Disclaimer: A cache of mine has been nominated for COTM for this month, but my opinion would be the same regardless.
While I think some event caches deserve to be allowed to be on the COTM ballot, I think the WGA events are a special case and should be excluded. All the ones I have been to have been so well executed and so much fun to be at, and so well attended, that two COTMs a year would automatically go to the campout and the picnic. This is certainly not a “bad” thing, but for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on, it just doesn’t seem to fit the spirit of what I think COTM should be.
There’s really no hard and fast rules for COTM. Is it the best cache you did in the past month? Is it the best cache that was placed in the past month? Is it the bast cache in the state that I’ve ever found, not necessarily placed or found in the past month, that has yet to win COTM? I’d be interested to run a poll just to see what people’s criteria is for voting. I guess I tend to lean towards the third example above.
I see suggestions on the GC forums every now and then for allowing finders to assign a rating to a found cache, and then that would be averaged and displayed alongside the terrain and difficulty ratings. I see this as something similar. It’s a way for us, the finders, to highlight caches that we think are special and worthy for others to go out of their way to find. If there’s a cache I liked, I’ll nominate it month after month until either it wins COTM, or I do another cache I liked even better and nominate that one instead, or I’ve forgotten how much I liked the first one and don’t nominate it anymore.
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