Confused - What is motivation to post tracking codes in public?

[+Chipper3]

I bumped into the facebook trackables page and am confused.  Why do people publish their trackable WITH the log code?  

 

 

[+msrubble]

If it's the Facebook page that's been getting a lot of attention here and in the Geocoins forum recently, it is not the owners of the trackables who are posting the tracking numbers. It is some jerk who is running scripts to check every possible combination. If you know what set of characters some type of geocoin or trackable tag starts with, you can try a lot of possibilities to fill in the rest. If you get a hit on geocaching.com, voila, it's an existing trackable.

 

The people who use those codes to log travel bugs they have never seen are trying to run up the score. For them, it is not the point to move something physical from one geocache to another. The idea for them seems to be to find as many codes as they can that work.

[+hzoi]

7 hours ago, msrubble said:

The people who use those codes to log travel bugs they have never seen are trying to run up the score. For them, it is not the point to move something physical from one geocache to another. The idea for them seems to be to find as many codes as they can that work.

 

Yep.  And if they keep it up, they're going to get banned.  

[+frostengel]

Some cachers have lists of

- tracking codes of trackables they have seen at events

or even

- tracking codes they have seen on other lists.

Those lists are traded to get more numbers.

 

So even without someone trying any combination by brute force there may be many cachers discovering trackables they haven't seen.

There is no deeper purpose in that other than "the number game". Logging more trackables than others have logged. Why? I don't know....

 

In the beginning I was discovering many trackables (which I all had seen). Nowadays I use to take anyone with me helping it travel - that's the important part for the trackable. I only discover in rare situations, especially personal coins shown to me by the owners might get an exception as this is something special.

 

I hope if enough cachers complain about the group it will be closed by facebook. That might give a sign to new cachers who might think that this is the normal procedure! That's the most dangerous part I see in these groups. :-(

 

Best wishes

Jochen

[+arisoft]

25 minutes ago, frostengel said:

So even without someone trying any combination by brute force there may be many cachers discovering trackables they haven't seen.

There is no deeper purpose in that other than "the number game". Logging more trackables than others have logged. Why? I don't know....

 

There is a similar game with mystery caches. Final coordinates are shared to help other players to find caches they would not find otherwise. Why? I don't know....

[+IceColdUK]

1 hour ago, arisoft said:

 

There is a similar game with mystery caches. Final coordinates are shared to help other players to find caches they would not find otherwise. Why? I don't know....

 

As annoying as this, I sort of get it.  If you don’t have the time or motivation to solve puzzles, but you can’t bear to ignore local unfound caches, then I guess you might accept any ‘help’ you can get.  You’re still going out to find the cache, but you’ve completely missed the satisfaction of solving the puzzle.

 

But typing a TB number from a list into the website to +1 a discovery count?  Just seems so bizarre!

[+frostengel]

6 minutes ago, IceColdUK said:

As annoying as this, I sort of get it.  If you don’t have the time or motivation to solve puzzles, but you can’t bear to ignore local unfound caches, then I guess you might accept any ‘help’ you can get.

 

I can (partially) understand this for local caches - okay. But there were (Facebook) coordinate trading groups where people gathered coordinates from cache finals all over the world. That doesn't make any sense, does it? They gather 5000 coordinates and can only visit 5 of them in there life time?

 

If you do this for this one special cache you can't solve that might be useful (still not as useful as asking for help instead of coordinates, of course). This wouldn't have been such a problem then - the bigger the group the bigger the upset but in my eyes not a bigger win for the cheaters.

 

Probably they do it because they can. Pity but true!

[+IceColdUK]

15 minutes ago, frostengel said:

 

I can (partially) understand this for local caches - okay. But there were (Facebook) coordinate trading groups where people gathered coordinates from cache finals all over the world. That doesn't make any sense, does it? They gather 5000 coordinates and can only visit 5 of them in there life time?

Fair point.

 

I can see why an individual might be motivated to use such a list for specific caches they’d like to find.  However...

 

The motivation of those that build / add to the lists is more of a mystery.  I’m sure they must kid themselves that they’re acting altruistically, but I’d say the behaviour is pretty egotistical - look what I can do? 

[+L0ne.R]

Motivation=Leaderboards

 

5 hours ago, arisoft said:

There is a similar game with mystery caches. Final coordinates are shared to help other players to find caches they would not find otherwise. Why? I don't know....

 

In this case, often the added motivation is to qualify for challenges. 

Edited March 3, 2020 by L0ne.R

[+cerberus1]

To be fair, years ago it was normal for coin collectors to create "lists" of their coins, which included the coin's code.

This was much easier on the fingers than writing hundreds of coin codes over a weekend at  (oh, let's say...) a geocoinfest, when looking through a couple hundred members collections.

I had to use a hand truck to bring the other 2/3rds coins in, and we were lightweights compared to many.

Most we know put a mark near the coins they were interested in for the icon, not having anything to do with " +1 numbers".

Just yesterday a cacher who's followed me for some time finally found one of our unactivated signature coins I leave as swag. 

 - He's been after that icon for over ten years, and now even has a coin.   I could have let him Discover one at an event if I'd known...   

 

That's a big difference than these bullies ruining the trackable hobby for many...

 

 

[+MtnGoat50]

On 3/2/2020 at 5:09 PM, Chipper3 said:

I bumped into the facebook trackables page and am confused.  Why do people publish their trackable WITH the log code?  

Whatever the motivation, it doesn't seem to be working well for them.

 

I got a log on one of my long missing TBs this morning. When I looked at the players profile he was showing over 1300 TBs logged. A little later when I went to delete the log it was already gone and when I checked the profile it was showing 0 TBs and the account was "locked". (there is some justice in the world  )