There are a number of issues raised here which I myself encountered a while back, and I’m afraid to say they have soured my enjoyment of geocaching, and have contributed to me giving up owning a lot of my caches.
The main problem with all of this is the question of cache ownership: don’t forget that it’s WE who own the caches. We think them all up, we put together the containers, we trek out to somewhere nice and hide them.
GC.com is a cache listing site only. The caches are not theirs. Somewhere along the line the organisation has lost sight of the fact that without us there would be no caches, and no need for a site on which to list them.
There seems to be an increasing attitude from GC.com that they musn’t be seen to support the placing of caches that are in any way risky, again forgetting that it’s US who places the caches in their physical locations, not them. So why do they persist in seeing themselves as accountable for the physical caches? How long before 5T caches are banned for health and safety reasons? Hell, that’s probably given them an idea.
Another problem is that the review process generally is flawed in so many ways, and I feel is no longer fit for purpose. I think that there are many ways in which the publication process could be improved, which would benefit everyone. It is tedious in the extreme when we have devised and set our caches to have them turned down, often for arbitrary reasons, and here’s what really gets my goat: for reasons that are not even consistently applied.
There are many examples of this, but I shall give you just one here which highlights this problem. I thought up a challenge cache which admittedly would be very challenging indeed (see dictionary definition of “challenge”, and no, it doesn’t mention anything about frogs), and would keep most local cachers busy for a couple of years at least. It was turned down on the basis that not many people would achieve the target, and that most caches should be able to be visited by many. Various emails went back and forth between myself and one of our reviewers, and I have to say that the last one sent to me was pretty offensive. I complained to GC.com at the time and received an apology from them, but not from the reviewer (Oh really? I hear you ask, that’s not like them at all!).
Anyway, a few months later, the same reviewer published a challenge cache which required the finder to have found thirty 5/5 caches in order to log a find. Hello? Anybody home?
It’s a fair cop when caches are turned down because of a miscalculation on the part of the setter, such as proximity infringement, or land use agreements, etc, but the reviewers’ general aloofness and unwillingness to enter into dialogue, along with their lack of accountability to us, the cache owners, needs to be challenged.
The other comments in the facebook exchange are correct but mssing the point entirely. No, we won’t all die if no more caches are placed on Dartmoor, and yes, a definitive ruling by the MoD was needed before a decision could be made. It’s us being at the mercy of these martinets that has got everyone’s backs up.
Guess who’s not going to be asked to be a reviewer then?
Ha ha!
