Regarding challenges

[+Cappa-d]

I recently got more into challenges and thought about creating an own one. As the rules are quite tight regarding challenges, I asked a reviewer beforehand and simply got the feedback "Nope, not possible".

 

Going through the rules I guess he is referring to the part:

 

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• 
  Challenges based on words or letters. Examples: use the first letter of regions of found caches to spell a word, find caches with attributes that begin with a certain letter, find caches in counties with the same name. (Added July 2021)

 

I would like to understand why it is forbidden to have a challenge using starting letters of a cache title or the starting letter of the name of an owner (Note: I think you can change your own name never or only once)

 

My original idea for the challenge was to ask for: complete your ABC soup for at least 6 of 9 categories (categories would be: Webcam, Virtual, Tradi, Myst, Multi, EC, WIG, LBH, Events, Owners) and to have just the first letter in use for each category.

 

To be honest I am not a wide and far travelling cacher, but I complete 6 of those 9 categories within 10 years of caching and the majority of the caches found in my country.

 

Could someone enlighten me why there was a ban on that?

 

Regards Cappa-d

Edited January 21, 2023 by Cappa-d

[+peter-tvm]

From the begging it was only cache names that was excluded. Ont reason for that was probably that caches and events with ridiculous names started to get published. 

For example: Mama coffee red lunch car leg water lily Weronica Adam

And this was for cachers to be able to use the same cache to fulfil several different challenges with themes like food, transportation, colour, names.

 

Why regions and attributes was added later I'm uncertain of. 

 

 

[+peter-tvm]

The name seen on the cache page can be changed to anything. So instead of the real owners nickname it could be changed to "Weronica had a red car for lunch" for example 

[+Cappa-d]

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The name seen on the cache page can be changed to anything. So instead of the real owners nickname it could be changed to "Weronica had a red car for lunch" for example 

 

Well ok, I was referring to the original owners nickname and not to any fantasy thing. As well the idea was first word first letter per cache that's it. Did not realize that such strange titles where used.. well at least in my area  that is

Pretty much straight forward I thought.

 

As changing the size of a container e.g. is possible any time and pretty much screws up your 366 large / micro / whatever matrix anyway. And you can do jack about it...

Edited January 21, 2023 by Cappa-d

[+Hügh]

3 hours ago, Cappa-d said:

think you can change your own name never or only once

 

No, you can change your name as many times as you want.

 

However, using that field is also prohibited because, given a challenge like "find 10 caches hidden by X" can become impossible if (1) X chooses to hide only impossible-to-find hides, or (2) X archives some of their hides, etc.

 

3 hours ago, Cappa-d said:

would like to understand why it is forbidden to have a challenge using starting letters of a cache title

 

This is because the first letter of the cache title is, in my view... a meaningless property.

 

For example, “fill your D/T grid” requires, well, filling your grid D/T grid (finding a 1/1, finding a 5/5, and everything in between). "Find 10 caches with the 'Swimming' attributes" requires you to... actually go swimming! But "find 10 caches starting with the letter X" could be... anything. A cache owner can set the title to literally anything*. In my eyes, it's not really a Geocaching challenge.

 

Granted, you can say the same thing about D/T ratings, attributes. But if you try to list a 1/1 LPC as a 5/5 with the scuba and climbing gear attributes, your Reviewer will (hopefully) question you on it.

[+thebruce0]

Text-based challenges typically fell under the "bookkeeping" category as well.  Big spectrum of difficulty, but people didn't like having to research and keep their own records of matches and the extra effort needed to find qualifiers, etc.  They just cut out anything text-based; rather, also in making it all statistics-based, text challenges were an easy cut.