I didn’t know about the OC.com site before this thread came out, but now I’ve registered with them and had a chance to look around I have to say I’m quite impressed. There are several factors which in my mind make it score over the GC.com site:
1. It weakens GC.com’s monopoly
2. You can import your finds from other caching sites, so you have a cumulative find count
3. It’s decentralised (one of its strongest points) and puts control back in the hands of the cachers and cache owners, getting rid of a lot of redundant bureaucracy and interference by the listing site
4. It allows the placement of virtuals
5. It provides several methods of visit-verification, so no more grumbling about whether a logged find is legitimate or not
6. Visitor feedback should enable cache quality to be clearly visible (rather than using “favorite points”, which are a bit of a blunt instrument) and may act as a deterent to the placement of poor caches.
7. Potential caches are peer reviewed, and if reviewers are local, I would expect them to be more sympathetic to the needs of the local caching community than the current GC reviewer system is.
8. It’s free!
One downside is that the website is not so slick, but if the site becomes more used, then further investment by the site owners may follow.
Another problem is that the cumulative find count is not “live”; you have to create a pocket query, download it, then upload it to the OC site. I’m sure this can be improved, but it is cumbersome at the moment.
So, not bad overall. The problem about critical mass is still the big one here, but unless we populate the site, that’s not going to change. With this in mind, I intend to duplicate all of my caches on OC.com, with visit verification turned on (just to add to the fun). Others may wish to do the same?
