A New Attribute Please

[kenhoath]

Hi there I live in the Tropics of Australia, up here in the Top End of Oz we have 2 main seasons. A wet season and a dry season, as does a lot of countries that are inbetween the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, ie close to the equator.

 

I was just in Europe for some of the winter and appreciated the attributes of geocaches, especially the ones that would tell me if I could try in the winter as snow covered almost everything.

 

I was thinking that around here some tracks and parts of the great outdoors are cut off during the wet season, it would be good to know whether you could attempt to find a cache in these conditions, like one of the attributes.

 

So...what do you think?

 

Kenhoath

[GOF and Bacall]

I think you need to define it a bit better and start a thread at the website forum. But it sounds like a decent idea so far.

[+palmetto]

There's an attribute that might apply

 

In Florida, as in Australia, there are many caches that will probably have seasonal dry access (late winter and early spring) and will probably have wet access the rest of the year. Cachers use the wading attribute with a note about seasonally wet.

[Motorcycle_Mama]

Moving to the Geocaching.com web site forum.

[+Gitchee-Gummee]

How about this? Not creating a new attribute.. but rather changing the "snow" attribute to "seasonal".

 

I mention this because as it currently stands, there are too many possible attributes to use now. At times a cache utilizes all that are available (space-wise) so you have to pick the most appropriate and disregard on the "less important" ones.

 

[+DragonsWest]

Winter means different things in different regions.

 

Where I once lived it could mean cache may be under 2 feet of snow or frozen in place.

 

Where I now live it could mean be wary of flash floods, mud or inaccessible because there's now a full stream running, which blocks safe access.

[GOF and Bacall]

How about this? Not creating a new attribute.. but rather changing the "snow" attribute to "seasonal".

 

I could live with this.

[AZcachemeister]

How about if cache owners wrote meaningful write-ups, and cache hunters actually read them?

Yes, really.

What is proposed here is an attribute that tells the seeker they need to read the write-up for more details...what do you mean 'Seasonally Available'?

While the 'Available in Winter' attribute may be a bit northern-hemisphere-centric, changing it will not eliminate the need to READ THE WRITE-UP!

[kenhoath]

How about this? Not creating a new attribute.. but rather changing the "snow" attribute to "seasonal".

 

I mention this because as it currently stands, there are too many possible attributes to use now. At times a cache utilizes all that are available (space-wise) so you have to pick the most appropriate and disregard on the "less important" ones.

 

 

Yeah I would agree with this!

[+ePeterso2]

What would really be nice would be (as has been discussed here before) to allow user-defined and user-applied tags, as in other social networking systems - especially if tags could be integrated into the search/PQ features. That would allow caches to be classified at a rate demanded by the user community instead of the rate at which Groundspeak chooses to add more attributes.

 

That'd solve this particular problem as well as one mentioned in another thread (caches whose size is incorrectly marked).

 

I don't expect this feature any time soon ... but one can always hope.

Edited January 28, 2010 by ePeterso2

[kenhoath]

After some thought I think that attributes are a great way of communicating information, especially for a beginner in an Austrian winter like me.

 

I can see Gitchee's point, so maybe limited the number of attributes that can be applied to a cache, AZcachemeister I don't agree with, sure what they are asking makes sense, that people could put more information up, call me romantic but that would spoil the criptic and coded adventure that geocaching is.

 

Certainly if snow can make it as an attribute the other seasonal variations like flooding can also prevent access, this is a worldwide sport. Here in NT AUST ther are some caches that cannot be accessed for up to 6 months, does that mean Geocaching.com will pick up on it's nil visitations and request action by the owner?