Benchmarking now retired

[+Captain Bird's Eye]

I only recently found out about the retirement of Benchmarking as a Geocaching activity by Groundspeak, their stated rational as being that benchmarks are only found in the USA. This is entirely wrong and I wonder how much research was carried out before coming to this decision. For instance it is a fact that there are 500,000 ordnance survey benchmarks in the UK all mapped on https://interactivemaps.uk/os-benchmark-archive/#13.71/52.70769/1.5318 . The original topic is closed to further comments but I felt I had make this point.

Edited March 23 by Captain Bird's Eye

[+HHL]

45 minutes ago, Captain Bird's Eye said:

but I felt I had make this point.

Well done. But why twice?

[+MartyBartfast]

1 hour ago, Captain Bird's Eye said:

This is entirely wrong and I wonder how much research was carried out before coming to this decision.

Well yes and no. Other countries do have their variations of survey markers but benchmarks in the Geocaching sense were only available in the USA from the start by intent. I'm not sure why they restricted it to USA  but that's how the old YOSM virtual (https://coord.info/GC45CC) in the UK and it's equivalent in Canada came about in order that we could participate in benchmark hunting too.

Sadly the YOSMs were shut down by TPTB for spurious reasons which was a sad day IMO.

Sometimes it seems that some of the inventiveness, creativity and thinking outside the box which was present in the early days has been lost in the quest to attract the masses via the apps and a "one size fits all" mentality is emerging.
 

[Keystone]

I moved this thread from the General Geocaching Topics forum section.

[+cerberus1]

5 hours ago, MartyBartfast said:

Well yes and no. Other countries do have their variations of survey markers but benchmarks in the Geocaching sense were only available in the USA from the start by intent. I'm not sure why they restricted it to USA  but that's how the old YOSM virtual (https://coord.info/GC45CC) in the UK and it's equivalent in Canada came about in order that we could participate in benchmark hunting too.
Sadly the YOSMs were shut down by TPTB for spurious reasons which was a sad day IMO.
Sometimes it seems that some of the inventiveness, creativity and thinking outside the box which was present in the early days has been lost in the quest to attract the masses via the apps and a "one size fits all" mentality is emerging.

I'd imagine if Geocaching.com originated in the UK those in the US might have been thinking the same...   

Maybe things would have been different if Benchmarks in the US counted as a find like they did in the UK.

IIRC, it was multiple logging on the same cache page that created an issue, and Groundspeak corrected that.     Spurious...

[+MartyBartfast]

3 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

Spurious...

Well given that the YOSM caches were  established with the cooperation/support of Groundspeak, in particular Jeremy,  with the specific intention that they would be able to be logged with multiple finds, and then YOSM was shut down because it was a cache which was being logged with multiple finds then yes I think that  "spurious" fits...