Oh, we feel your pain! I agree, the free apps seem to have caused this kind of thing to proliferate. We are now in the season of writing our “nice” emails to people who just started, visited a park and realized after the fact (probably) that we have a virtual or EarthCache there. Our standard practice is to write after a couple days with no response, a nice email with information about how these work and to be sure to ask if we can help. Nine times out of ten, we end up hearing nothing and deleting after about a week. Honestly, all we want is for folks to at least make an attempt at these. Yes, we’re retired teachers, but easy graders! [;)]

We’ve been doing a lot less geocaching and more of the things we used to do, as well as new interests. Some of that is just the natural progression in the hobby, but a fair amount of it is due to this sort of thing. We just lost another ammo can recently. Silver with a handpainted design on it and of course, clearly marked as to what it is. We have a bunch more to put out there, but are really rethinking those. Those thefts aren’t always cachers, but it still stings.

I don’t know what the answer is. Geocaching.com is a business and offering free apps that might lead to purchases of memberships and products is in their best interest, but it gets old, doesn’t it?

You had a nice way of giving information without a nasty tone, despite the sting of the loss of the ammo can.  Well done.  I agree, I wish that geocaching HQ would give a little more information before people could find geocaches.

I agree with Trekkin, the hobby has made way too many changes which is helping beginners show an interest and before they can understand jump in and cause havoc.  I have gone back away from the phone caching and our numbers have begun to decline with the type of caches hidden.  It seems a lot of people are lacking creativity in general.  Logs like “tftc” and seeing the same music groups used as the basis of a cache hide get old real quick.  We do occasionally geocache still but other hobbies are taking over.  Maybe one day we will become interested in running numbers again, but it isn’t looking positive.

So last week we get a message, needs to be archived, from someone in a summer school class who has never found a cache, supposedly a member of the class decided to toss it in the tall grass, so far we have lost a fish, a cow, and a saw on this trail, all one of a kind caches, have turned a few of the one of a kinds to Premium only, agree there needs to be more info. out there for the new cachers. Not disappointed enough to quit though, way too many positives to the game.

Sorry Mel. I will return the fish and the cow next week, but I’m not done using the saw yet.