As a cache owner, the worst kind of log that I see come across in our notifications is the HUGE detailed log of every single day of a cacher’s three-week cross-country trip… and then it is repeated (C&P) for every single one of the hundreds of caches that were found on that trip. I don’t really care about the geoart you found in South Dakota or the adventure you had in the mud in Iowa or the snake that was in your sleeping bag somewhere in Illinois… Was there anything specific about our cache that you remember or that we need to know? While I would prefer individualized logs for our hides that are found, short C&Ps are much preferred over the novels.
Those lengthy logs are also of no use when we are looking for caches ourselves. They offer no details about terrain that was encountered, conditions of the containers, if the coordinates were off… nothing of use at all. Some (both long and short ones) are even misleading, as in: “Found XX caches today while out with A, B, and C. Replaced damp logs in some, containers for others, dropped a few travel bugs along the way. Your cache may have been one of those.” Or C&Ps for all finds, but some were really DNFs. But on the short ones, at least we can see if there is something different added. I don’t even read through those super long travel-logs that are C&P.
I will admit to writing lengthy logs myself… very lengthy. These are accounts of our adventures AT EACH CACHE that help us remember where we were and why we enjoyed doing this cache. While they may take lots of space in the previous logs on receivers, they almost always give some kind of idea about what went on in our searches but without using any spoilers. The cache owners know a bit more about their hides, and cachers who come after us might get an idea of what the caches were like. And we can go back and read what we had to say and look at the photos we may have uploaded with our log and remember the good (and not-so-good) times we had caching.
One other thing that we make a point of doing, or really NOT doing: we don’t mention that this cache filled a certain spot on our grid or that we were working on a challenge and this was… whatever. Yes, some caches were placed for those very reasons, and maybe we sought ones out for those very reasons, but we still like to thank the cache owners for placing caches to be found and for bringing us to special places. We don’t always know the COs, and since we think the caches we place are special, so are those that are placed by others.
