Surely there has to come a point?

[+thebruce0]

It has to be a balance, and the line has to be drawn somewhere. Community has to not shy away from being responsive to issues, and in the absense of sufficient community response then authority can and should step in. It's not an all or nothing here.

[+L0ne.R]

15 minutes ago, dprovan said:

The problem is that the more people believe that is has to come from an authority figure, the more it will come from an authority figure whether it has to or not. And authority figures are always happen to oblige.

It's sad to follow this thread and find it arriving at a consensus that GS should step in with yet another rating and yet another prohibition. I'm sorry you guys have such terrible problems where you cache, but I wish you'd leave alone the rest of us that don't see anything like this.

If they do something to fix these problems where we live, it should make where you live even better. Good stewardship will continue where you are, and get better where we are.

Edited January 31, 2018 by L0ne.R
grammar

[+coachstahly]

27 minutes ago, L0ne.R said:

If they do something to fix these problems where we live, it should make where you live even better. Good stewardship will continue where you are, and get better where we are.

There's no guarantee that that will actually be the end result for his area.  Just because it works in one location doesn't mean that it will make it better in another one.  It's not necessarily a correlation that can be made.  One would hope that it works that way, though.

Like dprovan, my little neck of the woods has very few problems of the sort you continually refer to as well as the maintenance problems noted in this thread.  We have some slackers and some issues (no one is completely free from issues), but that's more from malaise and indifference than willful abandonment in a majority of the cases.  Most of the community looks out for each other's caches and helps out when we can (and with permission for a new container).  We could probably file more NMs and subsequent NAs to help open up some areas (and clean up some caches in the process), but, for me, most of those types of locations don't really interest me for placement of one of my caches.  

As to the OP, we don't see that type of problem around here and Indianapolis isn't really much of a vacation destination, so vacation caches are few and far between.

[+L0ne.R]

10 minutes ago, coachstahly said:

As to the OP, we don't see that type of problem around here and Indianapolis isn't really much of a vacation destination, so vacation caches are few and far between.

For those of us who sometimes go on a geocaching vacation, or do some geocaching while on vacation, it can be frustrating and a waste to find mostly abandoned caches in poor shape left by distant owners who never intended on returning. Not fun.

[+cerberus1]

2 hours ago, coachstahly said:

Then call them out publicly.  If they're going to shame and belittle a newbie (or established cacher), then they should be called out and be shamed and belittled on their actions.  There's no place for this in something that's supposed to be fun and a pastime.  No one should have to be subject to this and think it's an accepted norm in geocaching.

Curious how many times you've actually been placed in that situation.

When I say something to another "publicly" (events mostly) it depends on who that person is, or what they've done for others on how it's accepted by the group.  Most say privately that they appreciated the boldness/honesty.  Sheeple...

 - But a couple times the other 2/3rds was in tears over the hate mail she got for my actions from people we thought to be friendly.  No one ever said anything to me...

 

[+cerberus1]

1 hour ago, dprovan said:

The problem is that the more people believe that is has to come from an authority figure, the more it will come from an authority figure whether it has to or not. And authority figures are always happen to oblige.

It's sad to follow this thread and find it arriving at a consensus that GS should step in with yet another rating and yet another prohibition. I'm sorry you guys have such terrible problems where you cache, but I wish you'd leave alone the rest of us that don't see anything like this.

I agree.

As much grief as the other 2/3rds received because of me,  here, no one likes a tattletale. 

[+justintim1999]

3 hours ago, coachstahly said:

Then call them out publicly.  If they're going to shame and belittle a newbie (or established cacher), then they should be called out and be shamed and belittled on their actions.  There's no place for this in something that's supposed to be fun and a pastime.  No one should have to be subject to this and think it's an accepted norm in geocaching.

 

3 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

I find it has to come from an authority figure, especially if the culture in the area is predominantly smiley-oriented community-maintenance-is-OK. I really appreciated when a reviewer stepped in and left a public message when a cache owner got very angry in his archival log a few minutes after  I logged an NA.

That's one way but if I were aware of such a situation I'm pretty confident I could facilitate the desired result.  Within the confines of the guidelines that is.   

[+justintim1999]

1 hour ago, L0ne.R said:

If they do something to fix these problems where we live, it should make where you live even better. Good stewardship will continue where you are, and get better where we are.

I like the attitude and positive forward thinking.   Setting an example and sticking with it is a good way to slowly but surely change things. 

The only way injustice will triumph is if good men (and women) do nothing.   

Edited January 31, 2018 by justintim1999

[+dprovan]

2 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

If they do something to fix these problems where we live, it should make where you live even better. Good stewardship will continue where you are, and get better where we are.

You are wrong. It won't make it better. We've already seen that GS stepping in to monitor cache quality has led to a reduction in NMs and basically the elimination of NAs, and several caches have been archived prematurely. I'm sure this new proposal will further the trend, bringing the situation in my level down to the level it is in your area. All I can hope is that at least this will fix the problems in your area, but I'm not even convinced of that.

[+L0ne.R]

12 minutes ago, dprovan said:

You are wrong. It won't make it better. We've already seen that GS stepping in to monitor cache quality has led to a reduction in NMs and basically the elimination of NAs, and several caches have been archived prematurely. I'm sure this new proposal will further the trend, bringing the situation in my level down to the level it is in your area. All I can hope is that at least this will fix the problems in your area, but I'm not even convinced of that.

 

I don't understand. How would the proposal  "further the trend, bringing the situation in [your] level down to the level it is in [my] area"?

[+colleda]

On 30/01/2018 at 0:25 AM, Team Microdot said:

Vacation caches are actively discouraged or outright refused for all of these reasons but how is vacation cache specifically defined?

 

 

Here's one I searched for recently. An example of why they should be discouraged?

GC5JN82

Would the reviewer have allowed a "community maintenance plan" as noted in the description or was it altered after publishing?

 

 

 

[+coachstahly]

7 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

Curious how many times you've actually been placed in that situation.

 

Few enough times that I learned to keep my mouth shut when it mattered rather than run the risk of being outed once again.  i wasn't the most tactful person when I was younger and tended to spout off at the mouth without much thought about what I was saying.  That first public shaming wasn't enough to curtail my actions but that next one was enough for me to consider changing what I was doing.  That last one was brutally frank, honest, and much needed.

I'd prefer to deal with these things privately, but if a person can't change and repeatedly has the same actions that cause problems, even after attempts to deal with it behind closed doors, throwing open those doors to the public can certainly open the eyes of the one causing the problems, especially when it's something that most people agree on.  When it's something that's split, it would be counter-productive.  As per TM's issue, I think most of us would agree that the CO is in the wrong in the situation described.

[+dprovan]

7 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

I don't understand. How would the proposal  "further the trend, bringing the situation in [your] level down to the level it is in [my] area"?

Because locals will be encouraged to expect the authorities to deal with bad cachers instead of them being dealt with as a part of the local culture.

[+Team Microdot]

14 hours ago, dprovan said:

I'm sorry you guys have such terrible problems where you cache, but I wish you'd leave alone the rest of us that don't see anything like this.

I'm really pleased that you're not seeing anything like this near you and it sounds, from this and from previous posts of yours, like you have a great community who values keeping things shipshape and Bristol fashion

I too would like to see that sort of community attitude grow and flourish - everywhere.

I do worry though that addicted CO's who are allowed not only to continually spew out caches they'll never maintain - obviously outside a comfortable maintenance radius - and react negatively to anyone who dares to mention that a cache is missing or needs attention, will in fact, over time, as the community cycles, undermine the chances of community attitudes everywhere being as positive as they are in your area.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

23 hours ago, on4bam said:

Dropdowns are not maintenance.

OTOH CO can always ask visiting cachers in advance to arrange maintenance. I brought a container and log to a cache in Greenland after the CO asked if someone could do maintenance.

If you call it a dropdown or throw down, typically done so that one can get a find, then it probably wouldn't be considered maintenance (especially when the CO is nearby and could maintain it themselves.)   Whether you call it maintenance or not, replacing a container that is definitely missing will make a cache findable by others. I honestly think that most that do community maintenance on a vacation cache think of those that will be coming after them more than the typical throwdown on a cache with a nearby CO.   I've had the same experience with a CO asking if I could replace a cache in Zurich after I had sent a PM to the CO about it since it was just a 100' or so from where I was staying.  I didn't, but I did replace one on a remote section of the great wall (but did not log a found it). It was such an amazing location, I only thought about other geocachers that might want to find a cache there.  

[+justintim1999]

7 hours ago, dprovan said:

Because locals will be encouraged to expect the authorities to deal with bad cachers instead of them being dealt with as a part of the local culture.

That all depends on how you see the trend.   

In the past few years I've seen a general decline in the use of NM's and NA's by the geocaching community.  Combine that with the sharp increase of caches and cachers and it you start to understand why GS has taken steps. 

If we want less authority involvement then it's up to us to increase the use of NM's and NA's when appropriate.   This needs to be a team effort.  I don't think one side or the other can handle it by themselves. 

If you enjoy this activity and want not only to see it survive but prosper,  get out there and start making a difference by setting the example.  Maintain your caches,  post appropriate logs when called for and don't be silent when you see something wrong.   Most of all don't hesitate to reach out and educate new cachers on the do's and don'ts of geocaching.

I get frustrated when someone sees something wrong,  dose nothing about it and complains about the way someone else is trying to handle the problem.  This is not directed at you dprovan.  It's more of a general statement.      

[+justintim1999]

11 minutes ago, mr.jonesy said:

I wish I'd seen this thread earlier, I can think of one particular cacher I run across on a regular basis who does exactly this, actively discourages folk to not leave 'needs maintenance', does a wrench clearing owner maintenance usually followed by a 'can someone please go change the log for me'  if anyone does and castigates anyone who dares to post a NM log with a 'that's not helpful' note afterwards, when that doesn't work they threaten a mass archive of their 'estate' and 'what a loss to the game it will be' , almost sounds like we are talking about the same person

 

They even have it listed in their geo profile stating as such that it's better for you to maintain their caches as they own so many they don't have time to do it themselves and yet they fire off cache after cache. Oddly they also own a vast number of earthcaches, I find it amusing they don't have time to reply when folk send answers in for those , but have plenty of time to write spurious notes on their caches when problems are pointed out.

Of all the CO's I've had dealings with they are by far the most belligerent I've had the misfortune to encounter.

Anyhow, rant over

It's a good thing for me we don't have any local cache owners nearly this bad.   It's a good thing for them as well.  I would guess that someone like this wouldn't last very long in these parts.    

[+Team Microdot]

13 minutes ago, mr.jonesy said:

I wish I'd seen this thread earlier, I can think of one particular cacher I run across on a regular basis who does exactly this, actively discourages folk to not leave 'needs maintenance', does a wrench clearing owner maintenance usually followed by a 'can someone please go change the log for me'  if anyone does and castigates anyone who dares to post a NM log with a 'that's not helpful' note afterwards, when that doesn't work they threaten a mass archive of their 'estate' and 'what a loss to the game it will be' , almost sounds like we are talking about the same person

I'm not certain - but there's a fair chance

[+dprovan]

7 hours ago, Team Microdot said:

I do worry though that addicted CO's who are allowed not only to continually spew out caches they'll never maintain - obviously outside a comfortable maintenance radius - and react negatively to anyone who dares to mention that a cache is missing or needs attention, will in fact, over time, as the community cycles, undermine the chances of community attitudes everywhere being as positive as they are in your area.

I suppose it won't help to point out that the solution to this problem is being a community, not throwing up your hands, giving up any thought of community, and demanding that GS send in a swat team to deal with it.

[+Team Microdot]

13 minutes ago, dprovan said:

I suppose it won't help to point out that the solution to this problem is being a community, not throwing up your hands, giving up any thought of community, and demanding that GS send in a swat team to deal with it.

I suppose it won't help to point out that rather than throw up my hands I've opted to engage with the community that exists here on the forums - which incorporates GS who might be able to improve things by adjusting the odd policy here and there.

[+L0ne.R]

23 minutes ago, dprovan said:

I suppose it won't help to point out that the solution to this problem is being a community, not throwing up your hands, giving up any thought of community, and demanding that GS send in a swat team to deal with it.

Do you mean community maintenance?

 

[+dprovan]

2 hours ago, Team Microdot said:

I suppose it won't help to point out that rather than throw up my hands I've opted to engage with the community that exists here on the forums - which incorporates GS who might be able to improve things by adjusting the odd policy here and there.

The community here on the forums isn't the one that needs to be engaged to your local caching environment. They know nothing about it and can do nothing to improve it. And including GS bypasses any community and hands the problem over to the central government.

2 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

2 hours ago, dprovan said:

I suppose it won't help to point out that the solution to this problem is being a community, not throwing up your hands, giving up any thought of community, and demanding that GS send in a swat team to deal with it.

Do you mean community maintenance?

No, I don't mean community maintenance. I mean the community has to deal with bad COs as members of the community, not as criminals.

[+K13]

Has anyone reported the abrasive or threatening communications from the CO in question?  If someone degrades or appears to threaten another cacher either in a log or in other direct communication through the site, TPTB (G$) will investigate, and may step in and do something.

 

[+thebruce0]

On 1/31/2018 at 1:37 PM, thebruce0 said:

It has to be a balance, and the line has to be drawn somewhere. Community has to not shy away from being responsive to issues, and in the absense of sufficient community response then authority can and should step in. It's not an all or nothing here.

...Because it still seems like there's disagreement that if it's not all one, then it's all the other.

[+justintim1999]

25 minutes ago, dprovan said:

The community here on the forums isn't the one that needs to be engaged to your local caching environment. They know nothing about it and can do nothing to improve it. And including GS bypasses any community and hands the problem over to the central government.

No, I don't mean community maintenance. I mean the community has to deal with bad COs as members of the community, not as criminals.

Since ideas on how to improve the game effect everyone involved,  I'd say this is a great group of people to engage.  Maybe someone will take a good idea they read about here and apply it to their own local geocaching community.   Who knows,  being proactive may actually make a difference.  

[+The A-Team]

23 hours ago, dprovan said:

You are wrong. It won't make it better. We've already seen that GS stepping in to monitor cache quality has led to a reduction in NMs and basically the elimination of NAs, and several caches have been archived prematurely. I'm sure this new proposal will further the trend, bringing the situation in my level down to the level it is in your area. All I can hope is that at least this will fix the problems in your area, but I'm not even convinced of that.

I don't see how a ban on new placements by COs who have demonstrated an inability to maintain caches would have any negative effect on NMs and NAs. If anything, they would likely be used more if such a policy was in place. The only way that TPTB would be able to see a trend of non-maintenance would be if we cachers reported the problem caches using these logs. If people stopped using these logs, there'd be no way for TPTB to see that there's a problem and the community's issue wouldn't be resolved. It would be in our own best interest to use these logs to get the problem dealt with.

1 hour ago, dprovan said:

No, I don't mean community maintenance. I mean the community has to deal with bad COs as members of the community, not as criminals.

That sounds good in theory, but it can be very difficult to do in practice. It's hard to tactfully tell someone "You're a bad CO and you should stop hiding new caches", especially if someone is worried about blowback like cerberus1's other 2/3 has experienced.

 

To be clear, it's my understanding that a ban on new placements has already been done in the recent past, but it only seems to be used in the worst-of-the-worst cases. All we want is for it to be used just a bit more.

[+Team Microdot]

1 hour ago, The A-Team said:

To be clear, it's my understanding that a ban on new placements has already been done in the recent past, but it only seems to be used in the worst-of-the-worst cases. All we want is for it to be used just a bit more.

Even a curtailment would be a good start

• No more than X caches per CO
• No more than X miles from home / their caching centroid

[+barefootjeff]

2 hours ago, Team Microdot said:

Even a curtailment would be a good start

• No more than X caches per CO
• No more than X miles from home / their caching centroid

But how do you set an equitable X? For someone with a hectic work and family life, ten hides could be more than they could manage, but for a retired person who lives and breathes caching, many hundred could be fine. We had such a cacher here who had some 250 hides, all well maintained, until she archived and removed them all when she moved interstate last year. And not all caches need the same amount of TLC. A hundred pill bottles in exposed urban locations might be ninety-nine too many (some might say a hundred too many) whereas a hundred ammo cans placed under dry ledges in remote locations would need little if any attention.

And how far from home is too far? For someone in a big city with limited transport, more than a few kilometres might be too far, but at the other extreme there are people who travel long distances in the course of their work who could easily look after a cache on the other side of the country. With cut-price airlines now on the major routes, I could fly to Melbourne for not much more than it would cost me in fuel and road tolls to drive across Sydney, and it could well be quicker!

[+coachstahly]

6 hours ago, justintim1999 said:

Since ideas on how to improve the game effect everyone involved,  I'd say this is a great group of people to engage.  Maybe someone will take a good idea they read about here and apply it to their own local geocaching community.   Who knows,  being proactive may actually make a difference.  

It's my guess that the people here on the forums are already being proactive.  We're not the ones that need to get actively engaged as we most likely already are.  We're a drop in the bucket amongst an ocean of cachers.  The problem lies with the local communities and those who probably don't even know the forums exist.  Since being on the forums for my first post, I've run across maybe 5 cachers I know that post here (infrequently) who live in and around my state (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky).  The cachers on here are great to engage with but we're not going to be able to affect more than our own little corner of the world, regardless of the ideas that might be found here.  I can't even really do much outside of my city, much less the doughnut counties around Indianapolis or the state of Indiana.  Saying that this small group of posters who have responded on this thread will have an effect on geocaching for everyone is a bit of a stretch, IMO.  

[+Team Microdot]

7 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

10 hours ago, Team Microdot said:

Even a curtailment would be a good start

• No more than X caches per CO
• No more than X miles from home / their caching centroid

But how do you set an equitable X? For someone with a hectic work and family life, ten hides could be more than they could manage, but for a retired person who lives and breathes caching, many hundred could be fine. We had such a cacher here who had some 250 hides, all well maintained, until she archived and removed them all when she moved interstate last year. And not all caches need the same amount of TLC. A hundred pill bottles in exposed urban locations might be ninety-nine too many (some might say a hundred too many) whereas a hundred ammo cans placed under dry ledges in remote locations would need little if any attention.

And how far from home is too far? For someone in a big city with limited transport, more than a few kilometres might be too far, but at the other extreme there are people who travel long distances in the course of their work who could easily look after a cache on the other side of the country. With cut-price airlines now on the major routes, I could fly to Melbourne for not much more than it would cost me in fuel and road tolls to drive across Sydney, and it could well be quicker!

Golly - complexity in abundance!

Hopefully the Caching Health Score will go some way toward dealing with the lower end of those spectra - which aren't the subject of the thread anyway.

We're really looking at big hitters with tens of hundreds of hides and, sometimes, tens of thousands of finds which indicate that they should have enough spare time on their hands to maintain their caches but would rather be out finding / throwing out new caches than maintaining the ones they own.

When such a user is asking on their cache page for someone to do maintenance on a cache they own which is a drive-by within a few miles of their home coordintates, something's very wrong.

[+barefootjeff]

25 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Golly - complexity in abundance!

Hopefully the Caching Health Score will go some way toward dealing with the lower end of those spectra - which aren't the subject of the thread anyway.

We're really looking at big hitters with tens of hundreds of hides and, sometimes, tens of thousands of finds which indicate that they should have enough spare time on their hands to maintain their caches but would rather be out finding / throwing out new caches than maintaining the ones they own.

When such a user is asking on their cache page for someone to do maintenance on a cache they own which is a drive-by within a few miles of their home coordintates, something's very wrong.

I can't help wondering how big a problem this is. Across Australia, there are only two cachers with more than 1000 hides and 50 with more than 200. Project-gc doesn't want to give me world-wide numbers, but in the whole USA it looks like there are 67 with more than 1000 hides. Even if they were all irresponsible, is it enough to be a problem?

ETA: It looks like those numbers include archived caches so would be inflated on what's actually out there.

Edited February 2, 2018 by barefootjeff

[+Team Microdot]

14 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

I can't help wondering how big a problem this is. Across Australia, there are only two cachers with more than 1000 hides and 50 with more than 200. Project-gc doesn't want to give me world-wide numbers, but in the whole USA it looks like there are 67 with more than 1000 hides. Even if they were all irresponsible, is it enough to be a problem?

Maybe it's a UK thing - I don't know.

[+barefootjeff]

14 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

ETA: It looks like those numbers include archived caches so would be inflated on what's actually out there.

Okay, if I exclude archived caches, there are only 29 in the USA with more than 1000 hides.

For Australia, it's now 1 with more than 1000 (the other has dropped back to 998), 33 with more than 200, and 108 with more than 100.

[+Team Microdot]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

Okay, if I exclude archived caches, there are only 29 in the USA with more than 1000 hides.

For Australia, it's now 1 with more than 1000 (the other has dropped back to 998), 33 with more than 200, and 108 with more than 100.

Which pretty much renders your how many is too many? Points moot.

[+barefootjeff]

12 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

15 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

Okay, if I exclude archived caches, there are only 29 in the USA with more than 1000 hides.

For Australia, it's now 1 with more than 1000 (the other has dropped back to 998), 33 with more than 200, and 108 with more than 100.

Which pretty much renders your how many is too many? Points moot.

So with those numbers, where is the problem?  And, if there is a widespread problem of people owning too many caches, trying to fix it by setting the bar low enough to catch them is going to catch an awful lot of responsible cachers in the net.

[+Team Microdot]

26 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

So with those numbers, where is the problem?  And, if there is a widespread problem of people owning too many caches, trying to fix it by setting the bar low enough to catch them is going to catch an awful lot of responsible cachers in the net.

Maybe it's a UK thing - I don't know.

If there are so few cachers with hide numbers of the scale we're discussing, how is setting a bar low enough to catch them going to catch an awful lot of responsible cachers in the net?

You can't have it both ways.

[+barefootjeff]

30 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Maybe it's a UK thing - I don't know.

For the UK, there are six with more than a thousand hides and 269 with a hundred or more, out of a total of over 10,000 with one or more unarchived caches (the project-gc statistics page I'm using won't go beyond 10,000).

[+barefootjeff]

11 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Maybe it's a UK thing - I don't know.

If there are so few cachers with hide numbers of the scale we're discussing, how is setting a bar low enough to catch them going to catch an awful lot of responsible cachers in the net?

You can't have it both ways.

If you're saying there are lots of problem people (hundreds? thousands?) you'd have to be setting the bar at about 40 or 50 hides to catch most of them and I'm sure there are many people with that many hides that aren't irresponsible COs. Conversely, if there are only six people in your whole country that would qualify as having too many hides, responsible or not, what is imposing a limit going to achieve?

[+Team Microdot]

13 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

41 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Maybe it's a UK thing - I don't know.

For the UK, there are six with more than a thousand hides and 269 with a hundred or more, out of a total of over 10,000 with one or more unarchived caches (the project-gc statistics page I'm using won't go beyond 10,000).

Should be easy enough to nail them down then without upsetting any responsible cachers.

Out of complexity emerges simplicity

[+Team Microdot]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

if there are only six people in your whole country that would qualify as having too many hides, responsible or not, what is imposing a limit going to achieve?

If there are only six people in a whole country that would qualify as having too many hides, what harm would imposing a limit cause?

[+barefootjeff]

9 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

If there are only six people in a whole country that would qualify as having too many hides, what harm would imposing a limit cause?

If only one of those six is causing problems, it's unfair to the other five, isn't it? Worse yet if your problem cacher isn't one of the six, then you're punishing the innocent because you can't devise a technological solution to deal with the guilty.

[+Team Microdot]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

If only one of those six is causing problems, it's unfair to the other five, isn't it? Worse yet if your problem cacher isn't one of the six, then you're punishing the innocent because you can't devise a technological solution to deal with the guilty.

For me that's honestly preferable to the rot perpetuated by the guilty.

If it results in dozens newcomers to game not having to suffer the abuse and confusion arising from trying to do the right thing and the only cost is that a handful of individuals with 1000+ hides can't carry on hiding more caches I'd class that as a profit rather than a loss.

[+barefootjeff]

10 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

For me that's honestly preferable to the rot perpetuated by the guilty.

If it results in dozens newcomers to game not having to suffer the abuse and confusion arising from trying to do the right thing and the only cost is that a handful of individuals with 1000+ hides can't carry on hiding more caches I'd class that as a profit rather than a loss.

And what if limiting it to 1000 doesn't stop the abuse? Lower the bar to 100? 10? What if someone with only one hide abuses people logging NMs on his precious cache?

[+Team Microdot]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

And what if limiting it to 1000 doesn't stop the abuse? Lower the bar to 100? 10? What if someone with only one hide abuses people logging NMs on his precious cache?

So many what ifs.

[+barefootjeff]

8 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

So many what ifs.

All I'm asking is whether the problem is the number of caches or just a few individuals with a bad attitude? The lady here I mentioned earlier who had over 250 caches I'm sure never abused anyone, so should she be limited to fix a problem in the UK?

[+Team Microdot]

12 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

All I'm asking is whether the problem is the number of caches or just a few individuals with a bad attitude? The lady here I mentioned earlier who had over 250 caches I'm sure never abused anyone, so should she be limited to fix a problem in the UK?

Please read the OP and show me where it refers to the lady you mentioned earlier with over 250 caches.

[+barefootjeff]

9 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Please read the OP and show me where it refers to the lady you mentioned earlier with over 250 caches.

I'm responding to your post that said:

Quote

No more than X caches per CO

Depending on what you need to set X to in order to solve your problem, it may well affect lots of other people.

[+Team Microdot]

15 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm responding to your post that said:

Depending on what you need to set X to in order to solve your problem, it may well affect lots of other people.

Which makes me wonder why you've dropped from X being 1000 to X being 250.

 

[+barefootjeff]

9 minutes ago, Team Microdot said:

Which makes me wonder why you've dropped from X being 1000 to X being 250.

 

Well, I did ask what X should be and you never said, so I have no idea what it would need to be to ban all the abusive cachers in your country. But if it's set at 1000 it'll only impact six of your compatriots. Are they all abusing people? Are any of those six abusing people?

Surely a better way of dealing with the problem is to just identify the abusers and deal with them individually, rather than impose some arbitrary limit on the whole planet.

[+Team Microdot]

13 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

Well, I did ask what X should be and you never said, so I have no idea what it would need to be to ban all the abusive cachers in your country. But if it's set at 1000 it'll only impact six of your compatriots. Are they all abusing people? Are any of those six abusing people?

Surely a better way of dealing with the problem is to just identify the abusers and deal with them individually, rather than impose some arbitrary limit on the whole planet.

Did you read the title of the thread?

We've gone back and forth from one extreme to the other, into areas which have nothing to do with the subject matter.

Small wonder so many threads on here descend into chaos.