A push towards weeding out old caches?

[+Manville Possum]

Yeah, and with over 2 million caches world wide, folks can indeed play 2 entirely different games, can't they?

 

That's just this site alone, and I play on three sites.

[+Sol seaker]

Back to the original topic,

 

I'm definitely not for weeding out "old" caches. The oldest ones I've found are some of the best I've found.

 

However, I do agree cache maintenance is getting to be a problem. I am one of those people, who if I see a few DNF's then I generally won't bother.

 

If I DO go after it, I try to go all-out and make a good attempt at finding it so I can put a NM on it.

 

I am one who DOES log "Needs maintenance" and "needs archiving" as needed. I know they're not going to archive it just because I mark it as such, but if a cache has been down for a long time and the cache owner hasn't logged on in over a year, I don't have a problem with putting a N/A on the cache.

 

I've known instances where the cache owner has showed up again and then they can unarchive it if they replace it.

 

 

I really love the old caches, but it's not necessarily the old caches that are the problem.

Very often someone new to geocaching will put out a few caches and then quit playing. I see those as the larger problem.

 

There are getting to be so many caches and fewer and fewer people seem to be marking "NM". Perhaps some automation will help.

[+Shawnonabike]

I agree with sol seeker in that the problem is often geocachers who put out caches then loose interest and forget about them. Recently I went after a cache that hadn't been found in 9 years. This involved riding my mountain bike a total of about 40km, hiking up a mountain for about 4 hours, swimming to an island in a mountain lake, and then realizing there could not possibly be an existing cache her because the island would be completely submerged every winter. This cache had been found once soon after it was placed, by a person with a boat and a 4-wheel drive, and not found since. It was a fun adventure, but it would have been more satisfying if a cache had been there. People need to realize the maintanance responsibilities of owning a cache.