That’s a great idea Steve.

Could a person vote for any cache, or would they be limited to winners of “cache of the month”?

I would think the choices should come from the pool of monthy winners.

If we create such an award, I think Cache of the Year honors should be limited to Cache of the Month winners. (And I’m not saying this because one of my caches won Cache of the Month.) Otherwise there’s no real difference between it and Cache of the Month. If all caches are eligible, it would simply be an additional “most favoritest cache” poll that just happens to occur at the end of the year.

Those who say they did not hunt most of the caches of the month raise a good point. However, there aren’t many people who HAVE hunted all or even most of the Caches of the Month. I too did not hunt most of the caches of the month, but I enjoyed reading about them. Of course, I only voted for caches that I had found. Applying that same qualification to cache of the year, we should each vote only for a cache that we had found. And that makes sense, because if a cache is named Cache of the Year it should be one that a significant number of people have found AND enjoyed enough to vote for it.

If we limit voting to the monthly winners, it will create a “buzz” about those caches that will encourage more people to hunt for them because they will want to be eligible to vote for their favorite when it comes time to vote for Cache of the Year. It’s sort of like the Oscars. Once a movie is nominated for best picture, lots of people go to see it.

Unlike Cache of the Month in which there are literally hundreds of caches to vote for each month, the field for Cache of the Year would would be narrowed to only 11 caches to vote for (we didn’t have a Cache of the Month for January) so it will take more votes to win. If we were to open up the voting to any cache in the state, it’s possible a cache could win with only 2 votes because cachers would once again split their votes among all caches in the state.

My 2 cents.

[This message has been edited by kbraband (edited 12-08-2002).]

I think we should limit it to COTM winners for the reasons mentioned above.

In a couple years, we can put together a cache of the Decade. This would be limited to cache of the year winners .

[This message has been edited by GrouseTales (edited 12-09-2002).]

Right now it doesn’t look like people are all that interested in Cache of the Year voting. As of this writing only 12 votes have been cast for 11 nominated caches. It’s a nice idea but it’s too bad that the winning cache for the whole year for the entire state may be elected with only 3 votes. Does anyone have ideas on how we could improve the contest?

It is difficult to vote for a cache of the year when one has only been to two or three of the nominated caches. I think, in order to make a fair choice, one should have been to more than three caches.

quote:

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Originally posted by rpaske:
It is difficult to vote for a cache of the year when one has only been to two or three of the nominated caches. I think, in order to make a fair choice, one should have been to more than three caches.

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I would certainly be interested in voting for COTY, but since the only one of the twelve that I have been to is my own, which I assume I am not allowed to vote for anyway, I am unable to vote.

While I do think the COTY is a great idea, I agree that a cache winning three votes to one, to one, to one, to one, to one, to one, to one, to one, is not as meaningful as it should be.

Here’s a question for the database admin: how many different people are actually voting for COTM from month to month? Is it the same half dozen or so each month, or do the voters change? Given the number of people that turn out at WGA events, one would think that there should be dozens of votes cast on a monthly basis, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps we need to figure out a way to make more of the Wisconsin cachers aware of and involved with the site.

For example, has anyone thought of putting out some sort of newsletter? It could be put out on a regular basis, perhaps a couple of times a month, and include information such as reminders to vote for COTM, or details of the next WGA event. Also with the data scraping from geocaching.com and Trudy & The Beast staying on top of milestones, that could be a feature as well.

Of course this would be worthless if there are only a half dozen people actually registered on the WGA site, so there also need to be a better way of putting out the word about the WGA than people just stumbling across the site by chance. I know TATB were sending out letters to people that found their caches which may be a bit much, but perhaps people could be send out a quick non-threatening non-form-letter type message saying something like “Thanks for finding my cache! Glad you enjoyed it! By the way, if you’re looking for more info on Geocaching in Wisconsin, you might want to head over to http://www.wi-geocaching.com/ for more info!”

Or something like that.

Of perhaps I’m way off base. Anyone have any other ideas?