed. Like all of my logs, this is mostly just a rant. I... support the decision! The sport/game/hobby of geocaching has existed for so long, its long term survival outweighs what some users think about the more antiquated elements of it. I would argue benchmarking is not a priority for many users, only partially because Groundspeak has relegated it to obscurity on the website for years. Beginners, who are important customers to expand the product, don't seem to be flocking toward benchmarks. My area has been dominated by loop-holers focused more on statistics than unique hunts and only seem to log benchmarks when they can get a challenge cache out of it. The 0.13% statistic that was paraded around is probably an understatement, but I do not see the logic of paying to support something so little of the general population cares about. A majority of my gripes are not with Groundspeak's decision but the rotten system of global capitalism and the myth of unlimited business growth. Low interest, sadly, equals low profitability and thus elimination. The archivist aspect is the main element that is tragic in all this, for me. But this is a symptom of the internet at large- huge portions of the web are just being lost to the wind and almost no one seems to care. Geocaching has now outlasted web 1.0, 2.0 and if the impending demise of twitter is any indication, 3.0 as well. One of its most valuable elements then are the logs from a pre-cell phone age. There are inactive users who commented on benchmarks and their logs will be lost forever. That sucks. While scraping page by page through The Internet Archive is a great idea, it's not practical. I'll try anyway. It's not a defense of the decision, but reality. Burying the lede here, but Benchmarking is/was one my favorite elements of Geocaching. I think it is profoundly interesting from a historical aspect, and many of my most memorable experiences with caching overall have been hunting remote benchmarks. I was annoyed with how old the datasheet was and just how many of the marks were actually destroyed. Especially living in an urban area, where mindless sprawl and that myth of unlimited growth have destroyed many of these disks. But the ones I did find were fun, even if it was impossible to combine that experience into any sort of phone application. Of the 84 I found so far, 56 (66%) have been radio/water towers, cupolas, domes, flagpoles, or just tall buildings. These are a majority of the benchmarks I've noticed other users have logged. Which is logical- they are the most easily accessible. But I would also argue, not entirely worth it. For those above me who complain about lamp post hides, these categories of benchmarking are very much in the same vein. I do not want to gatekeep against either as that would be hypocritical. I strive to give my logs as much depth and information as possible, but it's pretty obvious that a State Capitol dome is "in good shape". Which leaves the other 32 (34%) of my finds- bench mark discs themselves. This is what I'll- and others here- will truly miss. I think that the amount of marks logged as missing or never logged at all are vast. That sort of eliminates the ease of accessibility. Of those 32 disks, a third of them have been found less than five times. I am the most recent finder on all of those for the past eighteen months. I was happy to recognize one of those other finders in these comments, and empathize with their disappointment, but this doesn't eliminate benchmarking. It just pushes it to a much less popular website. This is by no means the end of my benchmarking. It's just the end of me keeping track of my benchmarking online- my disapointments with Waymarking are a separate rant entirely. Talk all you want about how the best things in life are worth the challenge, but from a business model perspective it's not marketable. Which goes back to my hatred of the "game" (capitalism) not the "player" (Groundspeak) trying to promote and protect Geocaching. So in summary, while I love benchmarking, I can understand why Groundspeak would phase it out. Because it's a niche, mostly unrelated element to geocaching at large.

I've had a Garmin Forerunner for over three years now, nary a problem. All that time I've had a USB to serial connector plugged into a USB port, always ready to connect the Forerunner, first to a Garmin program, then to GSAK, and lately to Garmin's Connect website. Now, all of a sudden, I can't connect anymore. GSAK says "Garmin: Can't Init Com5." The Garmin program CRASHES with a blue screen that says "IRQL NOT LESS THAN" The connect website just says there's nothing there. If I unplug the USB connector, Vista promptly removes it from device manager, and re-installs it when I plug it back in. Manually remove and re-install the driver, to no avail. Garmin won't help me, says the problem is with the USB connector. The things only cost $16, but I really don't think a new one will help. Anyone else had this problem? Thanks, all! Mike

Three months is the bare minimum. I've had caches that were hidden for less, but it was not because I planned it - it was because they weren't viable for some reason and didn't work out. I have moved every couple years since starting, so each time I got to a new area, I knew roughly when the expiration date of my caches would be. I had a few in Oklahoma that I put out intending for them to be there for a year, and then we ended up moving six months early, so they were only there for five months. Other than that, looking through our hides, the shortest we planned to have some out was for about nine months. I'd say get 'em up now. If you end up moving next summer, take the ideas that worked and hide them in your new locale. I have returned to some hide styles (and some puzzles) over the years because they work, and because the locals don't necessarily know how to solve them in the new area. The important thing is to plan for your move. Don't wait until the last minute to try to adopt them out. Either talk to someone ahead of time about potentially adopting the listings from you, or plan to pick them up and archive them. Don't just leave them behind without a plan. All caches need maintaining, and moving without a plan just dumps the problem on the local cachers (and reviewers) you're leaving behind.

Bundled Uverse-$152 a month-some glitches Smart phone with all the bells-$82 a month-some glitches Groundspeak-$2.50 a month-some glitches Which one gives you the most for the least? Thanks to ALL at Groundspeak for what you do!

Thanks both for the responses. I guess what I was trying to get at is not so much the theme of the cache as the physical nature of it. As a kind of anti-example, we don't really have LPCs in Australia but I found one that I understand was very typical when I visited California a few years ago. It was under the skirt of a lamp-post on it's concrete pillar about 3 feet off the ground, in the middle of a carpark. I can imagine that caches like that are convenient for people with limited mobility because you can get right up close to it whether you do that in a car, a chair or on foot. I can also imagine that, even if they all had great reasons to bring you to carparks, the same thing over and over would be boring. So my curiosity is more about how you might make the hide itself both accessible and interesting (perhaps uniquely so) to someone who, for example, is in a wheelchair or has low vision. And yes, I'm well aware that every person's disability is different. I used to do education talks with someone who uses a wheelchair. She can walk a decent distance but it can be slow and tiring so she largely keeps to the chair. However, she quite enjoyed wheeling into a classroom and doing the talk, then finding an appropriate excuse to stand up and surprise the kids. We weren't there to educate on disability and inclusion but I think she taught a lot of kids a good lesson doing that.

I purchased a number of such apps. Every one of them self-destructed. As a dev myself, though, I'm somewhat sympathetic to their problem. There are a few problems that inherently makes the geocaching app market work poorly. I think it's gotten better for low-volume apps, but the OS provider (Apple, Google) gets a third of that right off the top. Now that's a fixed COGS and was hopefully built into the price model, but the dev now gets $6.50. The twist is that geocaching apps are something a user may stare at intently two days a week instead of, say, a joke-telling app that's used a few times and discarded or even something as specialized as a map converter that you only need a few times a year. Geocaching apps are just not typical App store apps: Geocaching apps are a small market. A successful app may have hundreds of installs and a really successful one may break into the thousands. So maybe that app maker made $10K. Maybe. (Download count is not the same as purchased user account...) It's a demanding market. Look at the endless raging controversy over 3 vs. 4 digits after the decimal point on some Garmin firmware. If your app works differently than the user expects, you're going to get an earful. Maybe you built - and sold as such - a bare-bones "follow the arrow" navigation app. You're going to get one star reviews because the app doesn't have native puzzle-solving abilities, such as decoding caesar ciphers on the device. That actually has nothing to do with geocaching, but there's an expectation that it's there. Maybe your app doesn't think it should be involved in travel bugs (and you made no promises about travel bugs in the app listing) but someone will say their life is ruined if your app can't automatically dip travel bugs with a log that auto increments, includes the timestamp, and reports "3/14 for the day", for each log. Oh, and it needs to handle the day ending when they went to bed, not at midnight because they were caching after dark. It's a moving target. Groundspeak was disrespectful of developer investment in their API and at least twice has restructured the way applications had to communicate with the server in an incompatible way. Not a minor, annoying, "let's change the spelling" way, but a major "rewrite the bottom half of the app" way. Multiple times. Cache types and log types and maximum API calls per hour and other things change (or at least did - I've quit following it) regularly. It's a localized target. Geocachers are worldwide. You'll need SI and Imperial. You'll need to know that altitude may be in feet, but ground distance may be in meters. You'll need at least most of the Romance languages supported. Individually these are trivial, but it's a lot of _stuff_ to keep track of and to exercise all the combinations. It's a changing target. Even within a given API level, Cache and log types come and go. Security rules around logins change. OSes change version and deprecate some service that you were using. There are new event types to handle. You'll need to build and test on phone and tablet, probably on real hardware and not the emulator because geocaching is a physical thing and it's hard to simulate the experience in the field. You'll need to handle all the new devices coming on as well as all the old devices that ever worked because someone will have a phone identical to yours, but is on a carrier that's withholding the OS upgrade so your "identical" phones offer two different sets of features to develop, test, and support. It's a demanding target. You don't control the schedule when any of this happens. OS updates get pushed and you're either on the train or your app quits working. Groundspeak changes the login process - again - and all your users are locked out. The solution space is small. You're never going to get VC funding to get an iOS dev, an android dev, a support person, a testing person, some equipment, etc. This is always doomed to be a one person operation (Every open-source attempt into this space I've seen has usually been a single-person show, perhaps after a brief flurry of introductory activity) and it's not like it's even going to be big enough money to be a full time job with insurance, etc. It's big enough to be painful (to do it well) but not big enough to actually hang a business around. Even Garmin made a run into the "geocaching" app space and eventually quietly withdrew. Not unique to geocaching is the split of the market. While there are frameworks that help you move your app between iOS and Android, they don't really cover things like the compass and the GPS and battery issues that are all crucial in a geocaching app, but less so in others. If you're a serious dev out to capture serious market share, you can then count on basically building,, testing, and marketing your app twice: Once in Swift and once in Kotlin. (And ten years ago, neither of those languages existed, so you've probably replaced the original Java and Objective C++ versions....) So now you're fighting for relevance in two markets, on two different fronts. I just looked at the android app store at the top paid apps from indy devs: #1 $5 - Sync for Reddit actually shares some of these problems. However, there are 430 million monthly Reddit users. The market is actually large enough to bring non-trivial income. Yay for them. Only they also just added monthly subscription fees ON TOP OF the base app price. This didn't go over well. #2 $3 calendar app. 1M users. (Hint: you're never going to get 1M geocaching app users) The target market is people that need a calendar. Not sure it competes on ongoing maintenance, though. #3 $1.39 watch faces. A watch face app is probably a weekend project. Build it once and you're done. 10K users. #4 $4. An application to talk to ghosts. Seems unlikely to have much tech support demand or changes from ghosts going on strike. So all of these are apps with a WAY larger potential user base and either less ongoing required dev/maintenance/support costs, or an additional monthly subscription fee to cover that. Yet, if you build an app for $10 (the same app for $2 would drive you insane with looky-loos demanding support) users basically expect the app to keep working forever, but without an economy around it that supports this. Build a $2 fart app where the market is anyone that was ever eight years old and people will forget about the app in a week and you never hear from them again. A watch face app may get a cease and desist from Rolex about using their artwork (and that could be detrimental if executed, but you're out a weekend of development) but you'll notice that other app types in the industry don't have this whole large ecosystem that they have to live in, but can't control. Mobile apps blew out the pricing of software. People now associate app prices with that $2 fart app, a $4 flashlight app, or the $1.39 watch face (honestly, I think the market for that kind of junkware has kind of blown over, but it still cratered consumer expectation of paying for software) and if you ask them to pay $50 for a specialized mapping program or some other market-specific tool, it's like you're a baby-killer. Yes, I was there for the wailing every time Clyde rolled out a paid upgrade to GSAK...and watched him put up with users going to great lengths to avoid paying for those upgrades, but still taking up his time. This isn't the article I was looking for, but it cites a lot of related articles that touch on these topics. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811619300473 So, yeah. A failed $10 geocaching app is just par for this course. Sorry. If I need credentials, I've been developing geocaching-related tools off and on since 2001. I've built at least two Android apps and one cross-platform GSAK-like app for cross-platform to prototype stage. I have geocaching-specific code in GSAK and in Google Earth (drag and drop a PQ into Google Earth Pro. Thats me.). I've studied this market and I've thought about it a LOT. Concluding advice: develop geocaching apps to scratch your own itch or do it for fun, but there's no money in it.

Please read my comment again. I'm not saying anything about PQs going away. I'm explicitly saying to migrate the PQ preview from the old buggy seek/nearest platform to the modern next.js search results. Knowing the mess that is the old seek/nearest code-base, I doubt it's that simple. I responded to similar claims here before: Yes it was working before when two ancient ca 2005 code bases were working together. Some of these issues are side-effects of trying to get a 2005 and a vastly different and advanced 2022 version to talk to each other. The best course of action would be to get two modern systems that are much more compatible to work together. That is the next step. For the present issue, while I understand your frustration, I offered you a clear workaround. If instead of continuing to have a productive conversation like we did up until this point , you'd rather point fingers and speak poorly about the people who are trying to help you, let me know and we can be done here. And to those who say "don't take it personal" - thanks, I'll stand up for my developers and QA engineers any day because I know how hard they work every day within the constraints of our systems.

AKA Mentor Wanted! Hi all New girl in town and living in the gorgeous Prescott Valley, Az. Just joined the site as a premium member so will be learning about all the functions and offerings. I stumbled over a cache accidentally last year while checking out an historical marker/graveyard and was officially hooked, though I'd been familiar with the site and concept for awhile before then. I was given a Magellan sports trak GPS but wasn't very intuitive and had no manuals, cables or anything and couldn't figure out how to use it. Anyway, I'm browsing Amazon ready to order something solid, reliable, and easy to use in the $300 range. I'm seeing high reviews for the Garmin Rino, so thought I would post and ask if anyone here is using it and how it fares for a complete noob and anything I might need to be aware of, and especially if I'll end up spending more $ on back end accessories that I will need but that don't come with (and worse, aren't even mentioned). Finally, if anyone is in Prescott Valley Az area, I would love to meet you. We're relatively new in town too and I've had little opportunity to meet people so far. Geocaching buds would be ideal! Thanks in advance. I think the email is shown, maybe in profile if you prefer that option too. Have a great evening!