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I LOVE Challenges!


Hockeyhick

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Many of the location specific ones can be logged from the living room.

There are local cachers who have already completed 40 and more challenges and have not travelled since the challenges showed up.

Challenges like providing a photograph of Saint Stephen's cathedral or the Ferris Wheel in Vienna or similar famous sights is quite easy to do from home. Even when the additional requirement is posed that one has to shown on the photo, many cachers have such photos at their disposition.

 

The same can be said for virtuals. How many armchair "Greetings from Germany" type logs have we seen on virtuals over the years where the loggers googled the verification info but never left their living room?

That was the fault of the CO. There is always a question you could ask about a location that couldn't be found on the internet. There was one I did in either Nebraska or Kansas, I don't remember which now without going back and looking it up. But anyway the CO asked about some information on the headstone, then he asked the name of the person buried next to him, who was just a normal person. The only way I could have gotten that information would be to either be there in person or to have a map and directory of the cemetery.

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...Edit: matter of fact, from this point on, for every challenge I thumb down I will leave a public comment on the page mentioning why - you with me? anyone?

I wish everyone would. It lets everyone know what you didn't like. We can learn from that. Just a down-vote tells us nothing.

 

I got the feeling that many cachers are not interested to learn why they received thumbs down. They rather would wish that no thumb down votes existed at all.

They argue like that "Go for a challenge if you (might) enjoy it, else ignore it". That contradicts however the idea of Groundspeak who encourages user to use votes also

if one has not completed the challenge.

 

I am pretty sure that most local cachers will prefer not to receive a comment explaining why I do not like a specific challenge. In case the description contains a comment that thumbs down ratings should be annotated, I'm happy to comply with this wish.

 

Cezanne

Edited by cezanne
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I have to agree with you guys about my challenge I asked about, I agree, it's not what a challenge should be. Now maybe if it was just "hike this section of trail and take a picture at the coords" instead of "finding all the caches". To bad I can't archive it since it has people who have accepted it.

Edited by TheLoneGrangers
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There are a few tweaks that need to be made, i.e. require coordinates so the challenge has to be found with a GPS unit, allow the challenge to have a known owner that is responsible for it, permit the editing or deletion of logs, allow a finder to delete an accepted challenge from their list if they decide later they don't want to do it, etc.

 

Perhaps that is why I don't like them. All of those issues are things that should have easily been spotted before Challenges became public -- I'm sure I could have sat down over a pint with a group of cachers and we would have been able to predict those.

 

Frankly, the whole thing smacks of "we rushed this into production so it could be released for the Block Party".

 

I'm not giving up on them yet, but until these things get sorted out they aren't something that interest me.

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Who am I to say whether or not a challenge is worthy unless I have actually done it?

 

You are exactly who Groundspeak wants to make such judgements. You, and I, and all the rest of the users who look at these things. As long as you are looking with a critical eye and making a conscious decision it's all good. Unfortunately it seems like some are just shooting down everything they can.

 

I'm pretty sure I saw a quote from Jeremy somewhere (scratching my head here, trying to recall where) *encouraging* people to vote up or down, even if they haven't done the challenge. I think the idea is that if everybody gives their opinion on any challenge that they look at, then the unfairly biased votes don't count as strongly. That way people that vote everything down on principle, or maybe vote up on bad challenges because their friend listed it, don't have as great of an impact.

 

its right there in the FAQ, afaic its an extremely flawed concept and a very bad decision

 

http://www.geocaching.com/challenges/faq.aspx

 

Who can rate Challenges and why?

 

Anyone can rate a Challenge with a thumbs up or thumbs down. We highly encourage the community to vote on every Challenge, whether or not you have completed it. You can change your vote at any time.

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Perhaps that is why I don't like them. All of those issues are things that should have easily been spotted before Challenges became public -- I'm sure I could have sat down over a pint with a group of cachers and we would have been able to predict those.

 

i agree 100%...too many issues that should have been obvious that will be a problem have been totally ignored

 

Frankly, the whole thing smacks of "we rushed this into production so it could be released for the Block Party".

 

if only that were the case, however on their own admission they've been working on "something" for close to a year lol

which gives them no excuse as to the zillions of issues they overlooked/ignored thus resulting in poor implementation

 

I'm not giving up on them yet, but until these things get sorted out they aren't something that interest me.

 

i really like the core idea of the challenges, and i even created one but i am extremely disappointed at the lack of control i have over it

 

its beyond me why would they even consider allowing the community to "police" the listing, even if i want to i can't even find them beyond 15kms of my home coordinates

and either remove the negative voting or make the ones that use the "thumbs down" give a reason why they did so and make that entry visible to everyone

right now i strongly believe that most of the "thumbs down" votes are either bogus or based on personal beefs

by taking away the "ownership" they actually encourage people to throw out there bad ones, which was originally the reason the virtuals were discontinued, at first the creator's name appeared in the listing, now that is gone too

allowing the creator to have ownership of their challenges will not only encourage them to create something good, well its not going to work 100%, but most people will take pride in their own challenges, but will also ensure that bogus logs are deleted

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...just trying to understand the term location based because the way I see it any challenge could have a location no matter how childish or ridicules it would be.

 

That's really the beauty of this system isn't it? If you don't like the "childish or ridiculous" part of the Challenge, you can vote it down out of existence and get it replaced with something more straightforward if you like. With the old Virtuals, they basically joined the legion of the undead. It seems nearly impossible to get rid of old Virtuals, and even with some extreme cases it would take months to get them Archived long after the object of the Virtual has been moved or destroyed.

 

Community policing of this cache type seems like a workable solution to me, compared with the old system.

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I can see the potential of challenges, but there must be some rules. At the very least the challenge owner should be able to delete bogus logs. Even better, Groundspeak should also include a section in the challenge placement guidelines about how to prevent (or prevent as much as possible) bogus logs, e.g. by asking a question of the location that can't be googled.

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I think the problem was that as they created them they focused on the problems with the old virtuals - difficulty of a number of different people making uniform decisions based on subjective criteria, disputes about deleted logs, and abandoned caches. I think they underestimated the mob factor and the inability of people to grasp a new concept. Remember Jeremy did not want to include them in the find count. I'm reasonably sure that beta testers were involved but they wanted it to succeed. Also both supporters and detractors keep wanting them to be something they aren't and refuse to wholeheartedly experience what they are.

 

I personally understand exactly why they weren't finished. When I was writing a paper in college back in the days of dinosaurs and typewriters, I had to get someone else to type it. If I typed it, I kept seeing ways to tweak it so it would be better, unfortunately this often resulted in having to rewrite the whole paper. The more excited I was about the project, the harder it was to leave it alone. This is still true of my projects but at least with computers, it's easier to revise them, My belief is that whoever was in over all charge of the project was too excited about it and was in a position where noone could easily say no we can't make any more changes, until there was an unmovable deadline.

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So far I'm not completely impressed.

But I do see that some cachers have figured them out and provided some that are really worthwhile.

I am ever the optimist, so perhaps this will (finally) be the one rose in a field of onions.

Roses have thorns. And some people like onions.

Yes, but I think most of us are bright enough to figure out the point he was so colorfully trying to make.

 

And yes, I get that you may feel different. But he is still entitled to his opinion.

 

Funny how that word keeps getting into these conversations. Entitled.

Edited by GOF and Bacall
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