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GEOTour attribute disappears as cache is archived


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Ref. http://coord.info/GC6VV4V

 

Recently the city council of Knokke Heist (Belgium) decided to stop their participation in the (only) Geotour located in Belgium. Reasons behind this decision are unknown to me but I don't believe this is relevant to my question. The fact remains that on their request all caches have now been disabled and will be archived shortly. So far nothing out of the ordinary.

What surprised me is that because of the city council pulling out of this Geotour, the "Geotour"-attribute has now also been removed from all of the caches making up the tour.

 

Is this the normal procedure, i.e. that the attribute gets pulled when a Geotour is archived? Or did something else happen here?

I would like to understand the process because it seems strange to me that attributes - once granted to a listing - can suddenly disappear.

 

Regards,

 

Peter

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We've had exactly the same issue here in Australia!

I worked hard over 3 days and some hundreds of kilometers to do the 20 caches for a geotour here in Australia in order to obtain every possible attribute available in Australia.

That left me with only 2 more to get, neither of which are available here.

I am flabbergasted that the geotour attribute 'just disappears' once the geotour is no longer!

Hell, if my 'found count' worked the same way when a cache was archived, I'd lost a huge percentage of my finds and I'd stop playing!

Those of us who earned the attribute for the geo tour would like it back as this attribute wasn't something that comes up every day and it was hard earned!

With all the changes behind the scenes on the webpage and app surely there are enough brains available at HQ to make a work around to allow those people who provide money to GS by going and doing the very expensive and location centric geotours to keep the attribute!

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It seems to me that GS is punishing those who financially support the GeoTour by finding the caches. The obvious response should be to require archival of all the GeoTour caches when they are no longer a GeoTour, and leave the Geotour Attribute on the cache page. The City can then create a new cache, if they choose, at that location without the GeoTour Attribute. We, the supporting Geocachers, would continue to have the Attribute that we earned.

Edited by 8Nuts MotherGoose
Edit for punctuation.
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On 6/14/2017 at 4:32 PM, locus cache said:

We've had exactly the same issue here in Australia!

I worked hard over 3 days and some hundreds of kilometers to do the 20 caches for a geotour here in Australia in order to obtain every possible attribute available in Australia.

That left me with only 2 more to get, neither of which are available here.

I am flabbergasted that the geotour attribute 'just disappears' once the geotour is no longer!

Hell, if my 'found count' worked the same way when a cache was archived, I'd lost a huge percentage of my finds and I'd stop playing!

Those of us who earned the attribute for the geo tour would like it back as this attribute wasn't something that comes up every day and it was hard earned!

With all the changes behind the scenes on the webpage and app surely there are enough brains available at HQ to make a work around to allow those people who provide money to GS by going and doing the very expensive and location centric geotours to keep the attribute!

 

That does not seem fair at all. I have spent so much money and time working on a geotour (and about to do more), and I agree with you.  You earned it, you should get to keep it, regardless if the cache is archived!

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I can understand the Geotour attribute to be removed if the cache remains available to be found, just no longer as part of a Geotour.

But removing one attribute when a cache gets archived makes no sense, why would this be useful? You can't search for it once it gets archived, so what's the difference between the Geotour attribute and for instance 'the recommended at night '-attribute when a cache gets archived? 

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Any attribute, rating, language on any cache can change. Generally the only thing that isn't going to change is type.

 

Did you enjoy the tour? great. 

 

(There is a bit of a left hand not coordinating with right hand  - GeocachingHQ now pushes and markets stats consistently on one hand, then pulls the rug out from under stats seekers on the other.  I think the marketing of stats is the error, and that handling of  attributes is appropriate, myself).

 

 

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3 hours ago, Isonzo Karst said:

Any attribute, rating, language on any cache can change. Generally the only thing that isn't going to change is type.

 

 

 

 

But not when it is archived, only when something has actually changed. Why only remove one attribute and not all when a cache is archived? None of the attributes apply after archiving the cache, so either leave the attributes as the were at time of archival or remove them all (and destroy all statistics, I personally don't care about statistics but for some this is important). 

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I  understand the logic of removing the GeoTour attribute myself. Cache WAS part of a GeoTour, and now it isn't - ie, archiving it alters that state.  That said, if people complain about this, perhaps it will change. Seems like it could - though I expect it's a bulk action on all caches in a tour, so altering it would require doing manually and individually something that's now a bulk action.  

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I'll be different. I happen to like the fact that the GeoTour attribute is removed from the cache when the GeoTour ends. It makes managing the caches loaded on my GPSr units a lot easier.

 

When I load caches into my GPSr, I alter the name of the cache to add various keywords to the beginning of the cache name for priority caches. This makes the primitive search tools on my GPSr more useful to me. I can easily search for GeoTour, or any of my other so-called priority caches with a name search. Having the attribute (or not) makes it easy to manage my keyword for GeoTour caches. If the attribute is gone when I reload the GPSr, the keyword automatically disappears. (Yes, I do use GSAK to do my intermediate processing, but I could also do the same with hand-written scripts.)

 

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5 hours ago, Wet Pancake Touring Club said:

I'll be different. I happen to like the fact that the GeoTour attribute is removed from the cache when the GeoTour ends. It makes managing the caches loaded on my GPSr units a lot easier.

 

 

Why load an archived cache into your GPSr ?

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On 5/14/2018 at 10:41 PM, irisisleuk said:

Why load an archived cache into your GPSr ?

In the OP, there are two coincident events. The end of the GeoTour, and the archiving of the caches that made up the GeoTour. When a GeoTour ends, the caches are not automatically archived. There are plenty of former GeoTour caches that are still active. Here's one: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC4AZRY_wastatepks100-steamboat-rock

 

 

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On 5/12/2018 at 5:32 PM, 8Nuts MotherGoose said:

It seems to me that GS is punishing those who financially support the GeoTour by finding the caches. The obvious response should be to require archival of all the GeoTour caches when they are no longer a GeoTour, and leave the Geotour Attribute on the cache page. The City can then create a new cache, if they choose, at that location without the GeoTour Attribute. We, the supporting Geocachers, would continue to have the Attribute that we earned.

I think this needs to be bumped. There are some valid points presented in this discussion thread. 

Another thread was started yesterday about a special icon to indicate geotour caches, and my searching reminded me of this discussion.

Edited by Max and 99
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