vb:literal>
I made a challenge for people to hide 10 nanos close to Mike's house. So far 12 people have accepted the challenge!
Here you go:
http://coord.info/CXED8
Last edited by brdad; 08-21-2011 at 04:32 PM.
DNFTT! DNFTT! DNFTT!
"The funniest thing about this particular signature is that by the time you realize it doesn't say anything it's to late to stop reading it..."
So, having been there in the past and having completed whats in this challenge, I've marked it complete just to see what the process is. No offense to you Mike but challenges are just plain ridiculous. Unless there is some way for the challenge creator to delete logs for not doing whats asked exactly, there is no way to police this. Its actually a big waste of time. The should have just brought virtual caches back and made it so you have to have yourself in a photo with a GPS onsite to prevent arm chair caching. At least the challenges don't give you a smiley. I can't imagine how many finds that darn K-9 would be up to by the end of the year. This certainly will be something I'll fail to mention if someone every asks about caching.
There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and ‘mental illness'. ---Dave Barry
But the thing is, it does count towards your find count. On some pages it appears not, but on pages where it shows total caches challenges are included. for example, on your profile is shows you have 697 finds: http://www.geocaching.com/profile/de...f+the+universe (you may have to click on the "geocaches" tab)
Also here is the associated section of the FAQs I previously posted:
It's funny benchmarks still do not count yet are 100 times more comparable to caching than most of these dumb challenges.Do Challenges increase my Geocaching.com find count?
Yes. Challenge completions and geocache finds are combined in your total stats count. However, you can hover over anyone's count to see how many caches and challenges the user has found and completed.
Mike's is a perfect example. Paul Bunyan is a good spot for a virtual. Caches have been hidden there before and they don't last. But he has no control over this challenge, he can't ask for verification and/or proof that anyone logging it was really there, nor can he delete the logs that are bogus. On top of that, the challenge does not really belong to him, he gets little or no credit for creating it.
Last edited by brdad; 08-22-2011 at 08:11 AM.
DNFTT! DNFTT! DNFTT!
"The funniest thing about this particular signature is that by the time you realize it doesn't say anything it's to late to stop reading it..."
I truly think these challenge caches are the dumbest thing to come along from groundspeak . . . and they smack of desperation to try to get folks fired up about caching . . . when will groundspeak listen to the vast majority of folks who want virtuals to come back? I understand there was an abuse of virtuals . . . but it seems to me that the screening process can eliminate a lot of the old virtuals of telephone poles and stop signs if they had a requirement that the virtual had to provide concrete information of some sort and there was a compelling reason as to why a physical cache could not be placed in the location.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the realization that there is something more important than fear."
"Death is only one of many ways to die."
Will folks end up doing challenge caches . . . I suspect many folks will . . . simply to keep their number count up if folks start to do them.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the realization that there is something more important than fear."
"Death is only one of many ways to die."
I agree completely with this being stupid. Holy crap I agree with Brdad, I'll have to adjust my medication. I created this one just to see what it was all about. I agree completely.
Virtuals would be ice with an added requirement to enter a pass code in order to log the cache, like asking what the last two words are on the second line of the front plaque. Something like that would lock out anyone that could not come up with the correct words. Something like earth caches.
Maybe they will come to their senses.
I really need to check my meds now.
I have no enemies, but I'm intensely disliked by my friends.
I'm not advocating for Challenges in anyway, but I suppose for Paul Bunyan you could create a "Photo Challenge" instead of an "Action Challenge" and require people to take a picture of themselves in front of Paul for proof. I'd have to think that groundspeak would give challenge owners some more control over logs and such in the future.
The real problem is that Groundspeak wants to branch out from geocaching to interest more people, but they integrate all these features under the geocaching banner because its what they are know for and is their only popular product. It would be much more logical to split things up into their own websites and have a central website at Groundspeak.com for example to display users statistics, profiles, etc. From Groundspeak's theoretical core website you would then navigate to geocaching.com to find geocaches, or waymarking.com, or benchmarking.com to log a benchmark, or challenge.com to do challenges. Challenges, benchmarks, virtuals, etc are not geocaches. Each activity should have its own unique site, yet still be able to integrate with the other activities under a central Groundspeak umbrella.