Personally, I wouldn’t post a “needs maintenance” if I hadn’t been out there myself.  I suppose maybe if there were many DNF’s, but not one.  You never know, the last person could have been searching at night, or entered coordinates in manually and made a mistake.  But this is just how I feel about it, not sure that it’s right.

I guess there is no easy answer to this. There are a lot of factors that go into it. If I dnf a cache and I know that the CO is one who keeps up on his caches, I’ll just post the DNF. If it is a CO who has a history of ignoring caches, then I might post a Needs Maint.

If you post a Needs Archive log on those mystery caches where they are no longer findable due to archived components, they will be managed.

Team Northwoods wrote:

I posted this in the Lonely Cache Game Suggestions too but it overlaps. I am not sure if everyone looks at all the forums so here it is. Here is something I found and curious about. I there anything we can do about caches like this GC22DMD ? Here is from the cache description This cache is the FINAL for the 4 “Teamed Up v.2″ caches that must be found to obtain clues that will lead you to the final cache. Ok fine but one of the caches needed is GC23Y55 . Now this cache is archived and no longer available. Cache GC22DMD and GC23Y5R would not be able to be found? Sound like a great cache and then a multi at the end but shouldn’t GC22DMD be archived or at least put under owner maintenance for them to fix it up the cache page in a timely manner if some of the stages are gone? Could I post a needs maintenance log from here without ever trying for it because a stage is gone?

What that cache needs is really a new write-up. The CO “Teamed Up” with another CO when they created that series. The other CO archived all of his caches, so the CO of this cache changed it to a straight-up multi. There is a contained at the posted coords with the coords to the final. It’s too bad that a CO can’t change the cache type once it is published.