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Less than a week to get your votes in for the photo contest. Voting ends Sept 15th.
Coords look like Wausau.
Congrats!!
I am planning to do the insane one-day trip and not stay overnight.
Speaking of that, if there’s anyone in the Appleton area who’d like to go to the picnic and wants to ride with me I have plenty of room as I am going solo.
Since I’m helping run the event it will be a very early start and I’ll be returning pretty late in the evening. But if you’re looking for something to do for the whole day just shoot me a note here or on facebook or wherever!
Check out the submissions for the 2011 Cache Ba$h WGA photo contest in the Photo Gallery: http://wi-geocaching.com/modules.php?name=gallery2&g2_itemId=19087.
You can vote for as many or as few photos as you would like. The more you like a photo, the more stars you may want to give it. You will have until the end of day on 9/15 to get your votes in.
Thanks to everyone who submitted photos for the contest and Good Luck!
Our webmaster and treasurer will be closing up the shop and tallying the items to place our order with the printer. Order now to ensure you will have one of these wonderful event souvenirs to take home with you.
We will be ordering a small number of “extras” to sell at the event but they will likely sell out fast!
Reminder, if you have not submitted your photo(s) for the contest, please do so now. The submission period ends on Wednesday 8/31.
Groundspeak intended for the thumbs up and thumbs down ratings to be used by someone who has completed the challenge and wants to give their opinion so that others can use that to help them decide if they want to do the challenge.
It was not designed as a battle-field for people to just be arbitrarily voting up and down to keep the listing active.
I believe that some people are just voting down everything because they dislike challenges. This is not helpful to the folks who actually want to participate in this.
I also believe that some people are just voting them up because they actually want to do the challenge and are afraid it will be voted out of existence before they can do the challenge.
Please just play the game or not. We get it, some people like them and some do not. But to ruin it for those that do is very petty.
PS I’m posting this because I’ve seen new challenges get lots of votes before it’s even done once and because most challenges by me have way more votes than completions. Votes in both directions.
This could all easily be remedied by requiring a completion (or at least an acceptance) to cast a vote one way or the other.
When you click on to add a challenge, now there is a little blurb of instructional text that wasn’t there before:
What makes a good Challenge?
Location-specific
The location of a challenge should be directly related to the action. “Take a picture of yourself with the Eiffel Tower” is location-specific, while “Take pictures of the night sky in Seattle” or “Find this/a geocache” are not. The goal of Challenges, and Geocaching, is to explore the world around you.
There should only be one location where you can complete the challenge. Worldwide Challenges are only issued by Groundspeak, but you can recommend new Worldwide Challenges on our feedback site
Straightforward
The Challenge should be easy to understand and not too complicated to do.
Appropriate
Keep Challenges clean so it reflects the family-friendliness of Geocaching.
Fun!
Like geocaching, Challenges should be a light and fun activity. Create Challenges that reflect this.
@-cheeto- wrote:
I would encourage others to “vote down” any challenges you see pop up near you that are not “location-based”. Even saying “in such and such a city” is not at specific coordinates. If this is to look or work even remotely close to the virtuals of the past, these need to be things to find at locations.
Actually, what’s recommended in the Groundspeak forums is to flag them as unplayable. This gets the attention of someone I guess.
@zuma wrote:
It will be interesting to see if Garmin can use this major stumble by Groundspeak to become more competitive.
zIs it really a “major stumble”. I don’t think so.
In fact I don’t think this dilutes anything. You can still go out and hide and publish and find geocaches all you want.
Find counts are one’s own personal business. A person can choose to log a cache. They can choose to log a “geocaching challenge”. They could have chose to log an event or a virtual or an Earthcache Or not. And even before logging they can choose whether to go find anything.
This game is bound to change as time goes along. It has since it’s inception.
I don’t think adding this feature is going to matter to most. In fact most would read all these pages here (and elsewhere) of discussion and just laugh and shake their heads.
Despite the naysayers and picketers, people are starting to do them.
It’s a game! Let’s play it.
(ps. I would much rather do the geocaching challenges that are starting to get created than go find another magnetic keyholder on another guard rail. But for some, the road-side guard rail is their favorite place to visit. Hmm.. interesting what some think can “dilute” geocaching.)
I would encourage others to “vote down” any challenges you see pop up near you that are not “location-based”. Even saying “in such and such a city” is not at specific coordinates. If this is to look or work even remotely close to the virtuals of the past, these need to be things to find at locations.
@huffinpuffin2 wrote:
@CodeJunkie wrote:
So who created the TJ Challenge?
No one will ever know. No responsibility involved. 😕
It’s weird how some list who created it while others do not. Don’t know if this is a bug or intentionally working this way.
The one I created doesn’t show I created it. But it’s obvious by the name 😉
On page 10 of the groundspeak forum thread regarding challenges I came across an interesting counter-argument to those who don’t want these “counting” towards their find counts.
The prior virtuals, events, mega events, CITO events, webcams, GPS adventure exhibits, (and I would add Earth Caches) are also not geocaches (i.e. not containers hidden at coordinates to be found with a GPS and a log signed). Why should they count and these new ‘challenges’ should not?
Just an interesting perspective thrown in the mix.
They’re obviously not ideally developed but there’s some potential to testing out the “peer review model” behind these.
They really should be “owned” and have attributes, additional waypoints, hints, etc like a “real cache page”.
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