[Jeremy]

@Team Deejay wrote:

Can anyone give me a source of those small zip loc bags I see used in micros, hopefully within 50 miles of Milwaukee (or online)? I’d like to get some to use in my cache repair kit.

I know Michaels (the craft store chain) carries ziplocs (er… resealable plastic bags) in a wide variety of sizes including the really tiny ones. I believe small bags can even be found at Wal-Mart in the craft/sewing section…

[Jeremy]

The Lonely Cache Game module has been installed on the WGA site. You can access it by clicking on the ‘Lonely Cache Game’ item in the Main Menu, or by the following link:

http://wi-geocaching.com/modules.php?name=Lonely

To submit a report, click on the ‘Submit Report’ tab and follow the directions. Your “score” will automatically be calculated based on what you enter in the form.

Note that this module is completely untested (by anyone but me)… so the first few people who enter reports will be our guinea pigs! 😀 If (or when) you run into any issues, contact Dave or Jeremy and we’ll try to get them fixed ASAP.

[Jeremy]

There were some good winter caching gear suggestions posted in this topic. I’ve added a folding metal army entrenching shovel and a mason’s hammer (no cache is too iced in with this! :)) to my winter arsenal since that time. And I can’t stress enough how helpful carrying a snowbrush has been.

I have a little fanny pack of “essentials” or emergency gear that I carry inside my main backpack. When I’m going to a cache that requires a decent hike (maybe over a half mile) but appears easy enough that I don’t want to bother with the full backpack, I can just pull it out. What I have in the fanny pack doesn’t weigh much, but covers most situations:

– First aid kit (including tick remover)
– Notebook
– Pens, pencils, markers
– Stormproof matches
– Plastic bags
– Spare compass
– Mini Mag flashlight
– Extra AA batteries
– Knife
– Multitool (i.e. Leatherman)
– Pencil torch
– Handkerchief
– Mini roll of duct tape (handyman’s secret weapon)
– Short length of rope
– Handwarmers in winter, small bottle of 100% DEET repellent in summer

[Jeremy]

The nomination form is now active and can be found here:

2008 WGA Board Nomination Form

There are 4 Board positions to be filled this year. We are waiting for the Board members who terms are expiring to decide whether or not they are running for re-election, and when we have this information we will post it.

[Jeremy]

@LDove wrote:

I love emoticons – can the big wigs around here get us a few more? 😈

I’m not a big wig, but it is pretty easy to add emoticons to the site… if you know of some that are interesting and in the public domain, send me a link. These extra ones would only be visible when you click on the “View more Emoticons” link. (Hint: There are already a few extras, so you didn’t use ALL of them in your last post ;)).

Personally I think there are more than enough as it is. But I am a guy, so about all I need is 😀 and 😡 and maybe 😉 from time to time. If you feel you need to have an icon that expresses the fact that you are sort of happy about something but somewhat apprehensive while feeling a bit annoyed and impatient, I’ll see what I can do. 😀

[Jeremy]

Do you want to be known as LDove on the WGA site as well? If so, give me a shout…

And how are people getting their name changed on geocaching.com? I thought that they told people they weren’t going to allow name changes any more?

[Jeremy]

@Team Deejay wrote:

On a related note, I have received a couple suggestions privately. First is a bonus for moving travel bugs (2 for moving, 1 for reporting missing). This seems like a good idea to me. Any objections?

Would this bonus only be for moving “lonely” travel bugs… i.e. ones that have not moved for over 3 months? Or just TBs that have been stuck in a lonely caches?

If points are awarded for any travel bug move I fear someone might take advantage of these bonus points to rack up a huge score. It would be pretty easy to “pinball” some travel bugs between a couple easy caches to obtain a huge score.

[Jeremy]

Good idea Dave. Maybe we can add something to the WGA site to allow folks to easily submit their score reports, possibly using the recent logs we harvest?

I’ll also donate a couple WGA geocoins (2005 and 2007) as prizes. And it might be nice to have monthly winners or second/third/fourth place prizes, instead of just one big winner at the end.

[Jeremy]

@abcdmCachers wrote:

I’m curious, does the WGA have permission to do this? (I seem to remember seeing that the gc.com terms of use agreement forbids “screen scraping”.) I realize once every two minutes doesn’t even register as a blip on their servers, but sometimes when I have to wait several minutes to submit a log on a Sunday afternoon, I think of all the screen scraping sites that must exist out there and that every blip adds up.

The WGA obtained special permission to “scrape” ONLY the recent logs page many years ago. This was back in the days geocaching.com was fighting with Buxley and others about data harvesting issues. For a while the WGA was blocked from harvesting until an agreement was reached. The agreement we have with geocaching.com is informal (just an email) and can be revoked at any time.

Back then the web folks at geocaching.com said the recent logs page is built periodically and cached on the geocaching.com servers, so the overall performance hit associated with the WGA server accessing this page should be incredibly small (probably smaller than looking at a non-cached geocache listing page).

Personally, I wish they had a lower overhead and more robust way for us to collect this data, but what we have seems to be working OK… it is better than having no data at all.

[Jeremy]

@Mathman wrote:

I haven’t had a problem with my logs showing up unless I record out of state finds and then they don’t show up. This has happened everytime I have cached out of state. I wonder why????

In order for us to grab out of state logs for you, you must provide the link to your geocaching.com profile in your account settings (Your Account -> Member Info).

Basically this is the only we can definitively pick out the logs of WGA members from the vast sea of logs on the geocaching.com Recent Logs page. (The geocaching.com username could be used, but if only a single character were wrong, it wouldn’t work correctly.)

So add your gc.com profile link and you should be set!

[Jeremy]

An adaptive algorithm is used to calculate the harvest rate… how often our server looks at the geocaching.com server. It can be as little as every 2 minutes (can’t be shorter due to gc.com restrictions) or as long as 30 minutes based on the log rate.

Every once in a while we do miss logs because things get too busy or geocaching.com has issues. Based on the logs our harvester keeps, there were a couple data misses yesterday so maybe you just got unlucky and logged during the time when we had a problem keeping up. But if you notice a pattern where none of your recent logs seem to be grabbed, let me know and I’ll look into it.

[Jeremy]

All 2007 Wisconsin geocoins ordered were shipped out this morning. Thanks to all the Board members who helped get everything packaged up, including Brian G. (Should’ve Bought Him The Tie), Jennifer (LightningBugs Mum), Jeff (hotdogs_off_trail), Dave (Cheesehead Dave), and Brian J. (GrouseTales) and son.

Note that there is a small error on all of the invoices that were printed and included with the orders. (It’s my fault. :oops:) The price of each coin is listed as $6… this is not correct and should be $9. The total amount listed on each invoice is correct.

[Jeremy]

Thanks for your many years of service Brian… and enjoy your retirement.

I’m still amazed how much time you (and the other reviewers) spent keeping “The Queue” clean… even more impressive is how you were able to tactfully and courteously interact with people who submitted cache listings.

Hopefully one of the remaining reviewers will continue your activities related to archiving / cleaning up long disabled caches.

[Jeremy]

I’d say it is a good idea as long as people know what to expect. If saying that it is up in a tree would ruin the surprise, at least give it an appropriate terrain rating (probably a 4).

There are a bunch of “Evil Monkey…” caches in the southern part of the state, most of which require some tree climbing (usually not more than 10′ high though). If you had “Evil Monkey” in your cache name, I bet a lot of folks would know what was needed to get to the cache.

Personally I enjoy climbing trees and will go out of my way to find these types of caches. I’m fact, I just spent the entire morning sitting 15′ up in a tree!

[Jeremy]

@abcdmCachers wrote:

Could someone replace the version currently on the WGA site with the new version? Thanks!

Done.

Thanks for keeping this presentation “fresh”. Last time I checked, all these presentation files have had several hundred downloads since they were added. So likely these presentations have been viewed and maybe used by folks in other states as well. (We are #1 in Google for “Geocaching Presentation Resources” and #4 for “Geocaching Presentation”.)

[Author]

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