Virtual Coin 'gone'

[+Geoki]

Can I just add that i wasn't aware that turning a coin into a virtual was against any 'rules'. The reasons that i did were that I 'd seen others like it and as the coin I recieved had a low number i actually want to keep it safe [after 'losing' my daughters tb]. What would have been common courtesy was to have recieved an email warning me that if I didn't change the coin I would then get it locked. I could have then brought it back and sent out a laminated'copy' to travel.

A few manners go along way! You then wouldn't get the 'them and us' that I have seen in this and other treads. There should also be a bit on the tb/coin registering system that Doesn't allow this 'virtual' posting at the offset. [iMHO]

Looking at some of the posts here it looks like I now have a coin that'll be going nowhere that I've paid for.

[+Happy Humphrey]

I think that false logging for caches and TB's has always been discouraged. Up until recently, I don't think it was such a problem that widespread intervention was required. But now we have cases like the South Pole cache, more drastic action was going to be inevitable.

 

I do agree that there should have been a warning sent before any bug was "locked": at least out of politeness and to help PR. I'd have proposed an option where all the bug's logs were deleted and the bug deactivated - a lot of people would just be following the fashion rather than trying to sabotage the game, so there's no need for punishment!

 

My solution to protecting my modest collection of geocoins is to buy two, then keep one and place the other in a cache.

 

HH

[markandlynn]

Moote has obtained an official response to this issue here .

 

Personally I think waypointing and virtual TB's will make ideal partners.

[+Dorsetgal & GeoDog]

Now, if that were really true, you wouldn't have had a TB posted from USA would you? Or are White Jeeps an exception in your eyes?

 

The rules, such as they are, are open to interpretation, and it seems lately that TPTB have lost sight that people enjoy the game in differing ways.

The jeep was sent by someone who checked out with geocaching that it wasnt breaking any rules being sent here. <snip>

My post wasnt a personal attack on anyone but if you wanna single me out thats fine. As a new cacher i suppose i am fair game

No it wasn't a personal attack at all, please don't take it as such.

 

Merely posted pointing out that you said you play the game by the rules and I know there are some who might interpret your actions with the Jeep differently too.

 

That's the point, live and let live. Poeple play the game according to their own interpretation of the rules.

 

There are things that I view as "not really playing the game" but I wouldn't trump up here and tell people they mustn't play that way, simply I'd do my own thing according to how I would like to play myself. Unless it heavily impacts upon the enjoyment of others I don't see the harm.

 

Had there been a rule that coins and Tbs must not be logged virtually then you would have had a fair point, but there is not ...

 

Seems to me that locking coins without warning shows that TPTB didn't have the imagination to realise that some of these virtual coins and Tbs could be used in very creative, educational and fun ways.

[+Moote]

Moote has obtained an official response to this issue here .

 

Personally I think waypointing and virtual TB's will make ideal partners.

Yes, it looks like I will get my coin back as long as I supply a mission it the real world! Email sent to Groundspeak and I will keep you all informed of the outcome.

 

Milton (aka Moote)

[+Alibags]

So it looks like people can reclaim their locked coins, which is the best result in the circumstances. Courtesy costs nothing... but if this issue gets satisfactorily resolved then fine. It doesn't affect me directly, but I am concerned over such developments which potentially affect my 'game'.

 

As far as I can tell, this latest blast from on high does not affect any coins or TBs which travel with a replacement tag (original got muggled) so I think that a "replacement coin" would still fit their rules (although J has stated that unwritten rules exist and these are what is obvious to him, so interpret that as you will!). The surrogate tag would still move in the same way as a 'real' one, so the clogging up the servers issue should be no more than any other tag.

 

We will see what this TB 'spotting' idea ends up as. It could work, or else we will just have to physically take Deego and cram him into an ammo can...

Edited December 7, 2005 by Alibags

[+welch]

I'd imagine that when there were only a few VTB's it wasn't much of an issue. Now that everyone is making their own geocoin, the strain on the "trackable item" server is growing.

 

Virtual caches went the same way if you think about it. They started off as just a few, but became a rampant problem when people started waypoint abandoned tennis shoes or dead birds. Now they have been moved to a separate site (Waymarking) so they don't impact the game of geocaching.

If you want another example, look at the 'chain reaction / replicator' type travel bugs. One there was one or two it may have got noticed a little bit. There was a thread in the TB forum about them once or twice even. Some liked the idea, some didn't. But it wasn't until they'd multiplied (both in themselves, and with others making similar ones) that Jeremy noticed and had them nixed.

 

For that don't know the goal of these TBs was to have people make copies and release them and/or just copy the TB number in every logbook, email, event the finders could locate. So once it gets going you could be getting hundreds of hits that really mean nothing.

 

To me it seems there would actually be two problems with virtual TB, one is that there is nothing physical, so all the logs are 'fake'. Two,(perhaps the bigger problem?) they have potential to circle the globe hourly, causing a large drain for one TB.

[+Geoki]

The good news is that I did send an email and the coin has been unlocked. Thanks to the advice from other cachers who have been in a similar position. I still think a polite email ar even not allowing the action of setting a tb/coin as a virtual from the offset would be far better.

At least other cachers will, hopefully, not end up in the same position.

[SlytherinAlex]

For that don't know the goal of these TBs was to have people make copies and release them and/or just copy the TB number in every logbook, email, event the finders could locate. So once it gets going you could be getting hundreds of hits that really mean nothing.

I'm still confused Welch.

 

OK, so virtual coins and bugs are out. I'm easy with that one. It did pee me off a little just how easy it was for people to get the EU icon on their tally.

 

But what of logging coins that you see at a cache meet. The way I understand it, now you will just log a "spotted" instead of a "find" and that won't generate an email to the owner or watchers.

 

Is that about right?

 

Alex.

[+Happy Humphrey]

Alex,

 

But what of logging coins that you see at a cache meet. The way I understand it, now you will just log a "spotted" instead of a "find" and that won't generate an email to the owner or watchers.

 

I don't think that this has been finalised.

 

I assume that it WILL generate an email, but only one, rather than one to say "picked up" and another to say "dropped off". I think that the whole point is just to classify these logs separately to reflect reality, and make this type of action easier to log.

 

HH

[+Happy Humphrey]

Geoki,

even not allowing the action of setting a tb/coin as a virtual from the offset

This never was allowed: see my debate with Simply Paul! The loophole was that you can give away the number of a real TB or geocoin, to encourage people to make bogus log entries so that it goes on a "virtual" tour. That can't be stopped (AFAIK), until the false logs start appearing.

 

HH

[+Chris n Maria]

This is logged into a local cache near me  Boysie so anyone turning up to collect the bug using PQ's is going to mightly peeved... this sort of thing should be banned what a waste of time 

Sorry - I forgot to pick up the TB after I dropped it. Sorry for playing the game in my own way and I will in future endevour to play the game exactly by whatever arbitary rules people decide to invent.

 

Chris

Edited December 7, 2005 by Chris n Maria

[+Moote]

This is logged into a local cache near me  Boysie so anyone turning up to collect the bug using PQ's is going to mightly peeved... this sort of thing should be banned what a waste of time 

Sorry - I forgot to pick up the TB after I dropped it. Sorry for playing the game in my own way and I will in future endevour to play the game exactly be whatever arbitary rules people decide to invent.

 

Chris

From what I can gather GC.com are not to happy about this 'drop and pickup' activity either, It does look as if TB's will only be able to travel on missions.

 

Milton (aka Moote)

[+Chris n Maria]

This is logged into a local cache near me  Boysie so anyone turning up to collect the bug using PQ's is going to mightly peeved... this sort of thing should be banned what a waste of time 

Sorry - I forgot to pick up the TB after I dropped it. Sorry for playing the game in my own way and I will in future endevour to play the game exactly be whatever arbitary rules people decide to invent.

 

Chris

From what I can gather GC.com are not to happy about this 'drop and pickup' activity either, It does look as if TB's will only be able to travel on missions.

 

Milton (aka Moote)

If you look further up the thread linked to by TeamGPSSaxaphone you will see that Jeremy said about just this sort of travelbug:

That is actually just logging movements from cache to cache. What I am referring to are people who pick up and drop off the travel bug or geocoin into the same cache it was already in just to get a "find" count on their stats page. So Bob picks up the Travel Bug out of X cache and places it back in X cache. You're just dropping it off in X cache, picking it up and placing it in Y cache.

 

So it seems like it is an "allowed" activity.

 

BTW - Don't you just love the way one person gets to make and change the rules of this game

[+Alibags]

From what I can gather GC.com are not to happy about this 'drop and pickup' activity either, It does look as if TB's will only be able to travel on missions.

Well that's just pants then! I took a TB to India and dropped and retrieved it from the two caches I did and then brought it home. The TB's goal was to travel to India, but if I had left it there, it would have sat for months all through the monsoon season going soggy, so I thought it best to bring it back. This is a drop and pick up activity. I cannot see how this contravenes the rules, the spirit or even the pleasure of caching. The bug owner told me they were happy with what I had done.

 

I will wait and see what actually happens as I think (hope) we may have reached the 'chinese whispers' stage with this subject now and common sense will prevail.

[+Geoki]

From what I can gather GC.com are not to happy about this 'drop and pickup' activity either,   It does look as if TB's will only be able to travel on missions.

Well that's just pants then! I took a TB to India and dropped and retrieved it from the two caches I did and then brought it home. The TB's goal was to travel to India, but if I had left it there, it would have sat for months all through the monsoon season going soggy, so I thought it best to bring it back. This is a drop and pick up activity. I cannot see how this contravenes the rules, the spirit or even the pleasure of caching. The bug owner told me they were happy with what I had done.

 

I will wait and see what actually happens as I think (hope) we may have reached the 'chinese whispers' stage with this subject now and common sense will prevail.

So does that then mean the coin, I've been saving to take across to Florida later in the year, to initially travel from cache to cache before leaving it in one I can no longer do that with? What is going on here.

 

It says on the TB page 'What does a Travel Bug do?

 

It's really up to the owner of the bug to give it whatever task they desire. Or no task at all. The fun of a travel bug is inventing new goals for the Travel Bug to achieve. One Bug's goal may be to reach a specific country, or travel to 10 countries.

 

I choose to take it from cache to cache so that my daughter can see how far we have travelled as a family to get to America from Scotland and then the amount ot travelling we do when there.

 

Other cachers have coins/bugs to mark their accumulation of miles. Are these wrong also?

 

Can there be a clarification 'IN WRITING' as to what NEW rules tb's/coins can do as this appears to be a problem across the board and only one person has the rules that, it appears, can be altered/changed adhoc.

I'm now more confused than before

[+Happy Humphrey]

From what I can gather GC.com are not to happy about this 'drop and pickup' activity either,  It does look as if TB's will only be able to travel on missions.

No, there aren't any rules about this. The only thing they were "not too happy about" was that sometimes people go to a cache (particularly an event cache), see a travel bug in it and leave it there. They note the number, "pick it up", then "drop it off". So they are considering adding in a log type of "spotted" to allow this to happen with only one log, rather than having two logs which basically don't do anything for the bug.

So does that then mean the coin, I've been saving to take across to Florida later in the year, to initially travel from cache to cache before leaving it in one I can no longer do that with? What is going on here.

No, it doesn't mean that.

I took a TB to India and dropped and retrieved it from the two caches I did and then brought it home.

Where does anyone say that you can't do that? For instance, what some people do is have a TB tag on their car keys or round their neck so that they can log it in and out of caches as they go to them.

 

There's nothing clever about logging a TB - you're just recording what happened in the real world: which is what the game is about.

 

HH

[+Moote]

Sorry I was wrong, I think that GC might be introducing new log categories though to allow 'drop / pickup' and should mean only one action required

 

edited for bad spelling

Edited December 7, 2005 by Moote

[+sTeamTraen]

As someone who works in IT (like many others here) and has to impose rules on people (which I'm sure many others do too), I have a lot of sympathy with GC.com here.

 

It simply is not possible to invent something as complex as geocaching, or geocaching.com, or TBs, or geocoins, and to anticipate even half of the "emergent" (that's the word, I believe) phenomena that will arise a result.

 

In most of Western society, undesirable trends have traditionally taken years or decades to emerge. This should give politicians enough time to consult a wide range of people before legislating, although even then they sometimes get it badly wrong (look at how Parliament reacted in haste in the 60s to the dsicovery that drunk drivers were killing people, giving the UK highly unwieldy fixed punishments: 12-months ban for 0.08001 and "have a nice evening sir" for 0.07999).

 

In the 'net world, things go a lot faster. Virtual caches, virtual TBs, and other "memes" (Google it!) spread so fast, and people change their behaviour to match, that it's inevitably going to lead to resource overruns, which in turn will need system shutdowns and cache suspensions.

 

It would probably have been nicer to write to all the virtual TB owners and ask them nicely to stop doing it. But I don't expect that Groundspeak has enough staff to handle all the replies, get into all the conflicts, etc.

 

My way of living with this is to assume that anything I do on the web can cease to exist tomorrow. That way I'm rarely disappointed. I don't think it's possible to have the benefits of something which can't exist without the Internet, but expect snail-mail-world rules and values to apply just when you want them to.

 

BTW, I note that the icons I gained by logging virtual coins are all still there. So that's all right. But I'm still looking for physical examples of all of them. (I'm thinking of putting "Will crawl over broken glass for a Moun10Bike coin" in my signature...)

Edited December 7, 2005 by sTeamTraen

[+Happy Humphrey]

Will crawl over broken glass for a Moun10Bike coin

Ah - so you know where a Moun10Bike coin is, then! Just a bit of broken glass to negotiate as well - no problem!

 

 

HH

[+sTeamTraen]

Will crawl over broken glass for a Moun10Bike coin

Ah - so you know where a Moun10Bike coin is, then! Just a bit of broken glass to negotiate as well - no problem!

 

There's one about 100km from my house (but not in a cache). The log ("sTeamTraen nicked it from darth_maul_3 while the latter was sleeping") would be accompanied by a copy of the arrest report from the Rheinland-Pfalz Kriminalpolizei's burglary squad.

 

However, if I broke the window to get in, I suppose that would satisfy the broken glass requirement.

Edited December 7, 2005 by sTeamTraen

[+Happy Humphrey]

Sorry I was wrong, I think that GC might be introducing new log categories though to allow 'drop / pickup' and should mean only one action required

 

Moote,

 

This will look pathetically pedantic at first - but bear with me! I think that the new log type is to allow a "'pickup / drop" in one log, not "'drop / pickup".

 

The significant difference is that, although they are both two logs for the same cache, the first does not move the bug anywhere (because you picked it up from the cache then dropped it in the same cache), but in the second case you brought the bug with you to the cache, dropped it in then picked it up again. So you moved it from somewhere to the cache and then back to you. It's the first type that may become a "spotted" - the second is just normal TB logging.

 

Although after all the misunderstandings, I suspect that this idea will just get "dropped" and never "picked up" again.

 

HH

[+welch]

For that don't know the goal of these TBs was to have people make copies and release them and/or just copy the TB number in every logbook, email, event the finders could locate.  So once it gets going you could be getting hundreds of hits that really mean nothing.

I'm still confused Welch.

 

OK, so virtual coins and bugs are out. I'm easy with that one. It did pee me off a little just how easy it was for people to get the EU icon on their tally.

 

But what of logging coins that you see at a cache meet. The way I understand it, now you will just log a "spotted" instead of a "find" and that won't generate an email to the owner or watchers.

 

Is that about right?

 

Alex.

Thats pretty much what I get from reading the other thread too.

Its not clear at thi s point if an email will be generated for spotted (or whatever it ends up being called) logs or not. But ever if it does it should still be like half of the current number for the TB owner and those watching the TB. Also since a 'spotted' apperently won't move the icon off the cache page the cacherowner and anyone watching that cache page shouldn't get any emails from those TBs that get 'spotted'.