Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
@RSplash40 wrote:
@Lostby7 wrote:
COTM is pointless plain and simple.
Agreed.
I’ve tried to have this discussion come to some kind of action on the past. I have had many caches nominated and a couple win the COTM, but not necessarily the most creative ones.
I monitored a couple exhaustive threads that proposed a different system for this distinction. One that did not solicit votes or encourage nepotism. While it would still be subject to gerrymandering, an assessment of the most favored and popular caches, based on a monthly tally of cache rankings, would probably better represent truly deserving caches.
Of course this would be hard to implement because you’d have to establish a cache ranking system and widget to place on all cache listings. There would be an immediate bias towards new caches of course but maybe that isn’t a bad thing.
No system is flawless, but some DO a better job than others and at present, our COTM does a poor job of representing the best and brightest in the state. I’ve long ago accepted this fact and these days, when I see a cache of mine nominated, I almost hope I don’t win as the award has little meaning for me.
Maybe someday there will be a better method, but I’m not holding my breath in the meantime…
@sweetlife wrote:
Here is a new gripe for me, Reviewers that don’t give you at least 24 hours to fix a cache with a wet log before they temporary disable it.
Yesterday night at about 7-8PM we received these two logs on our Cache GCNMHA Family Fun Cache in Crivitz (About a 40 Minute Drive from our house) :
Needs Maintenance: April 30 by todd300 (23 found)
Log is wet.Found: April 30 by todd300 (23 found)
Clouds and trees were throwing off my GPS accuracy, but found it within 20 minutes. Nice clue. Log was wet though.HERE IS MY GRIPE at about 10-10:30 WE GET THIS POST FROM WIS KID
Temporary Disabled April 30 by Wis Kid (0 found)
Greetings from geocaching.comYour cache has been reported as in need of maintenance. I have disabled it to give you time to repair your cache. Once you have completed the maintenance, you can enable your cache and post a “Owner Maintenance” log, which will remove the “Needs Maintenance” attribute. If you are no longer interested in maintaining your cache, please archive it and retrieve it at the earliest opportunity. If I don’t hear from you in 4 weeks, I will have to assume that you are no longer interested in your cache and will have to archive it for you. If you need more time, just post a note to the cache page indicating you are still working on the maintenance.
Thanks for your past contributions to geocaching in Wisconsin. I look forward to hearing from you.
Wis Kid – Volunteer Reviewer
I’m sorry but this was complete BS I did send him a message last night with no response asking him to make it active again as we are going to fix it tonight on our way to Milwaukee we will not have internet service this weekend so now my cache will be disabled all weekend.
This is a little more than a gripe,
Barry of sweetlife
HERE, HERE!
This happened to me twice as soon as the weather got warm. The vast majority of cache hiders are well aware of the status of their caches and most finders are very informative and quick to point out that a log sheet is full or wet, to make them aware. BUT, is there really a need to disable a cache because of a damp log or a full log sheet? If you are an avid cacher, you should have spare logs sheets in baggies with you and if you don’t carry that kind of stuff along while caching, you probably DO have a piece of dry paper somewhere on your person.
And REVIEWERS, even if you think the Needs Maintenance log warrants a “disable” status, can you at least give us 24-48 hours to respond to the post? Every time there is an action by one of you on a NM cache log like this it reflects poorly on us as cache owners. Certainly, if we don’t do anything about it in a timely fashion, then the disable may be warranted – to give us a kick in the pants. But BELIEVE me, I wake up EVERY morning with a run through of my mental to-do list on caches that need to be checked out or worked on. It IS ON OUR MINDS!
Personally, I think the Needs Maintenance log type should really only be used when a cache is in trouble – broken, water-logged, damaged – and, as many have said, finders should at least attempt to re-hide a cache that is found in the open. It never fails that within days of seeing a “found it in the open” log, a cache will get muggled. Sometimes we just can’t get in the car and rush out to save our cache.
It may seem like nothing to finders to post a NM log, but you’ll find that the more caches we hide, the more we are inclined to send the owner an friendly e-mail or a PM about the cache situation rather than flagging the cache itself as being poorly maintained, which is what a NM log does.
There, 1 gripe, 4 paragraphs… Think I’ll skip the other 10.
BTW, don’t gripe about full log sheets, bring extra and replace them!
@Sparse Grey Hackle wrote:
Find ’em most likely. That’s the fun part. And, yeah it kinda of the ‘what comes first’ kind of thing…the cache find or the cache hide? It is fun to do the creative thing for hiding a cache and all.
We are really not into “the numbers” thing, as we only have twenty hides to regularly maintain and look after. Just could not imagine what it would be like to have a flock of caches greater than 100 or even 200 for that matter.
Or, try over 2,000 or more? YIKES! A ‘Johnny Appleseed’ cacher type that throws them out all over the place and then does zero maintenance.
“Different strokes for different folks”
__________________________________
“Quality not Quantity.”
__________________________________Well, I have to say it is challenging to have that many out, but if I had to choose, everyone knows what side of the fence I’d be on.
I get some enjoyment out of “getting to” caches, especially the lonely challenging ones, but I lost interest in the actual opening and logging of caches years ago. That’s why I have slowed down considerably on the finding of caches. Take the Pathways series I just did. There just wasn’t much to remember or anything particularly redeeming about the placements or cache contents of the 3 caches in the series, save jumping the creek a few times. The final puzzle however, which is lonely, I probably will remember since it has presented a decent challenge and I am actually anxious about finding it tonight! Not many caches do that for me anymore.
@zuma wrote:
@AstroD-Team wrote:
,
I can’t believe someone actually bid on this. Well, unfortunately, yes I can… 🙄Well, good. Just dont outbid me on this one. Not sure where I will place it yet, but it will be fun figuring it out.
z
You’ve been outbid!
@Buy_The_Tie wrote:
The vendor needs 2 weeks for the final artwork, which puts the deadline at April 30th.
The vendor needs 1 week to procure and print the shirts.
The Campout Committee is zeroing in on a decision.
I can prepare final art in 2 hours! 2 weeks – talk about lead time.
@gotta run wrote:
The April prize has been “upgraded” to a letterbox hybrid with a custom-made (by me) and completely unauthorized WGA logo stamp…
If we “win” it in April, we’ll roll it over instead to May…or June…or July……………………….
I sure could use a Letterbox…. Hmmm, that’s 15 more lonely caches in 3 days. Nope, not gonna happen…
We’re not the only ones watching. The cam has made it to the AP wires and is now showing up on local media channels. I head it on FOX news Friday night. Here’s the AP release:
Wisconsin Web attraction: Underwater cam shows spawning walleyes, sturgeon in Wolf River
By Associated Press
11:28 PM CDT, April 22, 2009
SHIOCTON, Wis. (AP) — Anglers who can’t get on the water are getting the next best thing by viewing spawning walleyes, sturgeon and other fish on eastern Wisconsin’s Wolf River via Web cam.Gary Bunnell operates the Web site http://wolfrivercam.com using underwater cameras in the river near Shiocton and Fremont.
Comments posted on the page show it’s getting hard for fishing enthusiasts to resist, even though they sometimes can watch and see no fish. At other times, they watch a steady flow.
Bunnell said he started the project as a hobby, and it apparently attracts so much interest because it captures the natural movements of the fish.
The Internet audience has come from as far away as Australia.
___
Information from: WBAY-TV, http://www.wbay.com
…well, I have been thinking about dropping a couple hundred caches at every 1/10th mile corner of a 2 mile wide shoreline grid all along the Lake Winnebago shore and then peppering the area with pesky blue question marks just to give all those tour groups something to pandm about… Or better yet, just make them all Traditionals at the bottom of the lake. No one seems to want to go after that kind of hide anyway… they wouldn’t even have to last. Who’s gonna DNF them? Boy, a guy could really shoot one across the bow…
…then, after you read the full news story, dive into all the comments posted to the news story…
It is interesting because most of the feedback is from outsiders, students and non-geocachers, whom you’d expect to rant mostly about the poor judgment of a teacher who places a geocache on school property or about the obsiquious nature of the cachers who didn’t put a name to what they were doing on front of the school; although there’s plenty of that.
What there seems to be more of is a sense that we are all still recovering from the era of FEAR, where every suspicious activity must be linked to terrorism, pedophilia, or some other bad intent. That our nerves are so frayed we autonomically jump from an action to fear response without taking time to think about the rationale approach to analyzing this suspicious activity in between.
Just like the Allouez incident, common sense got tossed out the window. Part of the problem is that we think we are able as a society to “detect” when the real deal comes our way. That the one time out of ten a suspicious box is blown up, it actually is a bomb. But, as the recent mass shootings and family slaughters show, more often when it happens it just happens – without warning. I still want to know how many REAL bombs the Allouez Bomb Squad, or for the matter all the bomb squads in Wisconsin, have detonated compared to suspected bombs. What’s the ratio? 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000? I just don’t care to live in a society where we are some quick triggered that every little suspicious thing must be handled like a terrorist threat or potential school shooting.
Your workbench looks like you either have a penchant for collecting strange curbside garbage or you always wanted to open a nic-nac shop and you wife is constantly asking you, “what is all this stuff?”
You just came away from Fleet Farm, again, with more keyholders and matchstick containers, were sad to see they had no Supersize Ammo cans, and spent $22 dollars on an electronic bird call and you don’t even hunt wildfowl!
What I’m curious to know is just how often the rest of you experience similar muggle issues where you come across a log that says “easy find, cache was in the open” and then within a few days or a week your cache gets muggled, because the previous finder, who found it on the open, didn’t either take the time to re-hide properly or didn’t think they needed too, since it wasn’t their cache. What really gets me are the logs that also contain something like the words “we partially hid it, but maybe the owner should go check on it”.
Newbies I excuse from this kind of log, but veterans, NOT. If you’ve been around long enough to do 2 or 3 thousand caches, then you know that most cache placers simply cannot get to their caches to check the day a found it note that says “the owner should check” is posted. And that’s all it takes for a muggle to stumble on a cache that is “left in the open”.
I wish there were a new GC tagline “Rehide them better than you find them”. Somewhere, somehow, it seems like we could all use a lesson in Best Caching Practices”, now where did I put my handbook…
Hmmm, I have yet to create a tribute cache for either of these guys….
There are some great cache suggestions and I too want to finish KVR-HILO, even though I’ve been to the top of Lovers Leap multiple times.
Have you guys ever done an un-commercialized cave cache? I could definitely convince myself to finally create the ulitmate, Multi, Supersize, Earthcache, Spelunking experience in that same neck of the woods. A cache I have been contemplating since day one, but an idea that always required a little motivation. This could be it…
@Van’s Clan wrote:
This website was sent to me a couple months ago – I thought it was pretty cool, but I forgot all about it until I read this thread.
It has a pretty cool search feature that you might find useful in tracking down the weird stuff Wisconsin has to offer.
A GREAT site and one I could have used for my Phenomenal Series. I might just have to work up a few more based on this site. Sure are a lot of “sightings” around here…
04/19/2009 at 8:21 pm in reply to: Public Service announcement….it’s okay if you DON’T find i #1906092@baileyhk wrote:
I agree – I wish everyone would log their DNF’s!! I nearly always do.. in fact some of my best geocaching adventures have been on DNF’s. The only time I don’t is when I don’t feel I have searched enough or if I didn’t have enough time for a proper search. In that case I go back and then try again. If I am going out caching and a cache has had several DNF’s with no owner check they I will probably leave it until I know its there.
Another good reason to log them is that you might get help from others – after my 10th (maybe higher) DNF on Sundrop 1 Team Black Cat checked on it for me and confirmed it was indeed there. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have found it without their help!This is my approach too. If I don’t think I’ve given it ample time, I’ll skip the DNF until I get out there for a second look. If I DNF a second time, I almost always post a DNF, but rarely indicate that the cache might need maintenance or might be missing. I’ll let the cache owner decide that. On the other hand, if ground zero has a beacon, I will make mention that I looked in the “obvious” spot which might tip the owner off that the cache may indeed be in trouble. I am not embarrassed by logging DNF’s and try to be descriptive about my hunt, without spoilers it, when I do. Owner of almost 200 caches, I know first-hand how vital field reports are and am eternally greatfull for the PM’s and e-mails I get indicating that I might want to have a look.
What does bug me a little is a situation where a cacher posts a “needs maintenance” log because the cache, in thier opinion, is not labeled well enough (even though it clearly says “GEOCACHE” on it) or because they think it doesn’t fit one of the attributes. Forgivable from a newbie, which was the case, but no so from experienced cachers who should know that a private message to the owner is simply a much better way to convey a potentil issue than posting a NM log to the listing.
@zuma wrote:
…was recently stopped en-route to a sex holiday with 4 (fe)male friends and 69 Viagras in his luggage.
Hell, you can sign up for that tour any day of the week.
-
AuthorPosts
