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Knowledge books don't tally with guidelines


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Nobody really answered my question satisfactorily. Why should we be concerned about mentioning a business name?

We probably aren't too concerned about mentioning a business name in the listing for a legitimate cache - one which was going to be placed anyway.

 

But we'd be concerned if the website were flooded with ill-conceived micros stuck to drainpipes outside shops, submitted by shopkeepers who've heard it's a free way to plug their business. That, I think, is where Groundspeak see the "slippery slope" leading.

 

I don't actually agree, because I don't think geocaching is ever going to be mainstream enough for this to be a genuine concern. But nor do I dismiss the concern as completely as you do.

 

The 'slippery slope of commercialism' doesn't wash. The whole geoachaing/groundspeek operation is a commercial enterprise. Its pages are littered with advertising.

That's different, because Groundspeak can control it. If they start to get feedback that there's too much advertising (and they think it's damaging their business), they can cut back. But if they let themselves get into a position where 50% of the caches submitted are adverts, that's a lot harder to deal with.

 

To the people who've said it would be easy to tell the difference between a real cache and a promotional one... It's easy to tell the difference between real and spam email, but spam is still a problem.

 

Cheers

Richard

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What gives you the impression that I dismiss the concern? Far from it! I am merely searching for the answer as to why we should be concerned as nobody had actually spelled it out. There doesn't seem to be a collective answer yet either. Being concerned that somebody might get something for nothing doesn't seem a valid enough reason.

Edited by Captain Bird's Eye
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We worry about cache descriptions eventually slipping down the Very Slippery Slope of commercialism and eventually becoming billboards for advertising (whether thru overtones of advertising, marketing or promotion, thru sheer volume of "little mentions here and there," or some combination of both). The best way to avoid falling down the Very Slippery Slope is to not get on it at all.

MissJenn must have a very good telescope to see the edge of the slippery slope related to mentioning the name of a pub in a cache description! I think this is very similar to the problem Groundspeak has with mentions of charity- they become very worried about problems that are never likely to happen. Having said that if they want to ban pub names, while I think it's an over-reaction and a bit silly, it doesn't affect the game and is a Groundspeak eccentricity that I can live with.

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Followed to it's logical conclusion, all the 'Sidetracked' caches and all the 'Bus Stop' caches would also have to be removed as they suggest that you arrive by train or bus which are all run by commercial companies.

 

What about the Hospitalised caches? What if someone felt they had to fake an injury to get to hospital? :laughing:

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We worry about cache descriptions eventually slipping down the Very Slippery Slope of commercialism and eventually becoming billboards for advertising (whether thru overtones of advertising, marketing or promotion, thru sheer volume of "little mentions here and there," or some combination of both). The best way to avoid falling down the Very Slippery Slope is to not get on it at all.

 

With respect, why is it such a big deal mentioning the name of a pub that's near to a caching circuit when it's fine to say a cache requires the use of Garmin ® Chirp devices? The former provides a simple piece of information that if you're in the area, if you ran out of water, if you fancy a bite to eat or a beer, here's a place you might stop (other watering holes may be available). The latter provides a restriction that if you want to find it you need a Garmin unit.

 

why do you need the name, keep your eyes open for the local pub along the way

 

All well and good if there is only one pub. Not quite so good if there are two pubs side by side or on opposite sides of the road where one is happy to let cachers use the car park and the other is not.

 

"Park in the pub" might get someone clamped whereas "Park at the Red Lion" might work, as might "You can park at the Red Lion but will need to make a purchase, however small, to get the code to leave the car park".

 

If the concern is the "slippery slope of commercialism" will logs also be vetted to ensure they don't say anything reckless like "At the end of the day we stopped at the Red Lion for a well-deserved pint and found the food very good"? Why also are event caches exempt from this rather odd ruling - it seems to be pretty well agreed that if someone can't find a pub with GPS coordinates they might need a new hobby, so an event saying "Meet in the upstairs room at N51 12.345, W01 23.456" doesn't need to mention the name either.

 

I guess I just can't see the problem with mentioning a pub by name, firstly given how many walkers, cyclists etc will stop at a pub at the end of the day, and secondly given there's a world of a difference between mentioning a pub as a landmark and waxing lyrical about how reasonably priced their fine ales and good food are.

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Followed to it's logical conclusion, all the 'Sidetracked' caches and all the 'Bus Stop' caches would also have to be removed as they suggest that you arrive by train or bus which are all run by commercial companies.

 

AFAIK nobody's suggesting you can't mention "the pub" or "the bus" - but I suspect if you hid a series of caches at bus stops and named them Stagecoach Bus Stop 1 to 10 the reviewer might ask you to reconsider....?

When I first started placing caches, one of them was at a bus stop & the actual name of the cache mentioned the bus company.

I was unaware that this wasn't allowed?

our very nice reviewer 'Deci' kindly pointed this out to me and I changed the name.

 

I don't see a problem with any 'rules' wether they have changed recently or not. :unsure:

 

I don't understand the reason behind not being able to use a pubs name, but if I've told I can't .... then i can't ..... big deal! :blink:

Edited by FantasyRaider
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There has just been a series of pub caches published near me. It's a minor thing but they are now just numbered whereas before the change in guideline interpretation they would probably have had the pub name in the title, which is a shame as I had to click through them all to see where they are. I had a wry smile on reading the listings as in some of them the pub name is mentioned, but subtely enough that a busy reviewer would miss it.

Edited by Pieman
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MissJenn must have a very good telescope to see the edge of the slippery slope related to mentioning the name of a pub in a cache description! I think this is very similar to the problem Groundspeak has with mentions of charity- they become very worried about problems that are never likely to happen. Having said that if they want to ban pub names, while I think it's an over-reaction and a bit silly, it doesn't affect the game and is a Groundspeak eccentricity that I can live with.

 

Yes, this is how I am thinking. I can understand the logic - wanting to make things easy for reviewers, and there is some logic that says if you don't mention the commercial name it helps avoid the "slippery slope".

 

But, I also accept the argument that the slope is there regardless. E.g. stating "The pub at the parking coordinates does excellent food - mention that you are caching to get a discount" doesn't mention any name, but is clearly commercial, and "worse" than saying "Permission is given to park at the Red Lion". Reviewers will need to read the cache pages and make "slippery slope" judgements anyway.

 

But in the end, it doesn't matter to me if I can say a pub name in a listing or not. The one hide which I have near a pub I already simply refer to a "nearby pub".

Edited by redsox_mark
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It is silly rules like this that wil possible push people to use a certain site that I won't name.

Groundspeak need to realise that the UK culture with regards to pubs is totally different to the US's bars.

It would be shame if any caches or cache series have to go because of this stupid rule and GS drive us into the hands of that other site and therefore they will achieve what the owners of that site have failed to achieve so far.

 

These views are my own personal views.

Edited by DrDick&Vick
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Should Groundspeak not be told that in the UK there is a fine tradition of navigating by pubs ("Turn left at the Ferret and Tart and carry on until you reach the Crossed Badgers") which predates the invention of GPS by centuries. I think we should be left to the old ways.

Unless you're religious...

"Down to St Mark's church, left at the Methodist church, past the Baptist church..."

Edited by Bear and Ragged
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Unless you're religious...

"Down to St Mark's church, left at the Methodist church, past the Baptist church..."

Now isn't there something in the guidelines about religion

Geocaches perceived to be posted for religious, political, charitable or social agendas are not permitted.

So are the church micros to be the next victim of the guidelines?

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Surely the Side Tracked series advertise the railways, are they to be stopped.

 

Sorry Groundspeak but I just think that the rules are getting silly so maybe a little competition could be a good thing and to be honest you cannot blame people if they do decide to jump ship. After all it is a game and if some want to play to an easier set of rules then why not.

 

Thses are my own personal opinions

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It's very easy to add more rules and more stringency... it all sounds like "a sensible idea" until you suddenly realise that suddenly a lot of red tape is around, which is never going to be undone. There's no way, for example, a reviewer is going to say "I'm going to remove the need for you to prove permission before placing a cache within church grounds because it was probably a step too far".

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Should Groundspeak not be told that in the UK there is a fine tradition of navigating by pubs ("Turn left at the Ferret and Tart and carry on until you reach the Crossed Badgers") which predates the invention of GPS by centuries. I think we should be left to the old ways.

Unless you're religious...

"Down to St Mark's church, left at the Methodist church, past the Baptist church..."

 

Or simply use any available landmarks... "Down to the church on the corner, turn left, go past the Rat and Parrot and turn right, and it's just before the railway bridge".

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Should Groundspeak not be told that in the UK there is a fine tradition of navigating by pubs ("Turn left at the Ferret and Tart and carry on until you reach the Crossed Badgers") which predates the invention of GPS by centuries. I think we should be left to the old ways.

 

 

I feel this argument has been put twice in the past; once possibly in 2002/2003 and again in 2008 or thereabouts.

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It seems to me that 90% of this thread comes down to the statement reported in post #1 that a reviewer said that "you can't mention the name of a pub".

 

From the posts by Graculus, MissJenn, and others, it appears that that reviewer may have been (gasp, shock, horror, panic) not entirely correct in his or her interpretation of this guideline. We can't tell for sure, because we don't have the full listing in front of us with the exact context, but from post #9, it does seem plausible. There. I said it. The reviewer may have made a mistake.

 

I guess - well, in fact I know - that that's the kind of thing that happens when you volunteer your time and try to do your best to juggle between a long list of guidelines, a need for consistency, perhaps a wish to get to bed before 2am but also a desire to help cachers get their caches published quickly, and lastly, the knowledge that Every Single Inconsistency which one of the 8-10 reviewers in the UK team - or maybe one of the 200 or so reviewers worldwide - makes, is likely to end up as the subject of a forum discussion. I suspect that many of us don't have anything like that pressure in the jobs we actually get paid for.

 

Apart from that, I don't think that there is anything to see here. I don't expect the reviewer in question to come in here and apologise, and I don't think that anybody's human rights have been violated. The referee called you offside when you weren't; it happens, and if you continue geocaching, it will happen again.

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Well it wasn't really the acceptability of what i wrote in the cache description that concerned me. I may have over stepped the mark slightly in saying (with no axe to grind) that the cache was 'on the green adjacent to the Swan Inn which was voted riverside pub of the year in 2008'. What did concern me is that the reviewer did not ask me to remove the citation but to remove the name of the business which according to the newly amended guidelines was no longer acceptable in any circumstances, a fact that was reaffirmed by Cathy Hornback from Groundspeak in response to a query I put to them on the matter.

 

My main reason for starting this thread however was that the new guidelines did not seem to have been published as stated but have been subsequently.

 

You may be interested in an ironic twist. I submitted two other caches for review at the same time and one of them mentioned the name of a local theme park which is nearby. It amused me slightly that this was published without comment. I now await the email from the reviewer asking me to edit it!

 

I can see all sides of this and I certainly don't wish in any way to criticise this or any other reviewer who do a great job. I wouldn't do it.

 

Captain Bird's Eye.

 

(Are we allowed to mention business names on this forum?) <_<

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From the posts by Graculus, MissJenn, and others, it appears that that reviewer may have been (gasp, shock, horror, panic) not entirely correct in his or her interpretation of this guideline. We can't tell for sure, because we don't have the full listing in front of us with the exact context, but from post #9, it does seem plausible. There. I said it. The reviewer may have made a mistake.

 

I guess - well, in fact I know - that that's the kind of thing that happens when you volunteer your time and try to do your best to juggle between a long list of guidelines, a need for consistency, perhaps a wish to get to bed before 2am but also a desire to help cachers get their caches published quickly, and lastly, the knowledge that Every Single Inconsistency which one of the 8-10 reviewers in the UK team - or maybe one of the 200 or so reviewers worldwide - makes, is likely to end up as the subject of a forum discussion. I suspect that many of us don't have anything like that pressure in the jobs we actually get paid for.

 

Apart from that, I don't think that there is anything to see here. I don't expect the reviewer in question to come in here and apologise, and I don't think that anybody's human rights have been violated. The referee called you offside when you weren't; it happens, and if you continue geocaching, it will happen again.

 

I think the issue is one of consistency. I agree entirely with the point you make that people make mistakes. It happens to us all, and if we make a mistake and get called on it the best thing to do is acknowledge the mistake, correct it if possible, and move on.

 

Here I've very much got the impression that a mistake may have been made but then followed up by insistence that it was the right thing to do, that the any previous decisions that went the other way were probably being too lenient and so on.

 

I know there are people in all walks of life who want to seize on any mistake made by anyone as evidence they are somehow not up to the job, not fit for purpose etc, it just seems a shame when a mistake over something that really isn't that big a deal seems to get compounded like this when "Fair call, bad day at work... my mistake" would have settled it quickly and easily.

 

All that said I wouldn't want to do the reviewers' job so I'm not planning on throwing stones...

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I think the issue is one of consistency. I agree entirely with the point you make that people make mistakes. It happens to us all, and if we make a mistake and get called on it the best thing to do is acknowledge the mistake, correct it if possible, and move on.

 

Here I've very much got the impression that a mistake may have been made but then followed up by insistence that it was the right thing to do, that the any previous decisions that went the other way were probably being too lenient and so on.

As anyone who has ever worked in anything to do with "keeping people happy" will probably realise, a lot depends on how you go about it. For example, we now know from post #77 that the original cache submission described the pub as "Riverside Pub of the Year 2008", and that's certainly starting off a few paces along Commercial Avenue. Under those circumstances, perhaps the reviewer thought that saying "don't mention names of businesses" was a simpler way to get the message across than "You may mention the name of a pub, but only in a navigational context, and even then we'd prefer it if you found a different way, but in any case, please don't make it sound like you're recommending it" - after all, when you have 20 more caches to review and your significant other is waiting for you to put the bin out / thread a needle / come to bed, you don't necessarily have as much time as you would if you were talking to the cache owner on a support line at £1.50 a minute. Maybe reviewers should go on an extensive customer orientation training course when they start, but that would start to work against the "part of the community" ethos which they have.

I know there are people in all walks of life who want to seize on any mistake made by anyone as evidence they are somehow not up to the job, not fit for purpose etc, it just seems a shame when a mistake over something that really isn't that big a deal seems to get compounded like this when "Fair call, bad day at work... my mistake" would have settled it quickly and easily.

It seems to me like the compounding is mostly due to the OP having decided to drag this minor error (if such it is) into the forums, with a total of 14 posts in this thread so far. Maybe the reviewer in question hasn't even seen it yet.

 

With 1.3 million caches out there, there's probably several hundred that don't meet the guidelines, and several hundred others that did meet the guidelines, but didn't get published, and Groundspeak got the appeal wrong too. That's just the way it is with very large numbers like 1.3 million. (Example: if the reviewers get it wrong 2% of the time, that's 26000 caches. Groundspeak will then get the appeal wrong 2% of the time, that's 520 caches.) Where the Internet complicates matters is that one case out of 1.3 million can be very quickly brought to everyone's attention in a very public way. As a culture, we aren't set up to cope with that.

 

((Here's a much scarier thought, which I hope won't be taken as being too off-topic: with 80,000 or however many people there are in prison in the UK, there are inevitably going to be several hundred who are innocent, just because of the way justice systems work. I bet those people wish that they could go back and remove a couple of words from their statements to the police, and get a whole new trial. I'm not saying this as an agenda, because it's not a subject I spend much time thinking about, but please remember, this is a game: the umpire sometimes gives you out LBW, the TV replay doesn't detect the faint inside edge, you're back in the pavilion, but tomorrow is another day.))

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It seems to me that 90% of this thread comes down to the statement reported in post #1 that a reviewer said that "you can't mention the name of a pub".

 

From the posts by Graculus, MissJenn, and others, it appears that that reviewer may have been (gasp, shock, horror, panic) not entirely correct in his or her interpretation of this guideline. We can't tell for sure, because we don't have the full listing in front of us with the exact context, but from post #9, it does seem plausible. There. I said it. The reviewer may have made a mistake.

 

From the posts by Graculus, MissJenn, and others, it appears that that reviewer may have been (gasp, shock, horror, panic) not entirely correct in his or her interpretation of this guideline. We can't tell for sure, because we don't have the full listing in front of us with the exact context, but from post #9, it does seem plausible. There. I said it. The reviewer may have made a mistake.

 

I agree that whatever the reality of Grounspeak's position on this it is not a major issue but I couldn't put hand on heart and say that I know what Groundspeak's position is on naming pubs in cache descriptions after this thread! The quote above seems to me to be the exact opposite of what Graculus said (MissJenn not explicitly taking a position on a local issue), although it does fit with what Geohatter said.

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What about this one GC2NNZ1 ?

 

"The Woolpack" is a fictional pub...

In real life the pub is called by another name.

 

:P

 

Yep I know that, have been in it many times. The Pub is real, the name is fictional. It is called the Commercial, as mentioned in the cache blurb.

 

 

Sorry but you're both wrong - The pub was called "The Commercial" and the signage changed for filming (every day)

 

So in the end they changed the name to "The Woolpack" fo the benifit of the set dressers and the tourists, It's well over 10 years now since they stopped using the village for filming, but the name remains.

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What about this one GC2NNZ1 ?

 

"The Woolpack" is a fictional pub...

In real life the pub is called by another name.

 

:P

 

Yep I know that, have been in it many times. The Pub is real, the name is fictional. It is called the Commercial, as mentioned in the cache blurb.

 

 

Sorry but you're both wrong - The pub was called "The Commercial" and the signage changed for filming (every day)

 

So in the end they changed the name to "The Woolpack" fo the benifit of the set dressers and the tourists, It's well over 10 years now since they stopped using the village for filming, but the name remains.

 

And I've an adopted cache which has mentioned the Woolpack since it was published in 2002, and that blatent advertising didn't stop the pub from shutting down due to lack of trade last year!

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And I've an adopted cache which has mentioned the Woolpack since it was published in 2002, and that blatent advertising didn't stop the pub from shutting down due to lack of trade last year!

 

Maybe it was just attracting the wrong kind of clientele - shifty characters carrying tupperware around and peering under every rock in the carpark. :ph34r:

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I can see groundspeaks point of view, I find that owning a discussion forum myself there is no shortage of people trying to use you to get free advertising. It's difficult to tell if the person placing the cache is doing so to advertise the commercial premises or is just referring to it, so a strict rule has to be followed. In most cases you can just refer to "the nearby pub" if you must.

 

IMO you definitely shouldn't mention any qualities of the business, good ale, good rest stop etc, that's not for the CO to decide!

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IMO you definitely shouldn't mention any qualities of the business, good ale, good rest stop etc, that's not for the CO to decide!

That's total cobbler's.... after 50 years of eating and drinking in public houses all over our fair country, I think I'm eminently qualified to decide whether said establishment serves good ale or food and if the service is 'up to scratch'. If I consider that it is, or even that it isn't, I expect to be able to say so without being accused of 'commercial advertising'. I have absolutely no commercial connection with any public house so there's nothing in it for me other than the warm, fuzzy feeling I get from introducing someone to a good place to drink and/or eat..... As I do on a number of my cache pages.

 

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Those who aren't are presumably happy to go and play elsewhere.

 

Aaaah, this old chestnut! Doesn't take long to rear its ugly head does it... :anibad:

 

When does mentioning a commercial premises cross the line between giving a 'namecheck' vs advertising? A: It's subjective.

 

I could understand the logic if the numbers involved were significant. The average cache isn't going to attract huge crowds of people though, any pub landlord depending on Geocachers putting his kids through Uni would be gutted!!

 

Its the same idiocy as the Film Title farce.

 

Hopefully other caching sites are taking note - come the revolution we'll all be able to go and play elsewhere!! :ph34r:

 

Chalky

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