Quote Originally Posted by WhereRWe? View Post
Sorry, Medawookie. I don't like this idea. This site is for ALL geocachers. I don't want someone to feel left out because their bio will never be included because they're "not interesting".

I like mentioning milestones because everyone likes having a feeling of accomplishment. But there's no reason to keep mentioning the "big numbers" cachers over and over. Perhaps the Advisory Committee should encourage keeping milestone mentions to a minimum - perhaps at set milestones such as 100, 500, 1000 caches.

As for biographies - who decides who gets a mention in the newsletter/forums? What criteria do we use to decide? We have a LOT of interesting members. Someone would get left out or feelings hurt because they were not profiled.
Bios: WhereRWe? has a good point regarding jealous cachers. If we were to include bios into the Newsletter, I would advocate for my suggestion above: To create a separate forum thread called Biographies, or to use the Articles forum, and have cachers develop their own biographies (ok so that would be an autobiography!). In rare cases, for cachers who don't like to write, but who have a background they want to share, as the Newsletter editor I'd be willing to interview them by phone or email to write up a biography. Then these threads would be highlighted in the Newsletter like Hot Topics are. I would include all bios posted, I would never deter folks from posting bios, and I would welcome anyone to contact me about writing a bio for them or even just reviewing a bio before they post it if that's what they'd like. This way, they are in control of who gets mentioned, not me or the Board.

Milestones: When someone mentioned a milestone in a thread, I used to include it in the Newsletter. Then it appeared that we were choosing whose milestones to include in the Newsletter and excluding cachers; despite my arguement that we could just post how it was, we decided the simplest solution was to take out the Milestone section all together, because I nor the Board were interested in tracking ALL milestones. Which in the end was great with me because it made more room for other sections of the newsletter. The bios should not end up like the Milestones, because people will write them about themselves (or seek me out to write them), instead of cachers posting about others' milestones, which is how that thread mostly works.

Kapeesh? Other thoughts?