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Hello, I was invited a few weeks ago to this site by a friend and veteran geocacher here, because my son and I were really interested in jumping into the game. We both knew what it was about, and I've played a similar game before via other sites. Long story short, I've been trying to submit a cache for 3 weeks, but the local reviewer in Japan ("ShinyOrbital") will not approve our cache, has even brought my nationality up as a negative issue. He is retired, so I am guessing he's got little better to do than power trip on here. He has been extremely condescending and rude. The issue: He says we need to find 20 caches before we can hide one. I mentioned the official guidelines merely encourage this, and do not require it, and the official customer support here even told me the same. Still, "ShinyOrbital" refuses to approve our cache. My son was very excited, and I am feeling very disappointed in the lack of professionality. Who does this kind of crap to families just trying to play the game??? We have been out looking for caches together, and took two weekends to make sure our hide met the guideline criteria. I work full-time, so this time is precious. This reviewer, ShinyOrbital, mentioned that "we Japanese" don't want inexperienced (i.e. foreign cachers) just jumping in and playing. I mentioned my family is Japanese and that I was invited by a veteran cacher in the area. Emily at customer support said the same reviewer will be informed that 20 finds are not required. Shiny Orbital doubled down. He's stringing us along, and even mocked me sarcastically, and then asked "What is your problem?" All I ask is that if 20 finds are required, the guidelines be updated to reflect that. Even in the Japanese language the guide says 20 finds are only encouraged, and not required. I refuse to talk to this xenophobic troll anymore known as "ShinyOrbital," and if there's nothing that can be done by Geocaching.com to rein in losers like this, making people who just wanna play the game wait and wait and wait just for some sick fun, I'm going to go to some other site. I don't want to. I like this one. But sheesh. Exasperating. Anyone dealt with a reviewer like this before? -ZGBob

I'm curious that in the Blog post they talk about tackling a T5 climb or solving a tricky field puzzle and say they're celebrating the diversity of embracing your own version of adventure: Adventure takes on a unique form for each of us, whether it’s the thrill of climbing to reach a T5, solving a tricky field puzzle, or exploring a new area of your neighborhood with Adventure Lab®. What’s important is that you’re out there, embracing your version of adventure. This year, we’re celebrating this diversity with a special souvenir! But you can only get the souvenir by doing a stage (not the whole Adventure, just one stage) of an AL. I guess for me the "adventure" will be the long drive through Sydney's traffic snarls to get to the nearest available AL stage, but that's not an "adventure" I'm all that keen to embrace..

Sorry, I have no idea what you want to say here. Maybe my english is not sufficient. Lets try again. By "Picking up" a TB I meant someone "retrieves it from the cache" so that does not include a visit log but only a "Retrieve log" What I meant with hoping for a "surprising log" is that scenario that the TB somehow gets lost without any trace so you gave up any hope but suddenly the TB shows up again and was correctly logged (grabbed+placed). Probably in that case even I would be happy about a meaningful(!) discovery log I certainly don't talk about "your" or "cerberus1s" logs which apparently (at least in my experience) are an exeption to the rule. And yes visit logs are usually by far more annoying than discovery logs because of their volume.

I want to start by saying I worked with many reviewers (probably something like 12) and I generally find them amazing people doing great work. If anyone starts digging after reading this, I want to also state explicitly that it is not about my usual local reviewer, who I find to be extremely professional and helpful. I am trying to publish an earthcache and I am finding the way the particular reviewer who's looking at the cache approaches the process unacceptable. The process has been going for way over a month already and hasn't really moved forward during that period. It's generally been going something like this: - the guy asks me a question - I answer somewhat extensively - the guy takes over a week to answer and asks me another question, not at all related to what he asked before. If he does expand on his previous question, he seems to not have read my answer at all, at best having skimmed it In his most recent response, today, he asked me to change the cache entirely, dropping 4/5 questions. He didn't provide any good reasons, his reasons were twofold: 1. "This is not interesting to anyone" - I find that to be purely offensive and not really professional in any way. It is interesting, at the very least, to me, which is why I am trying to publish a cache about it. 2. "This is not geology" - In one case, he used that argument when he was talking about a question which says, literally. "How does this [high concentration of heavy metals] affect the geology of the soil?". In the other case, he said this because the cache talks about a river which was regulated by humans - but the fact that the river was regulated has nothing to do with the subject of the cache, I only mention it once, just so that people are aware, and I only talk about actual geological aspects of the river, not it being regulated. Needless to say, I do not ask any questions about the regulation or human interference in the river at all. I believe the guy to be completely wrong. But even if he were right about the crux of the matter, I find the way he doesn't address what I said to him and changes his mind about what the problem is constantly, to be unbearable. My question to you is, if he continues to be so difficult, is there anything I can do about it? Can I ask for the cache to be handled by a different reviewer? Can I ask Groundspeak to double-check our messages and ask him to be more reasonable? Are there any other steps, formal or informal, that I can take? I am asking this here, not in the earthcache forum, as I believe the actual question may be relevant to people outside of earthcaching, but facing problems with reviewers more generally. Thanks in advance for any advice!

"There's probably some "clever" bit of code in either the app or the phone's GPS service that thinks it can save a bit of battery life by not taking readings when it thinks you're stationary. I've worked with - and on- that clever code. These days it's a feature in the correlators called "static navigation" that can be enabled, disabled, or ignored. A GPS never knows where it is. I knows within N% confidence that it' somewhere inside a circle of R meters. As the ionosphere changes and the constellation moves, that circle and its assumed position in the point cloud will change. If a GPS in your car reported your position as moving back 2m NNE this second, 3NW this second, 5m SE this second, and so on while you were waiting at a stoplight, you would through it through the window, especially if that drift took you into an adjacent land and the girl in the box shouted out "rerouting1". As some point, MOST users want 'stopped' to mean stopped. If you're a geocacher looking for a tube stuck in the ground (ew!) you may actually want that, but most civilians don't. That mode is called Constant Navigation. I didn't know what it was called when I wrote this page 18 years ago (I wasn't even sure it was still public, actually) but I graphed three of the most popular GPS receivers in .. 2006(!) I sat a GPS 60Cs (the one with the stupid chip that would lose lock in tall grass) the 60CSx and the Magellan Explorist 600 and collected the location that it reported to the computer over the course of many hours. The 60CS basically didn't know where it was. The 60CSx of that era roamed all over, traveling over a mile while..sitting at my desk while the Magellan - which was famous at the time for doing a bit of aggressive position averaging - moved less than 1/5th of that, with about half of that in one short burst. Those last two actually used the same GPS chip, the SirfStar III, and I now believe that one used static navigation setting and one used constant navigation. https://www.mtgc.org//robertlipe/showdown/index.html I think Atlas' answer is probably the "right" one, IF there is an actual measurable difference. In the old days, people were more meticulous and more "gadgety" in respectful use of their equipment. Now, it's taken for granted and it's much more likely to talk up to a rock, drop a box behind it, snap 'mark' and walk away instead of taking 30 minutes of averaged locations as was common when coordinates came in roman numerals. As for the tease at the end that was fashionable in that era, I lost interest in caring about such things and was still able to go outside and play instead...

There is a limit to the distance you can update the coordinates to. Also hopefully it does not infringe on a proximity to another cache. Talk to your reviewer they can definately help and should be able to quickly tell you if there is a problem.

I use both my Android and an Etrex 22x. I've been checking out different apps on my phone. I've been bouncing between Geooh Go and the regular app. Geooh Go has some cool features the regular app does not have. I like having access to Wherigo and Project-gc directly in the app. I don't like the GPS function so I use my Etrex 22x for gps. I use my phone to log caches in real time with the talk to text feature to create my logs.

I'll just say that it's not too hard to find once you start looking. Talk about hidden in plain sight!

Yeah... I went to find a couple caches for a promotion. Most had maintenance issues, but one was only the top of a bison tube. People were finding that "top" and claiming it a find for over a year. A jerk like me (by talk at events) comes in and NM it. The only NM on that cache... The "CO" got in a huff and archived all caches in the park. I picked up the bison top and a couple others two weeks later, but there's a bunch still there. People were happy to find a top and claim it a find...

Talk to text?

Skimming topics, i decided to dip into the other remaining source of GPS expertise, the GSAK forum. (Duly noting that OP is on a Mac and this does them no/little good.) https://gsak.net/board/index.php?showtopic=36383&view=findpost&p=279765 concludes that there is MTP voodoo within GSAK (!?!?) Perhaps, this being a Microsoft creation as part of Windows Media, plinking around media files is easier there and GSAK somehow hooks to some kind of OS interface to do this. (We've also had people declare the end of Garmin MTP about every six months since the original Nuvi 350, so I don't know if the 67 is really really the end or not...) Still, when I see authoritative-sounding MTP Library things on the web saying things like: It seems quite likely that if Clyde came to me before May, 2008, I'd have told him to take off as it's MS-only and after May, 2008, I'd have told him to take off as sounds like the standard compliance is poor and reading things like https://github.com/libmtp/libmtp (search for 'kext') encouraging people to disable their USB mass storage devices, which requires unlocking several security checks, it just sounds like a bad idea even on MacOS. (I can be a jerk like that...) In that same doc, we have both: "Windows Media Player apparently never close the session to an MTP device." ... "The "Unix way" of running small programs that open the device, do something, then close the device, isn't really working with such devices and you cannot expect to have command line tools like the mtp examples work with them." You may be able to think of a program that very much embraces The Unix Way. It seems likely that you'd be deeply annoyed at GPSBabel running forever or requiring you to reboot between times of talking to your GPS. That's just incredibly dumb, but that's 2000's era Microsoft for you. So even now, if they were to ask, the words "take off" may not appear literally in my response, but without someone else paying for the engineering to bring a quality MTP implementation into GPSBabel along with a device testing budget, I don't see it happening. Heck, Maybe Garmin had to develop one for Basecamp that's usable open source (hahahahaha). Maybe iCaching is interested in developing some kind of code to talk to these things, but I don't particularly see this landing on my desk as an accepted action item without some divine intervention. (That happened on the 60 Cx...) Since I hadn't finished reading the entire internet before posting that (workin' on it!) it possible that https://openmtp.ganeshrvel.com/ may be better, worse, or at least broken in a _different_ way. It doesn't look particularly Mac-like for a Mac app, but I have no vote. Working + Homely > Attractive + Dysfunctional (This is also solid dating advice...)

Ok, let me ask you a question: Why does a magazine cover depicting a shot black kid (I suppose this is the cover in question) need to be on a geocache page? What does it add to the cache and the caching experience of the family trying to find it? Also, you talk about deflecting, but you don't say what the communication with the reviewer about placing a cache on a postal structure looked like.

I'm closing this thread because this is the forum for discussing Geocaching.com's smartphone apps - not for discussing handheld GPS units. There is a separate forum section to talk about GPS and Technology. There's a pinned thread at the top of that forum section, and the most recent post in that forum is in a thread asking the same question.

Based on the other caches you found I could see that there are several events within say 20km of that find location coming up. Why not join and event, talk to people and learn more about placing your first cache there? The community is generally very friendly and helpful.

Spam: Again, opt-in. Harvesting of usernames may be possible if replies are received, but that's also attainable from the gc website itself. Usernames couldn't be harvested from some central list since that wouldn't exist publicly. I'm sure throttling could also be implemented so bots don't spam every combination of letters to find valid/active forwarding emails. Incoming email: I'm not 100% on the technicalities of email distribution, but there's no email transfer to the gc servers if forwarding - the email process would have the servers exchange info and the forwarding server would simply be indicating the redirect destination. It wouldn't be millions of emails being transferred, just pings to tell the sending server where to send the email and how. Not much more intense I'd expect than the already inundated servers being hammered by bots and hack attempts. A ping is negligible; an email forward would be a bit more than a ping, to my knowledge. If that's wrong, then at worst the server receives the email and bounces the content to the forwarding destination server; nothing stored, just proxied over, and that's the last that's heard between them (a bounced destination, eg, would be sent back to the sender's server, not via gc's server). Managing addresses: This would, I think, be the biggest resource. However it wouldn't start out at a list of millions of forwards, and likely there wouldn't even be millions. If it's opt-in, then it would at most provide for active premium members who want to use it. Harvesting: Again, there'd be no way to attain a private email address from this opt-in feature let alone a list. Even after sending an email to a known active user's forward address, the user's private email would only be exposed if they replied directly to the email after receiving it in their own personal external email inbox. Only the sender's email would be exposed, on sending an email to the user - which, is, well, how email works. Email forwarding is a pretty standard fair feature of email providers. Of course GC isn't an email provider, and the system to be able to administer an email forwarding list on their existing email server would need to be built, but it wouldn't be building a complex email management solution on top of what already exists; just a tool to manage the forwarding function, and mitigate/throttle request overloads. All that said, I don't really see this feature being implemented, but it's fun to talk about. Someone might have a good idea for how to make it work in some optimal way.

Thanks for the report. I can repro this issue. I'll talk to the team!

Hmmmm, seems like I had a small breakthrough here (after several breakdowns): I created this Input: Then I made this flow to handle the "On get input": Then I put a "Talk to girl" command on the "Girl" character and eneabled/handled it: Now, if I click "Yes" the girl is moved to my inventory, and if I click "No" the message is shown with an "ok" button. If I click the "ok" button I am returned to the main screen and can try to accept helping her instead. There are so many "Unhandled" places to click that it's a bit of a jungle at first. Is this a good way to handle this, or are there better options available. Don't get med wrong, I'm pretty happy to get this far. I also wonder how to prevent the input "Talk to girl" from running when she has been moved to my inventory and I click on her?

Thanks for your reply. I downloaded your cartridge and ran it in Webwigo, but even though I move the player into the zone - nothing happens? And the bit about creating a variable and input is the crux of my problems. I think I have managed to create an input: But I have no idea how to use the input. I have looked at the variable bit, but been unable to figure out how to set things up in Urwigo so that it takes the input and then how to use it. If you are able to provide a *.urwigo file with this flow set up, it would be very helpful and hopefully set me on the right path. I really don't understand which action(s) is/are the right one(s) to use. I found a tutorial on YouTube. He did set up a command "Talk to", but ironically he never got around to elaborate no how to set up the handling of it. If using ChatGPT and Urwigo is viable, I would be most grateful if you were able to look at the script to see why it doesn't work. Since even the "shrunk" version of the script failed, I've hit a pretty soild wall. Here I have uploaded my entire project: https://1drv.ms/f/s!Ah32GzvTZ0Lhgo5ykxPYbCRtBf1VJg?e=PsEDY8 Please feel free to download it to have a look at what I have done so far. You will certainly not be impressed, but you should get an idea at what I am aiming for. Again, I greatly appreciate you trying to help out a complete noob here.

Thanks for the report. I will look into this and talk to the team.

It's just inevitable, @Mineral2. If you'll think about it, you've seen this progression for decades. FAT filesystems were of the CPM and later DOS era then things were coded in assembly and for a single CPU to be reading and writing them. Imagine a filesystem on a "disk" (doesn't matter if it's a memory card or a shared buffer or punched paper or mercury tubes or whatever...) as a clay tablet (is that all I've got? We're going to overlook that a clay-tablet is write-mostly? Really? I've gotta work on my metaphors... :-) ) that always has to be internally consistent with itself in case it's suddenly disconnected from the writer. It has separate areas like an index and a table of contents and it has a list of space of what space has already been written on and what's free. With some clever chisel-work, you can make sure that this always works by having the chisel that carves out letters also updating the TOC and the free list all in the same blow of the hammer. It's atomic (unbreakable) on each hammer strike. Sure, the chisel is funny looking, but this is how filesystems work. If the writer is stricken by a diety while they're writing, the tablet is always self-consistent and there's no chance of it getting out of sync. Now, if you have TWO writers trying to hammer away on that same block, each with their own magic chisels, each may try to write into the same blank space twice, each with different data which will hose up the table of contents/index if block 1,347 could possibly contain two different entries. The wheels pretty much fall off of everything if you have TWO processors trying to write to the same filesystem. You've seen evidence of this for decades. Network operating systems work very hard so that hundreds of computers talk to IT and IT talks to the filesystems, introducing locking and such, so prevent this problem. (Remember 3Com and Novel?) Cameras (remember those?) have long had this problem. If the camera is displaying the list of photos while you're connecting to a computer and adding, deleting, and reordering photos, Bad Things happen. We introduced PTP, the Picture Tunneling Protocol to act like an NOS. The CPU on your MP3 Players (remember those?) can't index your songs and display your albums and play lists while you're connecting to a computer and reordering, adding, and removing things. So we extended PTP to become the Media Tunneling Protocol. The final entry in my walk down history lane will indeed be cell phones, notably the very Android that's mentioned when it added memory cards, introducing Android File Transfer (which has applications outside of Android, but has the advantage of being open source and widely adopted by now as well as open implementations for all the OSes that matter) to be the intermediary where everything (the big computer with a keyboard and the tiny computer with a battery) spoke a protocol to AFT and AFT spoke to the tablet, err, storage media. In all these examples, these things handled notifying the other readers/writers when a change happened, when another device connected, and so on. If you think about it, we've seen the same issues in GPSes for years.The Garmin 60CSx wouldn't let you store anything but maps on the SD card and it required a reboot to read them. The Garmin and the host couldn't both access the card at the same time. (Contrast that to the protocol-driven devices where you could watch them draw waypoints on the screen as they were added by software like mine as they transferred.) Nuvi 350, back in 2005, and before it, the i3, would basically go into a catatonic state with the local CPU doing nothing as long as the USB connection was detected. (This was annoying as hell if your charging cable happened to introduce Just Enough resistance on the pin it was supposed to leave unconnected so that your car charger would put your GPS into this flatline state.) When the USB cable disconnected, the device essentially rebooted, invalidating what it knew about the state of the clay tablet, err, filesystem, and would read them fresh. Eventually, most Nuvi mutants and later, the Drive models started using MTP or AFT to do this same thing. The handhelds at least through the Oregon 600 (which may well be my final geocaching GPS) were still essentially shutting down while connecting to USB for this same reason. USB isn't - and doesn't pretend to be - a network file system. USB mass storage actually exposes raw blocks on the device in SCSI command blocks (yes, really - and for an extra laugh, some versions of USB MSTO even exposed floppy drives as SCSI devices). So software liie AFT acts like a tiny little TFTP server that reads and writes files (not blocks, though it may allow partial writes within files, such as for appending) where everyone talks to it and it alone is responsible for actually managing the storage device. (Well, it probably delegates that to lower levels of the OS, such as the kernel's own filesystem and journaling and below that, block level management) Unlike that "DADT" model where everything talks to a server (like AFT) though, in the era of removable media, we often want to be able to take the memory card to something ELSE and read and write it there, like mounting that memory card of pictures in your TV to share with others in the room. For THAT, we can't pretend that the code below AFT has just handled everything for us and we still need everything to be able to read and write the block level jibberish that the appliacations write to the filesystem. While we've created scores of successful filesystems, none are as ubiquitous as DOS's own FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32. The relevant patents (complete with Ballmer-era shakedowns and litigations) have only very recently expired on those. So the filesystem bits (the etchings on those clay tablets) are useful to be able to read and write across devices. That's why we haven't all moved our external disks and our TiVos and whatever to EXT4, ZFS, and other, better designs. So really, Garmin's engineers have two possible stances while building a device - they either detect the edge of an insertion/removal and USB attachment/detachment and they put the host device into a catatonic state where it can no longer access the card data (else things like the map it was displaying might be removed in the middle of a frame draw) or they add something like AFT to negotiate the access of BOTH the internal and external (host computer) access to the common media. Software like GSAK has seen this train coming for years. So far, on dozens of models they've been able to turn off MTP mode and choose the "catatonic" model I've described. GSAK users have been doing this for a very long time. Again, it's a lot of words, but hopefully this explains why these things are this way. (And, yes, I did formerly engineer this sort of stuff for a living..)

"I submitted a gazebo which has a square shape. Declined. Very fairly so as it says in the category that gazebos must be hexagonal or octagonal. What the heck!? I could give many more examples. So, talk about simplify, not complicate. " That sometimes depends on the reviewer who touches you. Thank goodness more reviewers are now being introduced in many categories. Now and there is less mafia in that subject and there are new nice reviewers. In gazebos, however if it is round you get approved. There are categories where it depends on who submits it is voted on or approved or denied, but that topic was talked about and censored in other forums. That said, now there are more reviewers (who are not those who have hundreds of categories) contributing. Which I love. Can we try to maintain "some" quality in Waymarking? This question is sometimes difficult and even seems to me a bit "false" at times. We can't have a party and a geocoin all happy because there were a million WM some time ago and then start to tighten categories to approve less WM or start to change and allow less things. Do you want quality or do you want 2 million? Is this professional? Does anyone get paid for it? Right now I see new people doing WM (and plenty of them in places like Spain, France, Netherlands, etc) who have been doing it for a long time and didn't get tired of it. So I don't think there is a loss of interest. In fact there are times when they say they want something more than geocaching.

No, it shows there are still silly categories hidden out there. If that Bat House is possible, anything is possible, given the author of the crazy idea massages conveniently the peers in this forums with smooth talk and a fantastic presentation of the category.

That the idea of imposing more troubles to whoever is contributing is awful. The requirements are good as they are and above all are those which the peers voted (well, it's editable, I know, but usually it applies what I said). Leave the categories alone. If something, I know quite a few which should be simplified. A practical example: gazebos. Unaware of the detail, I submitted a gazebo which has a square shape. Declined. Very fairly so as it says in the category that gazebos must be hexagonal or octagonal. What the heck!? I could give many more examples. So, talk about simplify, not complicate.

I have published the Final route for the Lewiston Cache Machine. PDF map of the route Bookmark of the caches on the route on geocaching.com A numbered list of all the caches on the route. Link to the Cachetur.no Template file of the route. A Google doc of all this information. https://coord.info/GCAMWGK Lewiston ID Cache Machine Dinner Where: KC's Burgers and Brew Address: 541 Thain Rd Lewiston, ID 83501 When: April 6, 2024, 19:30 - 21:00 Why: To talk about geocaching in the Lewiston Area. See you all there. Terrible Ts

The event has been published. https://coord.info/GCAMWGK Lewiston ID Cache Machine Dinner Where: KC's Burgers and Brew Address: 541 Thain Rd Lewiston, ID 83501 When: April 6, 2024, 19:30 - 21:00 Why: To talk about geocaching in the Lewiston Area.