[Az-Geocaching] The Future of Geocaching

[Farquhar, Larry]

"Geocaching" is extremely similar to "Letterboxing". The main differences
are Geocaching primarily uses GPS coordinates for the clue, and we exchange
trinkets instead of stamp images. I'm hoping Geocaching will continue to
follow the informality of Letterboxing. This includes none or little formal
organization, few rules (beyond common sense), and minimal costs to play.

Letterboxing has survived operating in this manner for over 150 years. The
number of letterboxes exceeded 10,000 many years ago (before Al Gore
invented the Internet). 

As long as Geocaching is fairly dependent on the Internet, there can't be
any enforcement of "rules" or "regulations". Common sense and peer pressure
is about all the enforcement there can be. If Jeremy started charging
anything beyond a modest fee to access geocaching.com or created a list of
strict "rules", most users would simply start going to other free geocaching
web sites. I've seen other web sites that list the placement of caches (but
geocaching.com is still the best). Jeremy is doing a GREAT job for keeping
geocaching alive. But nobody placed him in charge, or made him the ruler of
Geocaching. The few guidelines he provides are mostly common sense, and his
website has become the central repository of information. He's also become
the central spokesperson for Geocaching, working with various agencies to
help them understand and accept the game. 

I agree with Scott. Even though I can't see rules being enforced, make this
game too "regulated", and player's will simply leave Geocaching (and start
something new - maybe GeoStashing or GeoBoxing?). There's already a new
spinoff game called GeoDashing. Who knows, maybe this is just a passing fad.
Something new may come along next year.

Our best assurance to help insure acceptance of this game, is education. The
Geocaching community needs to continue to be conscientious about minimizing
the impact on the environment, continue to provide "suggested guidelines"
for cache hunters, and properly portray this game to the uninformed.

Okay - enough for this message. Can you tell I'm bored at work? I'm anxious
to go cache hunting this weekend!

Larry Farquhar
Team "Wyle E"
www.azjeeper.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Wood [mailto:wood@myblueheaven.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 12:32 PM
To: az-geocaching@listserv.snaptek.com
Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] The Future of Geocaching


At 11:35 AM 12/28/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Topics may include policies for placing caches in designated wilderness
>areas (there should be none is the obvious answer for me) and removing 
>caches or not placing them at all in fragile and/or high use conditions. 
>There might come a time when we are so large that a limit should be 
>imposed on the life span of a cache before it should be removed, or an 
>upper limit on the number

There was a very similar thread over at geocaching.com that I was very 
involved in.  My thoughts are that if the rules for placing and hunting a 
cache get so bad that it is no longer fun, most people will just stop doing 
it.  If that is the case, then it will cease to be a problem, if it ever 
was a problem to start with.
In liberty,

Scott

wood@myblueheaven.com
www.myblueheaven.com

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