The Search Jaunt

I’m disappointed, very disappointed. I had – in my eyes – a good idea for a cache and I was in the middle of  gathering information for the story/background info  when I was suddenly aware that it can’t be realised. At least not in the form I intended to be. Since the place is historical and the possible high amount of muggles, a physical cache wasn’t possible. So why not a virtual cache where people must take a picture of themselves with a GPSr in their hand and e-mail an answer on a question about the location. A good example of this is the earth cache I visited, as mentioned in earlier blog.

That was the plan, until I visited the GC.com site and discovered that new virtuals can’t be published any more. Old ones can still be visited. Apparently there was a lot of abuse with this type of caches. Since  it’s a wintry day, I decided to investigate further on this and took an ad random virtual cache where on needs to go to a location, see what material the building is made of. That material is the password for a ‘certificate’ you fill in yourself and upload.

This cache has a huge amount of logged visits of 876, with an average of 3-5 a day. How come that this cache is so popular? The only reason for this is the cheat factor. A simple Google query gives you the password in the first link of the search result. It took me more effort to get the document downloaded with Firefox than ‘solving’ the question. I guess most of the 876 logs are done this way. And no, I didn’t log.

What is the right to exist of this cache?  For me, there’s no other than to promote laziness and ‘pollute’ the game/sport of geocaching. There are 3 malefactors in this case:

1. The ‘author’/owner of the cache. In this case I even doubt if the he/she actually has been there and didn’t compose things based on a search result. The certificate logging – which is used for several (virtual) cache – is also a lazy way of checking things out. The cache owner doesn’t have to do a thing. I’ve seen other VCs where one needs to log something and encrypt it. The others only need to click the decrypt button and log the same. Shameful!
2. The approver of the cache didn’t seem to take the time/effort to check if this virtual cache complies to certain rules. If those rules didn’t exist at time, it doesn’t automatically mean that an owner can’t be asked to update their cache to the new rules. After all, I read in the guidelines published on the forums: ‘In the guidelines for logging virtual caches, we now say that the seeker must verify to the cache owner that he “was physically at the location,” instead of the phrase “was really there.”‘
   One might argue that there are a lot of them and the volunteers don’t have the time check all of them. I can agree with that. But instead of ‘grandfathering’ them, one should archive them all and let the virtual type of caches continue to exist. All old ones should reapply for approval.
3. The cache loggers themselves see this as an excellent way to increase their statistics. I took the last logger of this infamous cache. It seems that this German based logger has visited 67 virtual caches; 36 are logged the passed week. He seemed to have to have travelled that week throughout the US, back to Germany, back to the US, The Netherlands and even Alaska. He must have a lot of air miles with that;-) This makes one even wonder how many of his 1750 logs are for real.

All this buggers everything up and leaves people like me frustrated unable to create the cache they’re intending to. My friends in Twitter advised me a solution with micros or multis. I’m still thinking about it, but I wonder if people will bother the effort to look for them when they recognize the location on the photos people will log. Maybe I have to put a micro with a code word / question people need to mail (the answer) in addition to photo log.

It bothered me so much that I decided to face the weather today and get a breath of fresh air during lunch time and search for a cache nearby work: Groot Begijnhof GC1FY7X. Besides the nice settings of the Grand Béguinage in Leuven, blahma made a nice effort in hiding the stash. I almost gave it up, but discovered it eventually during my last attempt. What a relief after these no-brainer virtuals (which I didn’t log).

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