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There has been a battle going on. For those forum readers, this will be a
repeat but I for one, never read them. SO, there were a lot of issues
going on, here is the Bosses reply.
http://opentopic.groundspeak.com/0/OpenTopic?q=Y&a=tpc&s=1750973553&f=3000917383&m=2570915355&p=4
Summary (and response)
This is a long thread, so I'll summarize what I'm seeing in this
discussion. Hopefully I can respond to most of the observations,
suggestions, and issues that have come up here.
If you respond to my post, do not quote pieces of it and respond to it. Put
together a concise response and summarize with your own words.
1. Restricting users to a locality / charging for membership / modifying
the sport somehow.
Ain't gonna happen. This comes up once in a while and I will always point
back to the vow that the Geocaching sport will never be "pay for play" on
Geocaching.com - The nay sayers have responded that member only caches go
against this philosophy but it is an empty argument.
You will always be able to search by radius and get all the caches in that
area. New features will allow more precise searching.
It does cost money to run a site that gets 12 million pageviews a month so
we look at alternative methods to fund the site. No we're not about to go
under either. If we were, however, we would work on a transition plan to
ensure that the sport continues.
As an aside, when someone creates a hypothetical argument like shutting
down accounts where you can only search within xx radius from your home
coordinates, that doesn't mean it is going to happen. Sometimes
hypothetical situations grow horns and end up charging the china store.
2. Geocaching.com != Geocaching
This is a fun debate. Is Geocaching.com geocaching, or is it a database of
geocaches only? "Having a sport managed under one man will be the death of
us all!" is the cry from the masses.
If this was a dictatorship, do you really think the site would be
successful? Heck, dissent on Geocaching.com even goes in the forums hosted
by Geocaching.com.
A while back the early group of geocachers made the issue that
Geocaching.com does not own geocaching. I cede that argument. However that
means that since there is no ownership of geocaching by geocaching.com, we
have the right to create guidelines for geocaches listed on our own web
site. We also have the right to determine "quality" within our own
limitations that we cannot physically visit each cache and ensure that it
meets a checklist.
The admins have a hard job to weed out the signal to noise ratio. You would
be horribly naive to think, however, that opening up geocaching to allow
whatever listings people want on the site would be beneficial to the sport.
At this point we'd have about a gazillion store caches, tennis ball caches,
golf ball caches, "lets watch this carcass rot over time" caches, metal
detector caches, buried caches, porn caches, ad nauseum.
The continuing movement of the web site is to have regional approvers from
geocaching organizations around the world. This is a new sport, however,
and both technology needs to be modified and organizations need to be
formed to police their own areas. The ultimate goal is for each region to
have a "committee" to decide on the rules of geocaching in their areas.
Again, I want to stress that this is a new activity and perhaps the first
outdoor activity that has an online component. As a result there will be
obvious growing pains. Hopefully folks will retain a level head about it all.
3. The original discussion about a microcache with no logbook.
This discussion/thread was absolutely insane. An admin has a discussion
with a geocacher to verify some information about a cache, and make some
recommendations. Not just an admin either, but Moun10bike, a guy who has
been playing the sport just as long as I have been running the site. Then
everyone jumps on and offers their own advice without the understanding of
the entire situation.
How about instead of having a pity party you just try to work it out with
Moun10bike, and give him the respect he deserves? The fact that there would
be so much venom and time wasted over the placement of a film canister
really blows perspective out of the water.
Understand that if you do disagree with the decision of a cache, you can
always post your dissent in the forums. However, in this case there wasn't
an outright permanent archival of a cache. All I'm asking is to have a
little patience and benefit of the doubt for Moun10bike and the rest of the
admins who are working in the best interests of the sport.
4. Rules and Guidelines
We call them guidelines because they aren't rules. They are guidelines.
Geocaching.com is not a courtroom. The reason why they are guidelines is
because the sport is very fluid and organic.
Guidelines also make it harder to make decisions, and in most cases the
different admins with different backgrounds make a judgement call on the
approval or disapproval of a cache. For this ireason there is a way for
someone to "appeal" a "ruling" if they so choose, which would have happened
here if the cache was actually disapproved.
Obviously red tape would suck. For example, make a designated approver go
out and physically find the cache and rate it before approval. Logistically
it is impossible. So we do the next best thing.
Jeremy Irish Groundspeak - The Language of Location(tm)
--------------------- Glenn St. Louis, Mo
