Scott Wood wrote:

> At 05:04 PM 4/13/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>
>> a user rating system for the caches ... that way each user could 
>> actually give their own rating of how difficult etc they found the 
>> cache... and that way it would reprsent a more valid difficulty 
>> level...then the one submitted by the cache hider...
>
>
> That is something that has been talked about a lot over on the 
> geocaching.com forums.  Personally, I think it is a great idea.  There 
> have been a number of caches that I thought the ratings were way off.


I have been thinking about it for some time, and I really want to get it 
put on the site, but it's been quite some time that I have had enough 
time on my hand to do much of anything, except small things to 
azgeocaching.com.

Anyway, what got me thinking about it originally was the cache "Rim RR 
Depot" quit a long time ago.  That cache had several ways to approach 
it, and the way you might take if you were to go from when you reached 
the shortest point to the cache from the road (from the north east) like 
we did can, and almost was for me, down right deadly.  But if you were 
to approach from the north, it was much more safe, although fairly 
challenging, but you would quite likely completely miss the point of 
interest.  Then there was a trail that the head was located just north 
west of the cache, and would take you to the point of interest after a 
fairly short hike and then it was just a little of the challenging steep 
rim-side that you had to deal with.  There is also a 4th way to get to 
the cache that is a much longer trail, but I didn't ever go that route 
and can't say anything about it...  but the point is that this cache 
went from impossible to deadly, to challenging to easy all depending on 
the way you approached it.  I wanted to make a much more fine grain 
system that would allow for direction  or travel among other things to 
rate the cache.
The table mesa cache is another one that that should have seperate 
rating depending on if you approach it from the east or the west, since  
from the west is pretty much impossible if you don't have a high 
clearance 4x4, and from the east is just mearly difficult with a high 
clearance 2 wheel drive.   I also don't think you are a REAL cacher 
until you've done table mesa :)

Anyway, just some ideas that we had on additional ratings for caches:
-Difficulty of vehicle travel to the cache site
    -direction of travel
    -conditions
    -difficulty
    ...etc.etc
-difficulty of travel to the cache itself, once outside teh vehicle
    -direction of travel to the cache
    -conditions
    -difficulty
    ...etc.etc

maybe some possibly checkboxes that can give heads up on conditions that 
can change depending on the time of the year or weather conditions.
    stuff like:
    -extreme desert conditions, should probably not be attempted in the 
summer.
    -road impassible when raining..
I dunno, there are probably a billion of them, and most of them would 
have to some from suggestions from the mailiing list.

Then there are quite a few things that should be asked for reasons of 
handycaped accessability... frankly I had never thought about it, but  
there has been some very good points made recently on that subject.

Anyway, I would love to hear everyone suggestions on the subject, and 
maybe some day I can get the time to roll it into the site.  The 
additional ratings themselves aren't that big of a thing to add.  It's 
redoing the site to have logins, that will take quite a bit of work, but 
having a better idea of what it should be will be a huge step in the 
right direction.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek