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Adopting an unpublished Virtual Reward


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I'm wondering how many virtual rewards are currently unpublished? And I'm wondering how the pandemic affects this guideline: 

The cache owner must have visited the location and any additional waypoints in the previous two months before submitting the Virtual Cache for publication. Placements near the cache owner’s home coordinates are encouraged.

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I'll respond to your thread title to say that unpublished listings transfer through the adoption utility - www.geocaching.com/adopt/

Like other listing and trackable adoptions, this can only be initiated by the owner.  Unpublished is NOT a block to adoption (nor is it a block to dropping trackables).

 

Using search and asking for Virtual with placed date from 2019 forward I see 3,137.  I assume some are archived, and someone  changed the type to something else, as happened with the first batch ;-)  Anyway this suggests that there are around 800 unpublished.

 

 

 

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In our local FB group players with unpublished virtual caches are reporting that they are receiving multiple messages from people around the world asking to adopt them. 

How would somebody know who has an unpublished virtual? Would a reviewer have access to this information for instance? 

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3 minutes ago, Mermaid.Man said:

In our local FB group players with unpublished virtual caches are reporting that they are receiving multiple messages from people around the world asking to adopt them. 

How would somebody know who has an unpublished virtual? Would a reviewer have access to this information for instance? 

Good question! I would have no idea how to gather that information unless a geocacher themself announced on social media that they were granted a virtual reward. Even then I wouldn't know about it. 

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2 hours ago, Mermaid.Man said:

In our local FB group players with unpublished virtual caches are reporting that they are receiving multiple messages from people around the world asking to adopt them. 

How would somebody know who has an unpublished virtual? Would a reviewer have access to this information for instance? 

 

Someone locally here in Australia received such a request from someone in Portugal and it even included the GC code of his unpublished virtual. Since the virtuals were allocated in a contiguous block of GC codes, I'm assuming the Portugal person is going through that block and picking out any unpublished GC codes, but how are they then determining the owner?

Edited by barefootjeff
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I just wanted to write that these virtual caches can't be adopted but that has changed some days ago. That was totally new to me!

 

Quote

Can a Virtual Reward recipient give their reward to someone else?
No, Virtuals are still a legacy cache type. Therefore, adoptions are not possible.
As of April 2021, Virtual Reward recipients may adopt out their active published or unpublished Virtual Cache.

(see https://www.geocaching.com/blog/2019/05/introducing-virtual-rewards-2-0/)

 

I have to admit that I don't like the basic idea of adopting these out. As the interest seems to be very high I fear that some cachers will sell there reward to someone who wants to hide a new icon (for statistic purposes only).

 

If I remember correctly you had to apply to get a virtual reward from the 2.0 series (other as 1.0). So why do people apply if they don't want to publish the cache? That does not make sense to me. Or did they apply in hope that they could give it to others (in exchange for anything else)? That's possible by now and it will happen. :-(

 

In my eyes they should have taken those unpublished rewards (after the waiting time has expired) and make a new round for those with new applications.

 

Too bad I published my virtual in 2017 - I could get rich now. ;-))

 

Jochen

Edited by frostengel
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3 hours ago, frostengel said:

If I remember correctly you had to apply to get a virtual reward from the 2.0 series (other as 1.0). So why do people apply if they don't want to publish the cache? That does not make sense to me. Or did they apply in hope that they could give it to others (in exchange for anything else)? That's possible by now and it will happen. :-(

 

I can understand someone throwing their hat in the ring when the rewards were announced without really thinking through the implications of creating something worthy of the honour and then having to deal with all the logs from cachers who seem unable to follow even the simplest of logging requirements. I was one who applied at the time, with just a vague notion of where I might put it if I got one but, having seen the logging hassles some of my friends have had to deal with, I'm kind of glad now that I didn't get one.

 

One of the Rewards 1.0 virtuals I'd found, which was at a prominent tourist location, has since been archived by its owner because of the stress of having to deal with non-complaint logs where the logging requirement was simply to take a photo from GZ, not of yourself or of anything specific, it just had to be taken from that location. But no, that was too difficult, people would either submit a photo looking up at GZ from wherever they were standing or just not submit a photo at all.

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3 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

 

I can understand someone throwing their hat in the ring when the rewards were announced without really thinking through the implications of creating something worthy of the honour and then having to deal with all the logs from cachers who seem unable to follow even the simplest of logging requirements. I was one who applied at the time, with just a vague notion of where I might put it if I got one but, having seen the logging hassles some of my friends have had to deal with, I'm kind of glad now that I didn't get one.

 

One of the Rewards 1.0 virtuals I'd found, which was at a prominent tourist location, has since been archived by its owner because of the stress of having to deal with non-complaint logs where the logging requirement was simply to take a photo from GZ, not of yourself or of anything specific, it just had to be taken from that location. But no, that was too difficult, people would either submit a photo looking up at GZ from wherever they were standing or just not submit a photo at all.

I can certainly understand not wanting to deal with that frustration.

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I would LOVE to have virtual caches available when I travel to towns and other places that have NO caches. It seems no geocachers live in those remote places. They are wasted being used in places that already have caches.

For instance, it would be great to place one on the Normanton railway station and make it a SideTracked cache. The historic Gulflander train leaves from there. The nearest two caches (a traditional and an Earth cache) are 70kms away. The next nearest cache is 155kms away, and there's a big gap to the next cache after that too. It would be better if places like that got the Virtual cache, rather than a place where it would be just one of many other caches.

 

However, this suggestion of mine to want to place a Virtual cache in remote, cache-less places like that is academic at present, because I am a carer and stuck at home. But in a year or two when I am free again, that's what I would like to do. Travelling geocachers would then find a cache when visiting those places, and who knows, it might even introduce some locals to geocaching, who would then place some other caches.

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6 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I can understand someone throwing their hat in the ring when the rewards were announced without really thinking through the implications of creating something worthy of the honour and then having to deal with all the logs from cachers who seem unable to follow even the simplest of logging requirements.

 

Funny enough I have a virtual with not so simple requirements (*) and I have gotton more than 100 regular found its and very little wrong logs.

I had three or four cachers taking a photograph at the starting coordinates and that's it. Some of them deleted their logs as soon as I contacted them, others didn't react and I deleted their logs by myself. No problem so far.

 

So perhaps it is not about the easyness of the requirements but about the details. If you only have to take one picture (easy) but there is one detail to have (easy, too?) that's where the problems begin. In this case it might be harder to convince the cachers that they don't fulfill the requirements ("But I have taken the photo as requested?" Nope....).

 

An example is this one: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC7B7MR_weilburger-schiffstunnel

The task is simple: just take a picture in the ships tunnel. In the tunnel you have to wear a life jacket (official rule!) so obviously pictures without life jacket are forbidden. Some people don't care for the official rules and want there picture accepted without (though it is written clearly in the listing). I remember the owner wasn't very pleased with the logs in the beginning and I hope for him that the situation has improved.

 

Jochen

 

(*) It is a guiding tour of about 15 kilometres with 26 questions to answer - almost no coordinates given, finding the path by description.

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