Yup, I agree. (Believe it or not, by contradicting my own thoughts) I guess my point was that I believe that perhaps one character of the new code could be reserved for SOME type of identifier to help you quickly learn something about it. The state/country example was weak, I just wanted to get everyone thinking along these lines to see if anything else came to mind.

To help understand my thought, consider this: I don't know how many times I was driving, saw a waypoint pop up on my screen, stopped for fun to see what it was... After searching around for a bit I got disappointed, then returned to the Internet only to find out that it was a locationless or "puzzle" based cache that did not exist there. A simple character in the wapyoint number would have alerted me to this before I considered stopping. Just a thought.

TheWebbman

Webb Pickersgill

-----Original Message-----
From: az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com [mailto:az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com]On Behalf Of ken@highpointer.com
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 12:49 PM
To: listserv@azgeocaching.com
Subject: [Az-Geocaching] Problems with location based identifier

Another possibility (location based identifier): Reserve the first 2 characters as location indicators: AZ, PA, TX (states) and CH, IL, DU, RU (countries, etc.) This does however unfairly limit the number of caches within a state or country. As we all know, AZ would probably need more numbers than RI. ;)

I don't think that will work very well. You have correctly pointed out that large states may use up their allotment of numbers relatively soon, while small states may never use up their allotment of numbers. For example, Colorado used to assign license plate numbers based on the county that the vehicle was registered in, but abandoned that policy because urban counties have populations over 100,000 and thus were using up their allotted numbers, whereas some rural counties have under 1,000 people and thus used only a small percentage of their alloted characters.

Also, some countries codes you listed are the same as states - IL is also the abbreviation for Illinois, for example.

Ken (a.k.a. Highpointer)