Updates to Challenge Cache Guidelines

[+arisoft]

Quote

Added to the “Not Acceptable” column of the Time-Limited section:

• Requiring more than one find on any day or calendar date, even if cumulative. Example, find 5 caches for every date of the Finds for Each Day of the Year grid.

I have tried to publish a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year). It was rejected because it did not require finds for every day in a year. Only some dates were required. This quideline was used to cancel my challenge idea

:

Quote

13. Find Date

Geocaches found before challenge was published can count towards the achievement of the challenge.

Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted.

For me it is diffucult to follow this reasoning bacause I have seen same type of challenge published lately. (Requiring finds at some but not all calendar days)

Anyway, there may be problems to interpret this paragraph 13 in a coherent way. At first clance these two situations seems to be opposite.  But when separated, the interpretation changes from restrictions to requirements. I wish that this guideline would also be more precisely defined.

[+noncentric]

2 hours ago, arisoft said:

I have tried to publish a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year). It was rejected because it did not require finds for every day in a year. Only some dates were required. This quideline was used to cancel my challenge idea

Did your challenge require a find on something like Jan 10 and Feb 10 and Mar 10? Based on the text in guideline #13 (Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted.), then I'm not surprised that your challenge was rejected. Even with the newly announced changes, your challenge would still be denied because it is limiting cachers to only specific days, rather than a wider timeframe like a month or year. I guess the complaint is that cachers don't want to wait an entire year if they miss a single day of caching?  Not something I would complain about, but I also wouldn't complain that bookkeeping is required to prove qualification for a find, and we know that some cachers complained about that. Oh well.

 

I didn't understand the reasoning behind the newly announced changes either, until I read through the following text a couple times:

Quote

The general purpose of the Time-Limited guidelines is to ensure that cachers can pursue challenges at their own pace. It was determined that cumulative monthly challenges meet that standard because, for example, when pursuing a challenge to find 100 caches in January, a cacher has 31 days to work on it this year, then another 31 days next year, and so on. However, challenges requiring multiple finds for every date of the Finds for Each Day of the Year grid were deemed to violate the Time-Limited guidelines because a cacher only has one day each year to work on each date’s requirement of finding multiple caches.

 

 

2 hours ago, arisoft said:

For me it is diffucult to follow this reasoning bacause I have seen same type of challenge published lately. (Requiring finds at some but not all calendar days)

Perhaps that was a miss by the Reviewer. They are not infallible and maybe that Reviewer simply missed it, or the challenge requirement was misunderstood, or the qualification rule was changed after publication?

[+Oxford Stone]

Shall we just say that they've ruined the Challenge sub-game and leave it at that?

[+arisoft]

6 hours ago, noncentric said:

Did your challenge require a find on something like Jan 10 and Feb 10 and Mar 10? Based on the text in guideline #13 (Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted.),

I do not understand how it is different to require every day of a year or some days, weeks, months etc. of a year. It is illogical. The requirement was some (holy)days. Actually 12 days. Not 366 or 365 days. I thought that only streaks are allowed but it seems that it is not true also. What is the difference if a challenge requires a find only at 1st January compared to days between 1st January to 31rd December?

6 hours ago, noncentric said:

Perhaps that was a miss by the Reviewer. They are not infallible and maybe that Reviewer simply missed it, or the challenge requirement was misunderstood, or the qualification rule was changed after publication?

I think that it is not a miss by anyone. It is just vague guideline which can be interpreted so many ways depending on current situation. That is why I wish a better explanation, not because my challenge was rejected but because there may be a real problem.

Edited January 25, 2018 by arisoft

[+J Grouchy]

2 hours ago, Oxford Stone said:

Shall we just say that they've ruined the Challenge sub-game and leave it at that?

Many of us are not displeased.  Honestly, I'm immensely grateful that half the threads are now not devoted to talking about challenges.  It got quite ridiculous.

[+baer2006]

11 hours ago, arisoft said:

I have tried to publish a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year). It was rejected because it did not require finds for every day in a year. Only some dates were required. This quideline was used to cancel my challenge idea

Wow. Seems that the owner of GC7F59T has beaten the update by a mere 5 weeks .

[+thebruce0]

arisoft, I can see you could look at the logic of the wording as confusing. If 1-find per date of a year is allowed, then technically every day is "one day" a year to work on the challenge (for each date); in the same way, if you limit it to holiday dates, that's still "one day" a year to work on the challenge (for each date). But I think in this case it can be seen that there are many fewer dates in the year to work on the challenge. If you have restricted to 12 dates, then that's only 12 times in a year a person can work on it, as opposed to 365+.  So in that spirit - "a cacher only has one day each year to work on each date’s requirement" - your challenge would be declined. There's a lot more waiting for the next date to work on the challenge.

The only reason I can see them limiting the dates to 1 per day is for those instances where say someone waited a year to work on the next date they need and say they need 4 caches. But they were only able to find 3. Now they have to wait another year.  Limiting to one greatly reduces the chance that more than a year will be needed to complete the challenge. I guess I can understand that. But man that must have been a small fraction of appeals overall...

I'm personally not too upset about limiting the time-required aspect of challenge caches though. There's a 2000-finds-per-year-for-3-years challenge in my region.  Nope, not a chance. I had 2k in one year, a couple years back, didn't hit 2k the next year, and I'm not going to dedicated my next 3 years to year long high-count geocaching just for this challenge.   12 months of 150/month was active enough for me.  If others can hit that, great for them; but high count priority has gone down a lot for me recently.

[+dprovan]

6 hours ago, J Grouchy said:

Many of us are not displeased.  Honestly, I'm immensely grateful that half the threads are now not devoted to talking about challenges.  It got quite ridiculous.

Yes, one way to stop people from complaining about how other people aren't having fun right is to stop those other people from having fun that way.

Unfortunately, the complainers just moved on, so now half the threads are about how not enough caches are getting killed off to make sure geocachers are saved from ever encountering a broken container.

[+peter-tvm]

Where can I read about these newly announced changes?

Never mind. I did find it at the bottom of the help centre article about challenge caches:

 

Edited January 25, 2018 by peter-tvm

[+The A-Team]

20 hours ago, arisoft said:

I have tried to publish a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year). It was rejected because it did not require finds for every day in a year. Only some dates were required. This quideline was used to cancel my challenge idea

13. Find Date

Geocaches found before challenge was published can count towards the achievement of the challenge.

Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted.

I suspect you were quoted the wrong guideline by the reviewer. I expect that this is the one that would apply based on your description:

14. Positive Challenge Criteria

Challenge criteria must be positive and require that a geocaching goal be achieved.

Not finding caches: design that limits or punishes any element of finding caches. Examples: Challenges that require ratios in finds; such as 10% of finds must be Attended logs, challenges that require finding only some particular type for over time, as 100 consecutive Mystery finds. Competition rather than achievement; example, a challenge based on "First to Finds" is a competition.

Since your challenge requires that there be not more than one find on the relevant days, someone who already has one find on one of the relevant days would have to actively avoid caching on that day, so it would fall under the "not finding caches" clause above.

[+thebruce0]

20 hours ago, arisoft said:

I have tried to publish a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year).

  How'd I miss that "not"?  Yeah. If you limit the number of finds, then you make it possible to 'unqualify'. And in that case it sounds like it would become impossible to qualify (if having more than 1 find, during your entire career, on any required date? ouch)

[+arisoft]

2 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

  How'd I miss that "not"?  Yeah. If you limit the number of finds, then you make it possible to 'unqualify'. And in that case it sounds like it would become impossible to qualify (if having more than 1 find, during your entire career, on any required date? ouch)

This loosely relates to the new guideline. It is possible to find more than one cache per day and my challenge idea required just one at any year.

I just checked again and there is only one reason mentioned "Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted." And my "restriction" was to require finds at some holidays (any year). Is that a restriction? (To allow plenty of days when you do not have to find anything compared to fill the whole calendar in one year)

Edited January 25, 2018 by arisoft

[+baer2006]

11 hours ago, baer2006 said:

Wow. Seems that the owner of GC7F59T has beaten the update by a mere 5 weeks .

... and just now this cache has been archived ! I'm very surprised to see a challenge, which was published on 21 December 2017, archived because it violates a guideline introduced in January 2018.

[+thebruce0]

26 minutes ago, arisoft said:

This loosely relates to the new guideline. It is possible to find more than one cache per day and my challenge idea required just one at any year.

I just checked again and there is only one reason mentioned "Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted." And my "restriction" was to require finds at some holidays (any year). Is that a restriction? (To allow plenty of days when you do not have to find anything compared to fill the whole calendar in one year)

Wait. I think I get the misunderstanding (though it doesn't address the other issues).  When you said "a challenge which required not more than one find per a calendar day (any year)" I'm guessing another way of putting it would be "which did not require more than one find per a calendar day".  In other words, your challenge did not require multiple finds per calendar date (rather than requiring no more than 1 per date). That makes more sense if true. The negative plays a bit of havoc with that sentence.

[+niraD]

21 minutes ago, baer2006 said:

I'm very surprised to see a challenge, which was published on 21 December 2017, archived because it violates a guideline introduced in January 2018.

I think the policy was already in place. The recent update merely includes the policy in the written guidelines.

So the 2017 cache was archived because it violated the policy that was in place in 2017, not because it violated the guidelines of 2018 that finally documented that policy for us civilians.

[+The A-Team]

26 minutes ago, arisoft said:

This loosely relates to the new guideline. It is possible to find more than one cache per day and my challenge idea required just one at any year.

I just checked again and there is only one reason mentioned "Restrictions on date of finds used for the challenge are not permitted." And my "restriction" was to require finds at some holidays (any year). Is that a restriction? (To allow plenty of days when you do not have to find anything compared to fill the whole calendar in one year)

I think it would help us all figure this out if you fully-describe your proposed challenge. At this point, I'm really not clear on what the requirements are. It sounds like it has something to do with specific holidays and single finds per day, but I can't figure out how it all goes together or what "restrictions" there might be.

[+The A-Team]

10 minutes ago, niraD said:

I think the policy was already in place. The recent update merely includes the policy in the written guidelines.

So the 2017 cache was archived because it violated the policy that was in place in 2017, not because it violated the guidelines of 2018 that finally documented that policy for us civilians.

^This

From the original announcement post:

Quote

These updates represent the guidance we have given since 2016 whenever related challenges have been appealed to Geocaching HQ. However, we have seen an uptick in appeals for these types of challenges, so we felt it was important to add the guidance to the public guidelines.

 

[+arisoft]

53 minutes ago, The A-Team said:

I think it would help us all figure this out if you fully-describe your proposed challenge. At this point, I'm really not clear on what the requirements are. It sounds like it has something to do with specific holidays and single finds per day, but I can't figure out how it all goes together or what "restrictions" there might be.

This is a bit difficult because I deleted all material releating to this not accepted challenge. I only have couple of e-mails left. I used a lot of time to make nice description and checker. I was pretty sure that there is no this kind of problems. Maybe others but not this one. I got an verbal explanation that picking some special days from calendar would determine when the caches should be searched and this is not acceptable. That is why I wish a better explanation to this guideline because it seems to be difficult to interpret coherently.

[+arisoft]

1 hour ago, niraD said:

So the 2017 cache was archived because it violated the policy that was in place in 2017, not because it violated the guidelines of 2018 that finally documented that policy for us civilians.

It is violating this

 Requiring finds on Leap Day.

The note does not explain this enough. Maybe the CO gets a better explanation. I know that some reviewers do not pay attention to this very clear rule.

Edited January 26, 2018 by arisoft