What Irks you most?

[+barefootjeff]

What is the game coming to? This premium member joined almost a year ago and has made over 200 finds but has never visited the website and clearly has no idea that there's such a thing as a Needs Maintenance log, or if they do they can't figure out how to log one on the app.

 

[+BOTOCH]

Have a new one and my guess it has probably been mentioned here several times, but COs that just totally abandon their caches without disabling them.  In the past two weeks I have come across 2 that have DNFs logged for more than a year, at least one or more NM requests and nothing.  I get that it might take you a little while to get to get to it, but if it is more than a year since anyone has found it, has several DNFs (and you know there are probably a lot more that people just didn't log because they don't want to log DNFs) and nothing at all from the CO then I think reviewers need to disable them.  I posted this as a question to reviewers and found out they can but they are just so overwhelmed they can't possibly go through all the caches in their respective areas.  Come on COs, at least post a note saying you will get to it and when or disable the cache, that way someone else could hide a cache in the same area if they want to as well.  You're taking up space, making a waste of time for people who have to go through logs to see if the cache is even viable and then delete it from their list of caches for the day.  OK that was my rant for the day!  

[+Max and 99]

2 hours ago, BOTOCH said:

Have a new one and my guess it has probably been mentioned here several times, but COs that just totally abandon their caches without disabling them.  In the past two weeks I have come across 2 that have DNFs logged for more than a year, at least one or more NM requests and nothing.  I get that it might take you a little while to get to get to it, but if it is more than a year since anyone has found it, has several DNFs (and you know there are probably a lot more that people just didn't log because they don't want to log DNFs) and nothing at all from the CO then I think reviewers need to disable them.  I posted this as a question to reviewers and found out they can but they are just so overwhelmed they can't possibly go through all the caches in their respective areas.  Come on COs, at least post a note saying you will get to it and when or disable the cache, that way someone else could hide a cache in the same area if they want to as well.  You're taking up space, making a waste of time for people who have to go through logs to see if the cache is even viable and then delete it from their list of caches for the day.  OK that was my rant for the day!  

I hope you made the appropriate log, which WILL get the Reviewer's attention.

[+BOTOCH]

41 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

I hope you made the appropriate log, which WILL get the Reviewer's attention.

Well if it is more than a year since anyone found it and there are several DNFs I don't even bother looking for it and ignore that cache.  

[+K13]

3 hours ago, BOTOCH said:

Have a new one and my guess it has probably been mentioned here several times, but COs that just totally abandon their caches without disabling them.  In the past two weeks I have come across 2 that have DNFs logged for more than a year, at least one or more NM requests and nothing.  I get that it might take you a little while to get to get to it, but if it is more than a year since anyone has found it, has several DNFs (and you know there are probably a lot more that people just didn't log because they don't want to log DNFs) and nothing at all from the CO then I think reviewers need to disable them.  I posted this as a question to reviewers and found out they can but they are just so overwhelmed they can't possibly go through all the caches in their respective areas.  Come on COs, at least post a note saying you will get to it and when or disable the cache, that way someone else could hide a cache in the same area if they want to as well.  You're taking up space, making a waste of time for people who have to go through logs to see if the cache is even viable and then delete it from their list of caches for the day.  OK that was my rant for the day!  

In the "New Normal" days "due to COVID-19" much leeway is given to players in this hobby, especially cache owners who may not be able to get out to repair a cache. You have zero knowledge if that CO has communicated with a Reviewer, nor of any situation of the CO that may even include their demise from the disease.

 

Without the life changes brought to the world over the last year-plus, I would agree with you. But now, just Lighten up. Go find other caches. 

[+BOTOCH]

On 5/10/2021 at 1:27 PM, K13 said:

In the "New Normal" days "due to COVID-19" much leeway is given to players in this hobby, especially cache owners who may not be able to get out to repair a cache. You have zero knowledge if that CO has communicated with a Reviewer, nor of any situation of the CO that may even include their demise from the disease.

 

Without the life changes brought to the world over the last year-plus, I would agree with you. But now, just Lighten up. Go find other caches. 

If caches were something that needed to be checked on in crowds or indoors I might agree with you, but really using Covid here is pretty much just an excuse.  If you are going to be a CO then take care of your caches and I am not saying you have 48 hours to get it right but come on a year of DNFs, NM requests, and you don't even have to go outside to disable it.  My guess is more people have been getting outdoors caching and just hiking or taking walks in parks with Covid, so nope I am not buying it.  

[+Goldenwattle]

On 5/11/2021 at 3:27 AM, K13 said:

In the "New Normal" days "due to COVID-19" much leeway is given to players in this hobby, especially cache owners who may not be able to get out to repair a cache. You have zero knowledge if that CO has communicated with a Reviewer, nor of any situation of the CO that may even include their demise from the disease.

 

Without the life changes brought to the world over the last year-plus, I would agree with you. But now, just Lighten up. Go find other caches. 

If the CO can't be bothered to make at least a note on the log, it has nothing to do with the Covid situation. Of course there might be something else happening in their life.

If it were due to Covid, I would have disabled the cache and explained that due to Covid I couldn't get to it. A responsible CO would, not ignore a string of DNFs & NMs.

 

The title of this thread is, 'What Irks you most?' BOTOCH is allowed an irk. It's an irk, no need for "Lighten up".

[+Max and 99]

3 hours ago, BOTOCH said:

I am not saying you have 48 hours to get it right but come on a year of DNFs, NM requests, and you don't even have to go outside to disable it.

 

3 hours ago, Goldenwattle said:

If it were due to Covid, I would have disabled the cache and explained that due to Covid I couldn't get to it.

My reviewer requires regular updates using a note on the cache page. Something. Anything. 

[Blue Square Thing]

8 hours ago, BOTOCH said:

If caches were something that needed to be checked on in crowds or indoors I might agree with you, but really using Covid here is pretty much just an excuse.  If you are going to be a CO then take care of your caches and I am not saying you have 48 hours to get it right but come on a year of DNFs, NM requests, and you don't even have to go outside to disable it.  My guess is more people have been getting outdoors caching and just hiking or taking walks in parks with Covid, so nope I am not buying it.  

 

Well, in these parts travel away from home was very much discouraged during the early part of this year. That would have made checking caches further than a walk away from home difficult to manage for many people - certainly, of the 26 I have hidden only 3 are easily walkable (i.e within 15 km) of my home. I have several a good hour away and three which are a three hour drive from here - there's no way I could have justified that journey in order to check on a geocache.

[+Goldenwattle]

3 hours ago, Blue Square Thing said:

 

Well, in these parts travel away from home was very much discouraged during the early part of this year. That would have made checking caches further than a walk away from home difficult to manage for many people - certainly, of the 26 I have hidden only 3 are easily walkable (i.e within 15 km) of my home. I have several a good hour away and three which are a three hour drive from here - there's no way I could have justified that journey in order to check on a geocache.

But it's not far to the computer to write a note for the cache, or to disable it .

[+Mudfrog]

One of the things that has always sent an irk my way is reading all the silly excuses made for why a CO's cache isn't taken care of. Granted, things can come up in a person's life that are much more important than their cache. But let's be realistic here, that's probably the case less than 1% of the time. COs that just don't care enough to take care of business make up the other 99%.

[+baer2006]

It irks me, when I get locked out of this forum  .

 

I wanted to log in from another device. It didn't work, because of a server glitch - several tries, resulting in "HTTP 500" errors, or "account or password incorrect" messages (which were wrong - the password came from the browser's password store, and I verified that it's correct there). Anyway, after I gave up I suddenly received an e-mail about "3 failed login attempts" (true, but it wasn't my fault), and that my account had been temporarily locked. It also said, that if it was me, I could try to login again in 10 minutes. So I waited that time, tried to log in ... only to read "Account locked,  try again in 4 minutes". Huh? Ok, this time I made really sure, that the 4 minutes had passed before the next attempt (I waited around 10 minutes or so). Result: "Account locked,  try again in 1 minute". WTF ?! Ok, I'll bite ... next try about 5 minutes later. Result: "Account locked,  try again in 9 minutes".

 

I think, that this authentication server has some fun at my expense!

 

I'll let it rest now for at least an hour. Luckily, I can still use the forums from my primary device .

[ChaosFr0g]

Having a cache be muggled. I hid a cache a while ago, regular sized. It had a travel bug in it, I made it for my moms birthday and she wanted it to keep growing, and it got muggled and the whole container was destroyed with all the swag taken. I tried to replace the cache and it got muggled again so I simply archived it

[+TeamRabbitRun]

On 5/24/2021 at 4:00 PM, baer2006 said:

It irks me, when I get locked out of this forum  .

 

I wanted to log in from another device. It didn't work, because of a server glitch - several tries, resulting in "HTTP 500" errors, or "account or password incorrect" messages (which were wrong - the password came from the browser's password store, and I verified that it's correct there). Anyway, after I gave up I suddenly received an e-mail about "3 failed login attempts" (true, but it wasn't my fault), and that my account had been temporarily locked. It also said, that if it was me, I could try to login again in 10 minutes. So I waited that time, tried to log in ... only to read "Account locked,  try again in 4 minutes". Huh? Ok, this time I made really sure, that the 4 minutes had passed before the next attempt (I waited around 10 minutes or so). Result: "Account locked,  try again in 1 minute". WTF ?! Ok, I'll bite ... next try about 5 minutes later. Result: "Account locked,  try again in 9 minutes".

 

I think, that this authentication server has some fun at my expense!

 

I'll let it rest now for at least an hour. Luckily, I can still use the forums from my primary device .

 

Every time you try, it tells you how much time is left on your 'timeout'.

 

You've heard the expression, "a New York Minute"? It implied that things happen much more rapidly in NYC, in other words, time passes more quickly in the Big Apple than in other places.

 

Apparently, in Seattle, it's the reverse. If you waited ten minutes with four to go, then were told there was STILL one minute left, well, you can do the math to find out how much faster your location is than HQ.

 

It's connected to your latitude, I think. The closer you are to the equator, the further you are from the earth's axis and your lateral speed as the Earth rotates is faster, compared to locations with higher latitude numbers, either North or South because they're closer to the spinning axis.

.

It's the same relativistic thing that makes time pass more slowly for astronauts in orbit; a demonstrable effect proven with matched atomic clocks; one in orbit and one on the ground.

 

It's why American twin astronauts the Kelly Brothers have switched their relative age positions because the 'younger' one has spent SO MUCH more time in space than his brother. Now, does that make him now the older sibling, or the younger? A philosophical question.

 

Funny we haven't heard about this before, since I'd guess that Seattle is farther from the equator than the majority of the world's geocaching population. It's certainly farther north than New York's 42 degrees, and we don't wait for nuthin' or nobody!

[+Claireena]

Micro and nano caches in London, UK.... 

I know it's hard to find spaces to put larger ones but omg  

[Blue Square Thing]

11 hours ago, Claireena said:

Micro and nano caches in London, UK.... 

I know it's hard to find spaces to put larger ones but omg  

Although I understand your pain, it's even worse when you're in the middle of a forest in Norfolk and all that some people hide is micros...

 

There are some really good bigger caches in central London fwiw. The ratio of small/reg/large to other sized caches isn't that much different between London and Norfolk - we are a little better off, but only a little. You just have to choose to ignore most of the micros and play the game your own way. It is possible and it can work.

[+Claireena]

On 6/17/2021 at 8:13 PM, Blue Square Thing said:

Although I understand your pain, it's even worse when you're in the middle of a forest in Norfolk and all that some people hide is micros...

 

There are some really good bigger caches in central London fwiw. The ratio of small/reg/large to other sized caches isn't that much different between London and Norfolk - we are a little better off, but only a little. You just have to choose to ignore most of the micros and play the game your own way. It is possible and it can work.

 I haven't been to many forests for Geocaching yet but that must be so annoying! What a waste of possibility! 

Perhaps I'll just filter out the micros for a while so I don't have to see them haha 

[+Goldenwattle]

1 hour ago, Claireena said:

Perhaps I'll just filter out the micros for a while so I don't have to see them haha 

I sometimes do that when travelling, if there are more caches than I will be able to find.

[+GrateBear]

This may have been mentioned, but what irks me is the apparent reluctance to post a "needs maintenance" or "needs archived".  I see quite a few caches that have several DNFs, yet after 5 or 6 DNFs, no one will suggest that it be checked by the CO.  

[+cerberus1]

3 hours ago, GrateBear said:

This may have been mentioned, but what irks me is the apparent reluctance to post a "needs maintenance" or "needs archived".  I see quite a few caches that have several DNFs, yet after 5 or 6 DNFs, no one will suggest that it be checked by the CO.  

 

Yep.  For some time, I got the rep of being every (expletives deleted) you can think of, simply because I'd NM, or rarely NA a cache.   

There's a couple that I'd like to head to, now that I'm back to 70 or so %, and it seems many will have their first NM...

[+lee737]

One for HQ - with AL's, where they are an 'in-order' adventure - the locations you can't get to yet are there, and can be seen (at times) but are that feint that on a lot of maps they are just about invisible.... it makes it tricky to plan trips. And - why they can't be viewed on a PC, who would know?

[+lee737]

And this..... I'm checking a route for a trip and clicking on past DNFs out of interest....

Is this even a throwdown? A baggy and a scrap of paper (sorry - log)... sounds like trash to me....

 

[+ScribblyBear]

I did the whole "cache in trash out" thing and threw away a pathtag I found by mistake. I found it at the start of a cache run and started filling just one of my pants pockets with trash as I went along. When I got back to the parking lot, I headed for the trash can and emptied that 1 pocket. A few hours later, I realized that the pocket I had emptied, was the pocket I put the pathtag in.... Argggg!

[+cerberus1]

On 5/23/2013 at 2:42 PM, avroair said:

What irks you most? 

 

Forum posters who often don't even understand what you're saying,  but will nitpick every little thing, ready with an opinion anyway...      

[+Max and 99]

I don't know where else to put this. I spent time on the computer planning a trip for the November mountain summit with a geocaching friend. I look for caches I have not found, I look for caches he has not found, I look for caches that the wheelchair van can get close to. We stopped to find one today and ask my husband goes to sign the log he says to me, "what should I do we were already first to find". I was so confused. He says our names at the top and it says first to find. "But we've never found this cache. We've never been here before! How in the world did I go wrong when I planned the caches to find today?"

On the way home, in a great Adrian Monk impression, he says to me, "Here's what happened!"

I think he's right. We found about half a dozen geocaches in a geoart comprised of about 125 caches. Not a power trail but similar. Someone probably just did the old "take the geocache container with me and replace it with the last one we found and signed" trick. Maybe a bunch of people did that. Grrr. I spent too much time trying to figure out what I did wrong. 

[+Mudfrog]

17 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

I don't know where else to put this. I spent time on the computer planning a trip for the November mountain summit with a geocaching friend. I look for caches I have not found, I look for caches he has not found, I look for caches that the wheelchair van can get close to. We stopped to find one today and ask my husband goes to sign the log he says to me, "what should I do we were already first to find". I was so confused. He says our names at the top and it says first to find. "But we've never found this cache. We've never been here before! How in the world did I go wrong when I planned the caches to find today?"

On the way home, in a great Adrian Monk impression, he says to me, "Here's what happened!"

I think he's right. We found about half a dozen geocaches in a geoart comprised of about 125 caches. Not a power trail but similar. Someone probably just did the old "take the geocache container with me and replace it with the last one we found and signed" trick. Maybe a bunch of people did that. Grrr. I spent too much time trying to figure out what I did wrong. 

 

This is just one of the reasons I dislike power trails and sometimes geoart. Geocaching dot com started off with  three simple guidelines,

1. Take something from the cache

2. Leave something in the cache

3. Write about it in the logbook.

 

It's bad enough the 3rd has gone with the wind but even worse that it sometimes doesn't manage to stay with the cache it was placed in. All this because some want to play a number's game that geocaching wasn't intended to be. 

[+dprovan]

On 11/7/2021 at 3:50 PM, Max and 99 said:

I think he's right. We found about half a dozen geocaches in a geoart comprised of about 125 caches. Not a power trail but similar. Someone probably just did the old "take the geocache container with me and replace it with the last one we found and signed" trick. Maybe a bunch of people did that. Grrr. I spent too much time trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Of course I agree that behavior is obnoxious. But if I were as sure as you were that you hadn't found that cache, I wouldn't have given the errant log much thought beyond it being an interesting mystery, and a mystery you did sort out, after all. (Of course, if it were me, I wouldn't have noticed that I'd already signed the log to begin with....)

[+ScribblyBear]

I found one live 12 gag shell and a handful of live 9 mil rounds in a cache that had been archived around a year ago. I was out near my parents cabin and was curious if it had been removed even though it had been archived. I took a look at the logbook and it looks as though people are still signing it with several dates marked as found within the last month.

[+colleda]

I am irked someone caused the "Found It, Didn't Find It" thread to be locked.

[+Jayeffel]

I recently ran across a cache log that fits the IRK category.  I found this multi cache- a good one at that  -- over a span of a few years, mainly because I just took my time working on it.

 

Anyway, once I located it I went online back to see if anyone else did. Someone did, but they first had a DNF log, because they could not "get it out". Then they had a found log; , they "got it out " but could not put it back, so they placed it close by " to make it easier for others".  There was no need to get it out as they said, tricky yes but easily conquered . 

 

The CO was notified and he did put it back where it was intended to be. The IRK part was not putting it back where it was and putting it where it would be easier. Where it was put would surley have the cache lost or destroyed. Oh well it is okay now.

[+tumbleweed42]

On 5/23/2013 at 9:56 PM, TheMasses said:

Throwdowns

Always and forever throwdowns are the bane of geocaching. I hate them. How can anyone be so arrogant that just because they can’t find it, then it can’t  possibly be there?! I have found multiple containers at one GZ on several occasions. It’s even worse when the cache is supposed to be something really cool and someone throws down a film canister, ruining the experience for everyone else. The only time I ever replace a container is when I find the damaged original container and have a similar container with which to replace it. I would then always contact the CO and tell them exactly what I did. 

[+L0ne.R]

On 11/18/2021 at 1:12 AM, colleda said:

I am irked someone caused the "Found It, Didn't Find It" thread to be locked.

 

And Keystone included this in his closing comment: "No "replacement thread" should be started."

[+colleda]

18 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

 

And Keystone included this in his closing comment: "No "replacement thread" should be started."

 

On 11/18/2021 at 5:12 PM, colleda said:

I am irked someone caused the "Found It, Didn't Find It" thread to be locked.

I recall seeing that.

[+Lynx Humble]

23 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

 

And Keystone included this in his closing comment: "No "replacement thread" should be started."

Well that topic lasted 17 years without Groundspeak doing anything against those fake logs so a new thread wouldn't be useful to change their decision...

[+niraD]

1 hour ago, Lynx Humble said:

Well that topic lasted 17 years without Groundspeak doing anything against those fake logs so a new thread wouldn't be useful to change their decision...

Was the point of the thread "to change their decision" or was the point of the thread to complain ridicule commiserate with others about those fake logs?

[+TeamRabbitRun]

On 11/24/2021 at 7:11 PM, tumbleweed42 said:

Always and forever throwdowns are the bane of geocaching. I hate them. How can anyone be so arrogant that just because they can’t find it, then it can’t  possibly be there?! I have found multiple containers at one GZ on several occasions. It’s even worse when the cache is supposed to be something really cool and someone throws down a film canister, ruining the experience for everyone else. The only time I ever replace a container is when I find the damaged original container and have a similar container with which to replace it. I would then always contact the CO and tell them exactly what I did. 

 

Can a CO throwdown on his own cache?

I once snagged a popular, often-found nanocache on the outside of a railing-post on a bridge, but the written logbook entries stopped a few months earlier.

Curious, because the ONLINE logs ran right up until the morning that I was there. I scrolled back through the online logs, and found an "IT'S GONE / I REPLACED IT" combo from a few days after the last written log.

Weird.

I cast about, and sure enough there was the IDENTICAL replacement, stuck in an identical fashion, ON THE VERY NEXT POST. Every online log since the replacement was in there.

I contacted the CO and we had a good laugh over it. He had run out at the end of the day when he got the NM log and didn't spot it, so he just planted a new one in what he thought was the original location, ON THE VERY NEXT POST.

STILL weird - in the time that the new one was up, NO ONE had logged the original (until I did) less than a foot away!

[+baer2006]

1 hour ago, TeamRabbitRun said:

I cast about, and sure enough there was the IDENTICAL replacement, stuck in an identical fashion, ON THE VERY NEXT POST.

It is actually a minor irk of me, that whenever I have to do maintenance (usually to change the logsheet) on my most visited cache, I have to search for it under each of 4 identical benches in a small city square, although there is a clear hint and a spoiler photo, which unambiguously show under which one it should be hidden.

[+MNTA]

8 hours ago, baer2006 said:

It is actually a minor irk of me, that whenever I have to do maintenance (usually to change the logsheet) on my most visited cache, I have to search for it under each of 4 identical benches in a small city square, although there is a clear hint and a spoiler photo, which unambiguously show under which one it should be hidden.

 

So true!

My hint said SW corner. I found it twice on the NW corner. So I took the hint and moved it to the NW corner so far it has not moved from that spot. Still was annoying.

[+CheekyBrit]

New irk: landscaping changing the terrain of an area ready for construction. Where I live in Pocatello it is almost always on top of trails and geocaches. It is a silly irk, people need houses and they need to be built somewhere.

[+Viajero Perdido]

A related (but minor) irk:

 

Caches hidden in a landscaped area.  Because every so often, annually maybe, the landscapers come back and tidy things up ... and toss anything that don't belong there.

[+kunarion]

12 minutes ago, Viajero Perdido said:

A related (but minor) irk:

 

Caches hidden in a landscaped area.  Because every so often, annually maybe, the landscapers come back and tidy things up ... and toss anything that don't belong there.

 

That happened to some of my caches.  Cache on a branch that got pruned.  Cache in a tree, and the trees were then all chopped down.  Both of those had express permission for the placement.  Which, yeah, does not mean "protection from removal by maintenance crews".

 

Some of mine (and some missing ones that I tried to find) that were on the ground probably got Landscaped away... a lock-n-lock is no match for a leaf blower.  

 

This one was tucked into in a nice, safe lone bush, until the day the landscapers mowed the whole bush down.

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by kunarion

[+Wulff Pack]

I do not like the policy that hidden stages count for cache saturation guidelines, when I can't even see they are there when I fill out the page.  Particularly when there is a multi-cache with 10 hidden stages blocking anyone else from placing a cache within a large geographic area.  You go through a lot of effort putting a cache together that only works for a particular geographic location (that you thought was clear when you fill out the "hide a geocache page," only to find out a hidden stage is blocking it. 

 

Simply put, you should be notified of a hidden stage when you are filling out the page, not 2-3 days after. 

[+TeamRabbitRun]

10 hours ago, Wulff Pack said:

I do not like the policy that hidden stages count for cache saturation guidelines, when I can't even see they are there when I fill out the page.  Particularly when there is a multi-cache with 10 hidden stages blocking anyone else from placing a cache within a large geographic area.  You go through a lot of effort putting a cache together that only works for a particular geographic location (that you thought was clear when you fill out the "hide a geocache page," only to find out a hidden stage is blocking it. 

 

Simply put, you should be notified of a hidden stage when you are filling out the page, not 2-3 days after. 

 

That's a completely valid 'irk' and description of its unfairness.

 

Now, please continue your discussion to the other side of the coin; to the CO, let's say 'me', who puts out a cache with a hidden stage. Say you want to find my stage without solving the puzzle or putting any work into it or even physically going to the FIRST stage and looking at the dadgum historical marker and adding up the digits in the year that so-and-so slept here to get the coords of hidden stage #2.

 

If the website told you that there was a hidden stage nearby, then you could simply adjust YOUR new cache page coordinates in incremental steps until it's clear, then adjust again in steps in a different direction and soon, you'd have the hidden location of my cache. 

 

If you think that no one would go through all that, you're wrong. It would just take a few minutes, and it's common enough to have a name: it's called "Battleshipping", after the board game.

 

Instead, you could just take advantage of the practice already baked into the hobby of putting all your stage coords into the FIRST, undetailed cache description page of YOUR new cache, titling it "Coordinate Check" and your friendly local Reviewer will sniff out all conflicts (because that's what dogs do) and let you know which of your stages might have a problem.

 

Frankly, knowing that hidden stages are a thing, it's your own fault if you go through the effort of deploying a cache without adequately checking as part of your advance planning.

 

If you could do that all on your own on the website, then hidden stages would be a joke to many people. By requiring that a reviewer knows you're poking around, attempts at using the website to 'end-run' around a CO's design will be apparent.

 

It's a pain to every CO, but the rest of us just 'ask BEFORE we plant' and the inconvenience is minimal.

[+tumbleweed42]

This is in a far second behind my rant about throw downs, but the phrase “all is well” in cache logs, especially from a CO irk me. If I have DNFed a cache and the CO checks on it and simply writes “all is well” that doesn’t tell me if it was, in fact, missing and they’ve replaced it and now all is well or that it was there in the first place and all had always been well. There is one CO in particular in my area who writes this on every log and it really does not give an accurate portrayal of the situation. 

[Keystone]

1 hour ago, BendSinister said:

I'm not sure of the scale of the threats to the Geocaching business model this stuff aims to prevent, but when it impinges so drastically on what I see as a natural extension of cache maintenance (of caches placed in the almost continuous six year period when I was paying for Premium membership) it feels a little petty and aggressively punitive.

 

There was a significant, widespread spam attack that exploited the message center.  The restriction was put in place rather quickly as part of ending that emergency.  Message Center functionality was cut off totally for a period of time while this band-aid was coded.

 

Here is a link to one of the many discussions for this horrible spam attack.

[+thebruce0]

On 1/23/2022 at 8:13 PM, Keystone said:

There was a significant, widespread spam attack that exploited the message center.  The restriction was put in place rather quickly as part of ending that emergency.  Message Center functionality was cut off totally for a period of time while this band-aid was coded.

 

I guess the followup question to that then would be is there a better way to incorporate an anti-spam measure that doesn't dramatically reduce the friendliness of communication between users?

Maybe not... or, go premium...

[+Goodgulf]

Gotta like a thread that's going on 10 years old 

 

My recent Irk is Challenge caches that don't have a checker link on the page even though someone kindly created one post publishing and this is obvious to the CO since the last dozen founds reference it.

 

OK maybe a 4 on a scale of 10 but my Doctor told me I should avoid irks so I am starting out small 

[+frumiousb]

On 1/28/2022 at 11:23 PM, Goodgulf said:

My recent Irk is Challenge caches that don't have a checker link on the page even though someone kindly created one post publishing and this is obvious to the CO since the last dozen founds reference it.

Similarly frustrating:  Challenge caches that desperately need a checker, often because they require you to tally points for a long list of caches that you may or may not have found, which requires clicking on every one in the list that you aren't 100% sure you *haven't* found.

[+GeoElmo6000]

When people drive down the shoulder during a traffic jam.

[+JL_HSTRE]

Frustrating caching experience yesterday. I hit three trails, all of which happened to have caches from the same CO.

 

One trail deliberately had Not Chosen for the size on all 10 hides and said nothing about the containers. The descriptions made it clear this was deliberate to be more "challenging." There was at least some variance in D-rating.

 

The other two trails had all caches listed as Small, though some were actually Micros. A variety of screwtop containers. All similarly rated (D2). No hints. Perhaps 1/3 were at the base of a tree, tucked into the roots where I would expect to find such containers because it limits their accident movement. About 1/3 were tucked under or against logs. The rest seemed to be in random locations; moved or deliberate I wasn't always sure. The undergrowth, often thorny and with large amounts of pine straw, made searching for thumb-to-fist-sized containers a bit frustrating. At several locations my Garmin experienced a lot of signal bounce and limited accuracy despite limited tree cover (mostly widely spaced pines).