I hear you and would have to comment that it is very frustrating. I know I have had situations with my own placed caches where people have commented that I should change the difficulty rating. I might do that in the first couple of months after placing, but after that, it would be what it is so that it does not potentially affect someone working on a D/T challenge. I do understand that a cache can look different on the D/T depending on the season (summer or winter or spring), however, I think the CO needs to take that into account when placing and decide how to rate the cache so as to not change it when transitioning from season to season…

“Grid fillers” being the key word here. I have no intentions of ever filling out a d/t grid or a calendar grid. I cache when I like or what d/t I like. If I have to wait for a certain day to fill a calendar grid or have to search for a certain d/t combo, then geocaching is no longer fun.

That’s the nice thing about geocaching. Everyone does it their own way. It doesn’t bother me if a CO changes the d/t rating on a cache I previously found.

Well, occasionally there are changes to the environment or the original container gets muggled and the D/T needs to be changed. That or the hider thought they should examine the D/T if it turned out to be harder than they originally anticipated.

I suspect that challenge caches are much more popular with hiders than finders. The reality is that most geocachers are VERY casual. The numbers I got from Groundspeak a few years ago was that the average member had found less than 20 caches, and the average premium member had found less than 100 caches. The medians are even lower as a few folks with lots of finds throws off the average. Most of these folks just want to go out and find a box in the woods.

The reality is that challenge caches are one of those topics that keeps coming up as “needing to be fixed”. For what it is worth, I’m one of the people defending challenge caches, as I think they are popular with the community and add to the game. Just know that sending complaints to groundspeak about people changing cache statistics, names or other minor issues will tend to drive the decisions the other way. (You can complain all you want in here!) As Gwen said, often these changes are due to changes in the cache and need to be made. Most of the time, people will be making caches easier (both D and T) to attract more finders. It is going to happen. To be safe, I suggest you just find 10 or more caches at each spot, then you won’t have to worry.

By the way, I know of at least one instance where a land manager was upset about someone placing a bunch of challenge caches on their property. Their problem was that they felt these sort of caches don’t attract enough people to the area, compared to “normal” caches. Of course, they really weren’t paying that kind of attention. Someone in the area complained when there was no more room for THEIR cache. The CO managed to negotiate with the land manager and keep half of the challenges from being archived.