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Caching Culture Changes?


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3 hours ago, Dame Deco said:

as well as empty ammo cans with nothing but a log.

 

I don't put swag in my higher terrain-rated caches as they're meant to be adult hiking adventures to places of hopefully awe-inspiring natural beauty, not toy swap-shops for kids. Two are in national parks where caches aren't allowed to have anything in them apart from an information card, logbook, pen/pencil and a pencil-sharpener. There are plenty of kid-friendly caches about for those who prefer that sort of thing.

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1 hour ago, barefootjeff said:

 

I don't put swag in my higher terrain-rated caches as they're meant to be adult hiking adventures to places of hopefully awe-inspiring natural beauty, not toy swap-shops for kids. Two are in national parks where caches aren't allowed to have anything in them apart from an information card, logbook, pen/pencil and a pencil-sharpener. There are plenty of kid-friendly caches about for those who prefer that sort of thing.

But not all trinkets are meant for kids necessarily. I have been putting jewellery in them, and not all of it is junk; in some cases, definitely not junk. It's jewellery that adults would wear.

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9 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

Containers != culture.  Not even close.  The biggest change I have seen is the emergence of unending complaints about cache quality.  On average, container quality today is far superior to what I encountered when I started caching in 2002. 

In 2002, cache container quality was terrible. Trash bags as cache containers were not unusual.  One of the first ammo cans I ever encountered was the APE cache I found in Georgia; before that, I had found all sorts of plastic containers that were already cracked and broken. In my first year caching, I found glass jars, ziplock bags with no container, black trash can liners (as mentioned above), poor-quality tupperware, etc.   Lamp-post hides had not been invented yet.  Film canisters were common and considered micros.

Seriously, people, the fantasy peddled by some here of a time when cache containers were all in perfect shape and the swag was wonderful are completely fictional.  It has never been that way.

The biggest cultural change is the now-ubiquitous sense of entitlement; that we are owed cache containers that are in pristine condition and filled with high-value swag, with instantanous maintenance response by the owners to our smallest requests.

 

Wow.   

"Cache quality" was enough of an issue that a survey  was done on it.  "Container" was thought by many to be the issue.

As you can see, container was only a small portion...

We've seen our fair share of cookie tins wrapped in black trash bags, real tupperware,  metal coffee cans, and film cans,  so we're not one of the "peddlers" you're speaking of.

In our "late start" in the hobby we saw containers were getting better though.  Most got better simply because the newer people stuck around afterwards.  

Many older caches in our area were placed by people that left the game shortly after.  Similar to many today actually... 

 

 

 

Edited by cerberus1
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2 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

 

Wow.   

"Cache quality" was enough of an issue that a survey  was done on it.  "Container" was thought by many to be the issue.

As you can see, container was only a small portion...

We've seen our fair share of cookie tins wrapped in black trash bags, real tupperware,  metal coffee cans, and film cans,  so we're not one of the "peddlers" you're speaking of.

In our "late start" in the hobby we saw containers were getting better though.  Most got better simply because the newer people stuck around afterwards.  

Many older caches in our area were placed by people that left the game shortly after.  Similar to many today actually... 

 

 

 

Well it's now been a FULL YEAR since they released those results and I don't see anything that Groundspeak implemented...

 

Have we done that survey about how caching culture should change for the better 2 yrs ago for nothing????

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3 hours ago, Lynx Humble said:

Well it's now been a FULL YEAR since they released those results and I don't see anything that Groundspeak implemented...

 

Could it be that Groundspeak would like to see more of it's members attempt some changes first ?     :) 

"As noted when the survey was conducted, we can’t guarantee implementation of all these ideas.  But these results give us a much clearer picture of the community’s feelings about cache quality.  Your feedback will help us prioritize projects and greatly inform our work in general.

The survey results also show how geocachers can directly improve quality, both as finders and hiders of geocaches."  seems to say so.

Do people really want more "rules" ?

          In that survey for example, there's been a few newsletters on placing more action logs (DNF, NM, NA), and seems like a good place to start.

 - But we saw long-time "high count" PMs logging a nano top as found.   They didn't learn anything...   It was finally NM, and I NA it. 

By logs, there's a dozen caches in that area that needed maintenance, no action logs, and after I NA one cache not even there, the "co" archived the rest instead, and left them there... if they were even still there ...

Maintenance was another example from the survey...

          By a couple popular threads, logging caches and trackables not even seen is becoming a nuisance for some, so possible I guess they wonder whether it would make any difference, when some are still continuing nonsense like this.    

 

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8 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

Wow.   

"Cache quality" was enough of an issue that a survey  was done on it.  "Container" was thought by many to be the issue.

 

I really shouldn't have to do this, but:

 

My contention (and the data support it) is that the "cache quality" issue that HQ addressed was not because of an actual decline in cache quality, but a result of an increase in complaints about cache quality.

 

And that increase in complaints is a result of a change in the culture towards an entitlement mindset.

 

This cultural change is the result of two effects coming together. 

 

The first effect is a cognitive bias; people incorrectly associate reality about the past with how you remember feeling about things in the past. It is known as rosy retrospection , and it is a well-known and well-studied effect. When we were new to geocaching, everything was exciting and new and wonderful.  As we find more and more caches, we begin to notice the problems and become more dissatisfied.  It's a natural human progression, and there is nothing wrong with that.  It's when we remember how we felt at the beginning and decide that things really were better that the cognitive bias kicks in. Unacknowledged rosy retrospection leads to declinism, a belief that things are getting worse and worse.  Both cognitive biases are rampant in these forums.

 

The second effect is the result of the growth of geocaching.  Early on, it was a small activity of enthusiasts with low expectations. People were happy to find anything in the woods -- the idea of using a GPS was new and exciting. Geocaching was not a well-established company and was just trying to find its way.  Fast-forward to the 2010s, and geocaching became an app for smartphones.  New members were much more likely to view themselves as consumers of a product than as participants in a community, and consumers feel entitled to a certain level of quality.

 

My contention is very clear here:  I have never seen evidence of any actual decline in cache quality.  What has happened is a noticeable increase in dissatisfaction with cache quality.  Claims that caches were better in the past have never been backed up with real supporting data.  An increase of complaints about cache quality does not necessarily reflect an actual decline in quality, but rather a perceived decline.

 

So please -- if you want to argue that there has been an real, as opposed to perceived, decline in cache quality, please provide some evidence.  Sorry, but qualitative anecdotal evidence, such as "when I first started caching the containers and maintenance were better" does not count because of the cognitive biases presented above. Responses by Groundspeak to customer concerns likewise do not count, as also explained above.

 

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OBTW:  you may consider that my requirements for evidence in the post above are impossible to meet.  They are not.  

 

Here are some good, concrete examples.  The fraction of geocaches listed as "micro" size is much larger now than it was in the early 2000s.  The average volume of a cache listed as a "micro" has likewise decreased.  The average distance from caches to the nearest road has probably decreased, as has the distance to the nearest urban area.  All of these measures are objective data that could be used to argue something about cache quality. 

 

Unfortunately, in my opinion, some of these changes are results instead of causes of the perceived decline in cache quality, but that's another discussion.

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1 hour ago, fizzymagic said:

Here are some good, concrete examples.  The fraction of geocaches listed as "micro" size is much larger now than it was in the early 2000s.  The average volume of a cache listed as a "micro" has likewise decreased.  The average distance from caches to the nearest road has probably decreased, as has the distance to the nearest urban area.  All of these measures are objective data that could be used to argue something about cache quality. 

 

Some concrete statistics for my region (New South Wales Central Coast), courtesy of Project GC:

 

           Year hidden          #Caches             #Micro              #Small            #Regular             #Large

  • 2000-2004                48                     3 (6%)               1 (2%)             31 (65%)             5 (10%)
  • 2005-2009               257                  47 (18%)         106 (41%)         89 (35%)              7 (3%)
  • 2010-1014               646                 254 (39%)        284 (44%)         70 (11%)              5 (1%)
  • 2015-present          429                 147 (34%)        154 (36%)          94 (22%)              3 (1%)

This region is a mix of urban areas (Gosford city, Wyong shire and suburbs), rural areas and bushland, with the urban hides dominating to the north, the rural hides to the west and the bushland hides to the south where I live. Note that micros have never been the dominant cache size and have actually declined both in total number and percentage in the last five years.

 

The early years were dominated by a handful of players whose hides were mostly in bushland and whose containers of choice were ammo cans or regular-sized plastic screw-top tubes like this one:

 

RegularContainer.jpg.5c2e67bb83a09af142a19aacceffe258.jpg

 

The stats for 2010-2014 are no doubt skewed by one prolific hider who put out several hundred predominantly smalls and micros along the rural back roads. 2015-present may well have been dominated by me with my mixture of smalls and regulars. These are the top hiders here for that date range:

 

image.png.81d52c005bd498f8f62299ec38bd9ddd.png

 

The 40 by MV were part of the geoart series for the 2018 mega and the 37 by ALL7 were her final hides before she archived them all and moved away.

 

So yes, caching culture here has changed a lot over the years, but that's been dominated by a small number of players and their preferred hiding styles rather than any community-wide trends.

 

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1 hour ago, Goldenwattle said:

I call that a small. The opening for starters limits what can be placed in it.

 

The photo doesn't do it justice as the logbook is a lot closer to the camera than the container is. They are about 10cm in diameter, measuring it against my kakak where it was sitting:

 

20200517_141342.jpg.ea618e1c5177fc3f4206b0f651478e1c.jpg

 

  The height would be about 25cm, going from memory, giving a volume of about 2 litres. How is that a small when it's double the minimum volume for a regular?

Edited by barefootjeff
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2 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

 

The photo doesn't do it justice as the logbook is a lot closer to the camera than the container is. They are about 10cm in diameter, measuring it against my kakak where it was sitting:

 

20200517_141342.jpg.ea618e1c5177fc3f4206b0f651478e1c.jpg

 

  The height would be about 25cm, going from memory, giving a volume of about 2 litres. How is that a small when it's double the minimum volume for a regular?

I was looking at the white cache, that holds the log I would guess and any other items. That appears to be the actual cache; the rest that until now I hadn't noticed, does not appear to be the cache proper. The outer layer I guess is not waterproof and can't be used as is as a cache, or why the white container? Maybe it should be listed as an 'Other'.

I have a spider cache where the spider is bigger than my hand, but that doesn't count, as the bit that holds the log is an internal bison tube in the spider. Outside it's small sized, but the internal space that holds the log is only micro sized. It is neither a small or a micro, so I rate it as an 'Other'.

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2 hours ago, Goldenwattle said:

I was looking at the white cache, that holds the log I would guess and any other items. That appears to be the actual cache; the rest that until now I hadn't noticed, does not appear to be the cache proper. The outer layer I guess is not waterproof and can't be used as is as a cache, or why the white container? Maybe it should be listed as an 'Other'.

I have a spider cache where the spider is bigger than my hand, but that doesn't count, as the bit that holds the log is an internal bison tube in the spider. Outside it's small sized, but the internal space that holds the log is only micro sized. It is neither a small or a micro, so I rate it as an 'Other'.

 

The thing I'm holding is just the logbook. The container is the white cylinder sitting on the floor of the kayak. It has a screw-on lid which isn't in the photo. You can just see the end of a blue pen sitting inside it. The perspectives are all wrong because the logbook is right up against the camera whereas the container is between my legs. The horizontal white bar isn't part of the cache, it's my paddle. Here's the uncropped original photo which might make it a bit clearer.

 

Uncropped.jpg.6cf64ca4f8e6727fd09a370014427229.jpg

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, barefootjeff said:

 

The thing I'm holding is just the logbook. The container is the white cylinder sitting on the floor of the kayak. It has a screw-on lid which isn't in the photo. You can just see the end of a blue pen sitting inside it. The perspectives are all wrong because the logbook is right up against the camera whereas the container is between my legs. The horizontal white bar isn't part of the cache, it's my paddle. Here's the uncropped original photo which might make it a bit clearer.

 

Uncropped.jpg.6cf64ca4f8e6727fd09a370014427229.jpg

 

 

 

 

Okay, now I understand, and I have now seen the person in the other photograph which I hadn't before I wrote my reply. If that was my cache I would mark it as a small. Function is how I judge them, and it would not hold what I consider a regular should, but would hold what a small would. I don't like the strictly literal measurement of 1 litre and above being a regular, as a long skinny pipe could then also be classified as a regular, even though little would fit in it beyond a rolled up log.

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On 5/11/2020 at 12:37 PM, brodiebunch said:

"Trade fairly or don't trade at all" is a mantra I have heard since the beginning.

 

 

Yep.  I rarely trade.  It's just a part of the game in which I don't want to be bothered.  However, if I do trade I almost always trade up and over-trade to be safe.  I don't have Bob Barker giving me the retail value of everything in a container to allow me to trade "evenly."

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On 5/11/2020 at 5:48 PM, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot said:

It actually took a level of dedication just to find your first cache.

I understand your sentiment here.  However, my first find was by looking at the aerial image of the cemetery a mile from my house.  Then, I drove over and found it.  No GPSr.  Saw the website, looked at the map, made a mental note of the landmarks and found it.  Still do this frequently.

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1 hour ago, TerraViators said:

I understand your sentiment here.  However, my first find was by looking at the aerial image of the cemetery a mile from my house.  Then, I drove over and found it.  No GPSr.  Saw the website, looked at the map, made a mental note of the landmarks and found it.  Still do this frequently.

This is how I found my first several hundred caches, other than the 4 I found with a group as a friend introduced us all to geocaching. But there's a certain dedication required to find caches that way; you aren't just opening an app and following it to GZ. And most people knew something about geocaching before finding their fist cache, either reading about it on the web site, or being introduced to it by a more experienced geocacher. No one just installed an app and followed it to GZ.

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On 5/11/2020 at 10:00 PM, barefootjeff said:

 

No, the Help Centre says 100ml to 1 litre is a small and 1 litre to 20 litres is a regular. Ammo cans and shoe boxes are a fair bit bigger than 1 litre (10cm x 10cm x 10cm or variations thereof). This is a 1 litre Sistema, which I'd list as a regular, but clearly my foot wouldn't fit in it, let alone a couple of shoes.

 

20200512_130322.jpg.64c0f13e6fbe7ddf89925cb5d95ae239.jpg

 

It should be a crime to post pictures of bare feet ANYWHERE on the internet.

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13 minutes ago, bflentje said:
15 minutes ago, niraD said:

My point exactly.

 

:wacko:

 

I thought it was obvious that the photos of those feet wearing those shoes were much more hideous than barefootjeff's photo of his foot. Apparently I was wrong...

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On 5/16/2020 at 8:30 AM, cerberus1 said:

"Cache quality" was enough of an issue that a survey  was done on it.

In addition to fizzymagic's point about this survey only showing the popular but unreliable myth of lowering cache quality rather than in any way proving that caches are actually low quality, I'll also add that, in my humble opinion, the survey was -- unintentionally one hopes -- designed to get that result. As a long time holder of the position fizzymagic so eloquently expresses, I found it hard to answer that survey in a way that even remotely allowed me to display my positive opinion about the trends in cache quality. There was literally no way to say that GS shouldn't try to "fix" anything, only a section that allowed them to determine what priority to give the various things they'd already decided to do.

 

1 hour ago, niraD said:

If you say so...

That foot was ugly, no doubt about it, but that's OK, it was just a foot. Your post was a crime. I can never unsee those "shoes".

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On 5/15/2020 at 11:16 PM, fizzymagic said:

In 2002, cache container quality was terrible. Trash bags as cache containers were not unusual.  One of the first ammo cans I ever encountered was the APE cache I found in Georgia; before that, I had found all sorts of plastic containers that were already cracked and broken. In my first year caching, I found glass jars, ziplock bags with no container, black trash can liners (as mentioned above), poor-quality tupperware, etc.   Lamp-post hides had not been invented yet.  Film canisters were common and considered micros.

 

Seriously, people, the fantasy peddled by some here of a time when cache containers were all in perfect shape and the swag was wonderful are completely fictional.  It has never been that way.

 

I can confirm this; cachers back then, even more experienced ones, just didn't have a sense of what would survive in the elements. My very first find, in 2002, was a yogurt container taped to a tree. It was a few weeks old and the lid was already cracked. Plastic bags for logbooks were rare, even in inherently leaky containers like Altoid tins. Cheap generic tupperware and repurposed food containers of all kinds were prevalent. Once I found a cache made from plastic VHS tape box that was too warped to close. "Another lame micro in the woods" was a meme by 2005 at the latest. Swag was more common, yes, and 95% of the time it was stuff like McDonald's toys, business cards, pennies, and assorted dollar store crap.

 

The quality issues today are different. They aren't notably worse.

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On 5/16/2020 at 3:18 AM, barefootjeff said:

 

I don't put swag in my higher terrain-rated caches as they're meant to be adult hiking adventures to places of hopefully awe-inspiring natural beauty, not toy swap-shops for kids. Two are in national parks where caches aren't allowed to have anything in them apart from an information card, logbook, pen/pencil and a pencil-sharpener. There are plenty of kid-friendly caches about for those who prefer that sort of thing.

 

Why bother with ammo cans, then?  Or do you?  If you're saying that your higher terrains are smalls and micros, that's fine.  But you're kind of misrepresenting the point of my post which is simply to say that an ammo can doesn't guarantee anything about the cache--didn't back then, doesn't now.

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21 hours ago, dprovan said:

in my humble opinion, the survey was -- unintentionally one hopes -- designed to get that result.

To be fair though, I believe the survey was always billed as polling for "how to improve cache quality", not "is there a problem with cache quality"... IIRC.

 

Of course, that doesn't change that this is true:

21 hours ago, dprovan said:

There was literally no way to say that GS shouldn't try to "fix" anything, only a section that allowed them to determine what priority to give the various things they'd already decided to do.

 

But, if their only intent was to find a way to improve cache quality, is that a Bad Thing? (Without inserting the opinion that nothing should be changed because nothing is wrong)
I think it's always a good thing to merely look for ways to improve. Then again if the only options are changing things in a manner someone thinks is an improvement and others think is not, that's a different question... Don't vote for those options :P  

 

Again, I think the whole intent of the survey was to see what people think can be done to improve the game. That does imply that some people will think there are areas that are 'bad' and need 'fixing' - but improving can be done by fixing or just, well, improving. But we all know you can't please everyone -

There are people who think there are problems that need fixing who won't be satisfied.

There are people who think nothing is wrong or should be changed.

There are people who think nothing is wrong but there's always room for improving.

Good luck HQ, trying to find a course of action that upsets the fewest people :laughing:

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27 minutes ago, Dame Deco said:

Why bother with ammo cans, then?

I had to stop and consider whether you were seriously asking this question since the answer seems obvious to me. I can't speak for the person you were asking, but my opinion is that people bother with ammo cans because they're fun. They provide entirely different hide and seek characteristics. As the game has gotten away from the whole concept of caches being caches in the traditional meaning of the word, what can be put inside the container has become unimportant, but that doesn't nullify the value in the different experience of a finding a larger container. You might as well ask why anyone bothers to hide anything except uncamoed bison tubes.

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6 minutes ago, thebruce0 said:

To be fair though, I believe the survey was always billed as polling for "how to improve cache quality", not "is there a problem with cache quality"... IIRC.

Exactly my point. The survey assumed there was a problem that had to be fixed and presented possible courses of action as all being implicitly positive. The attitude was that it couldn't get any worse, so we didn't have to worry about side effects. Yet every solution they offered for checking had negative consequences that, in my opinion, were hard to justify even if for someone that agreed there was a problem. Anyone like me that denied there was a problem to begin with were barred from the discussion.

 

12 minutes ago, thebruce0 said:

Again, I think the whole intent of the survey was to see what people think can be done to improve the game. That does imply that some people will think there are areas that are 'bad' and need 'fixing' - but improving can be done by fixing or just, well, improving. But we all know you can't please everyone -

I'm sure their hearts were in the right place, but really the best way you can possible spin it is that they were trying to improve the game for seekers. The entire survey implicitly put the blame and the burdens on hiders. The underlying philosophy was that it makes sense for GS to force global standards on every CO everywhere instead of letting local communities decide what's best for them. They imagined themselves raising the bar for everyone, but what they actually did was drive the game towards the lowest common denominator.

 

19 minutes ago, thebruce0 said:

There are people who think there are problems that need fixing who won't be satisfied.

In my opinion, these are the people GS listened to: they tried to please the people that complain the loudest and will never be satisfied. To actually improve the game, you have to look at all sides of a change. Instead, they declared a problem, and any change aimed at reducing the problem was accepted without thinking about whether it would actually solve the problem, let alone considering whether the perceived advantage was worth the negative consequences.

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20 minutes ago, dprovan said:
1 hour ago, thebruce0 said:

To be fair though, I believe the survey was always billed as polling for "how to improve cache quality", not "is there a problem with cache quality"... IIRC.

Exactly my point. The survey assumed there was a problem that had to be fixed and presented possible courses of action as all being implicitly positive.

Nah, you missed my point :P I said I don't believe the survey was saying "there is a problem that needs fixing" but was rather "how can we improve quality". There is a difference... but it is easy to infer that there's an underlying motivation, as we know there are plenty of complaints about cache quality on a granular scale.  So I don't think the survey "assume there was a problem" at least as it was presented. But anyone coming to the survey could project problems they've seen to any number of questions and think "this question is about fixing this problem" when the question was really "how can we make this better". I think HQ was very careful not to imply there was a problem with any particular aspect.

But it's been a while since I reviewed the content of that survey, heh

 

23 minutes ago, dprovan said:

I'm sure their hearts were in the right place

I'm absolutely confident this is the case.

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1 hour ago, dprovan said:

I had to stop and consider whether you were seriously asking this question since the answer seems obvious to me. I can't speak for the person you were asking, but my opinion is that people bother with ammo cans because they're fun. They provide entirely different hide and seek characteristics. As the game has gotten away from the whole concept of caches being caches in the traditional meaning of the word, what can be put inside the container has become unimportant, but that doesn't nullify the value in the different experience of a finding a larger container. You might as well ask why anyone bothers to hide anything except uncamoed bison tubes.

 

I agree with you 100%!  I should have done the multi-quote thing--I was responding to someone who quoted me, etc.--the person seemed to imply that ammo cans were for kids only, etc.  I love larger containers and wish everything in the woods was an ammo can!  There's nothing like opening up an ammo can in the woods and seeing what's inside--

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8 hours ago, Dame Deco said:

 

I agree with you 100%!  I should have done the multi-quote thing--I was responding to someone who quoted me, etc.--the person seemed to imply that ammo cans were for kids only, etc.  I love larger containers and wish everything in the woods was an ammo can!  There's nothing like opening up an ammo can in the woods and seeing what's inside--

 

Absolutely agree. It adds another layer of fun and anticipation. I've found some very interesting things in caches. I've also had fun for a couple of years by collecting those plastic animals. I had no use for them (except I used a few for some craft/art projects),  but it added to the fun. How many different animals could I collect? Will the next box have an animal I didn't currently have. 

 

image_11654379995_o.thumb.jpg.65e57558ac038e0d3275356d12c4a2b6.jpg

Edited by L0ne.R
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6 hours ago, Dame Deco said:

 

Why bother with ammo cans, then?  Or do you?  If you're saying that your higher terrains are smalls and micros, that's fine.  But you're kind of misrepresenting the point of my post which is simply to say that an ammo can doesn't guarantee anything about the cache--didn't back then, doesn't now.

 

One of the caches I adopted is a genuine steel ammo can, one of my hides is a plastic one, but most of my other regular-sized containers are steel cash boxes, the larger Sistemas or some other container themed to the cache such as the stainless steel cooking pot I used for the Slow-Cooked Aussie Challenge (GC752YF).

 

CacheAndContents.jpg.fa42f7b558b6be51c4a9ed91b7cc19ef.jpg

 

My container sizes are largely dictated by the size of the hiding place, which is usually a hollow space in a cave or rocky outcrop. A larger container makes it easier to find, and since many of my hides are a challenging hike that can take at least a couple of hours to complete, I don't want people looking for a needle in a haystack at GZ. It also means I can use a good-sized logbook, preferably A6 or even A5, so it'll never get full even if people write detailed logs in it (which some still do here).

 

With the exception of the national parks caches where only the information card, logbook, pencil and sharper is allowed, if anyone wants to add swag that's fine, and sometimes people do, but the only "swag" I put in them is something themed to the cache like the gold coins in the centre photo, which cachers are welcome to sample as a souvenir of the cache without swapping anything for it.

Edited by barefootjeff
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6 hours ago, L0ne.R said:

 

Absolutely agree. It adds another layer of fun and anticipation. I've found some very interesting things in caches. I've also had fun for a couple of years by collecting those plastic animals. I had no use for them (except I used a few for some craft/art projects),  but it added to the fun. How many different animals could I collect? Will the next box have an animal I don't currently have. 

 

 

 

A few years ago, a I had a HUGE rubber ducky collection that I got from caches!  Now it helped that we had a local cacher who liked to leave rubber ducks!  But I found them all across the US, too.  It was a lot of fun being on the look out for them.

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22 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

Nah, you missed my point :P I said I don't believe the survey was saying "there is a problem that needs fixing" but was rather "how can we improve quality".

I can understand why you might imagine that's the way it was, but it wasn't. I'm not imagining or implying what the motives of the people designing the survey. Indeed, I doubt those were the motives. I'm just telling you how the survey worked in practice. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the survey to express, "the way you can best improve quality is to not implement any of the suggested plans which will do nothing but reduce quality, at least in the way people like me measure quality," and there was simply no way to do that.

 

22 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

But anyone coming to the survey could project problems they've seen to any number of questions and think "this question is about fixing this problem" when the question was really "how can we make this better".

Sorry, that's really not true. Most of the check boxes simply made no sense except to fix specific problems that people commonly complain about but are, in global terms, infrequent.

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22 hours ago, dprovan said:
On 5/19/2020 at 12:49 PM, thebruce0 said:

Nah, you missed my point :P I said I don't believe the survey was saying "there is a problem that needs fixing" but was rather "how can we improve quality".

I can understand why you might imagine that's the way it was, but it wasn't. I'm not imagining or implying what the motives of the people designing the survey. Indeed, I doubt those were the motives. I'm just telling you how the survey worked in practice. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the survey to express, "the way you can best improve quality is to not implement any of the suggested plans which will do nothing but reduce quality, at least in the way people like me measure quality," and there was simply no way to do that.

 

On 5/19/2020 at 12:49 PM, thebruce0 said:

But anyone coming to the survey could project problems they've seen to any number of questions and think "this question is about fixing this problem" when the question was really "how can we make this better".

Sorry, that's really not true. Most of the check boxes simply made no sense except to fix specific problems that people commonly complain about but are, in global terms, infrequent.

 

Yes, much of what you are saying was by inference.  As I said, one can read "How can we improve this part of geocaching?" as "Some believe this is a problem that needs fixing, so how can we fix it?"

Clearly the latter doesn't give an option for "Do you think this needs fixing?" -- I'm not saying whether the inference is right or wrong, only that the implication was not "We want to fix things" but "We want to improve things".

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17 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

Yes, much of what you are saying was by inference.  As I said, one can read "How can we improve this part of geocaching?" as "Some believe this is a problem that needs fixing, so how can we fix it?"

Clearly the latter doesn't give an option for "Do you think this needs fixing?" -- I'm not saying whether the inference is right or wrong, only that the implication was not "We want to fix things" but "We want to improve things".

You're talking about how an impartial survey should be written. I'm talking about how this specific survey was written. When you agree with a survey's bias, it's hard to notice that the questions are one sided.

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