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00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome. This is Inside Geocaching HQ from Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, one of the Lackeys who works for HQ, my geocaching username is Rock Chalk. Thank you for taking some time to listen to our podcast. This is our final reviewer chat. We have gotten to hear from many reviewers from around the world during this series of conversations, and here we have four more community volunteer reviewers to chat with: Private Curb from South Africa, that’s Bruce, Bunjil, from Victoria, Australia, Pete and Helen, Keystone AKA Dave, who reviews Ohio and Pennsylvania, and Geohatter or Paul, from the UK. So let’s get to it.

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01:11 CR: I’d like to start by hearing some stories about how a few of you started as community volunteer reviewers. Bruce down in South Africa, how did it begin for you?

01:22 Bruce: Well, I joined geocaching in 2008, a colleague at work introduced me to it and we used to go out at lunchtimes looking for new caches. The end of 2012 or 2011, our current Africa reviewer, Fish Eagle, was wanting to step down. And so Rodney took over, and 2012 was our first South African Mega, and he was just finding it very difficult keeping up with all the new caches that were being published. The community were basically looking to the reviewers for advice on where to put power trails and whatever else. So I think it was Rodney who put my name forward and sort of fast-tracked it. So I came in April 2012 and the Mega was in October, it was a great success.

02:16 CR: We have Dave, reviewer name Keystone, reviewing in Ohio and Pennsylvania. You have done this for 17 years.

02:25 Dave: That’s right, I’ve been at it for quite a while, and it’s wound up now being one of the more senior citizen reviewers, at least in terms of tenure. I started way back in 2003. At the time, I covered Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia all by myself. And fast forward to 2020, it now takes seven reviewers to cover the same territory because of the fantastic growth of geocaching. But I’ve kept my hand in with the Ohio team and the Pennsylvania team, and have given over wonderful West Virginia to one of my teammates.

03:10 Dave: It’s been very interesting watching the growth of geocaching over the years and I love reviewing today as much as I did when I was surprisingly asked in 2003 after going on a camping event with another reviewer sharing my tent with me and I had no idea he was a reviewer. And it turns out that was an audition and I got the phone call the following week.

03:39 CR: Pete and Helen down in Australia, I believe 2013 is when you got started.

03:45 Pete: Yes, we got started in November 2013. I can’t remember how many caches we’d actually found when we started, but we got brought on by the reviewer, Ministro, who was looking after Victoria, and I think he was looking after the ACT, and I think his wife was looking after Queensland. And the workload got a bit heavy, so we got a tap on the shoulder and here we are now seven years later.

04:12 Helen: That’s 10 less than…

04:15 Pete: Yeah, 10 less than Dave. But the area we review is the state of Victoria.

04:21 CR: And Geohatter, Paul, you review the United Kingdom and you’re part of a team there, and that must be nice to be able to bounce ideas off each other during the reviewing process.

04:34 Paul: Yeah, in the UK and Ireland, we have our own forum that we bounce things off each other about… And then obviously, anything that’s bigger than us, we will come to you guys in the HQ. It is nice having that sort of… Even though we are part of this global community, it’s nice to have our own little private group where we can bounce off particular UK and Ireland issues. And then anything that sort of affects everybody, we can go to the rest of you guys and say, “This is going on.”

05:08 Bruce: Well, for us as well, we also have an internal WhatsApp group for the Africa reviewers, and the joy is that because we speak with one mind, nobody’s been able to play us off one against the other. So if I say no to a cache and they go to Rodney and say, “Well, won’t you do it?” He says, “Well, this is what the guidelines say.” And we both… We all stick together so nobody can actually put a division between us in that.

05:40 Paul: We call that reviewer shopping.

[laughter]

05:42 Paul: We’ve had that happen to us, despite the fact that each of us has our own distinct areas that we deal within the UK, people have tried to come to another reviewer and say, “So and so says this, and so and so says that,” and trying to play us against each other. I’ll go, “Well, that’s their thing. Go and speak to them, it’s got nothing to do with me.” [chuckle]

06:08 CR: I don’t think I’ve heard that term before, that’s pretty funny. Well, given how many hours you all spend volunteering to review caches, I would fear that there could be a tendency to maybe get a little burned out on the game because you spend so much time, so much of your free time volunteering like that, and then in turn, maybe not playing as much, but each of you loves to geocache, which is such a great thing, and certainly is positive for the reviewing that you do, too.

06:39 Helen: You see what sort of people have decided to put out. You get it from the player’s perspective, and what they think or what other people think is important, and whether it takes you to interesting places or not. The change in mystery caches, even in the time we’ve been doing it is just incredible, where you can get your information, where you can hide coordinates in photos, and none of that was around when we started.

07:05 CR: And Dave, I mentioned before that you’ve been reviewing 17 years and playing even longer. How do you feel about how the game has evolved during that time?

07:17 Dave: Well, I think change is good. And for the people who complain that there are too many roadside park and grabs and not enough hikes, my answer is always, “Learn how to use the filter and search tools.” Those caches are still out there and they’re still being hidden. In my territory, Johnstown and Altoona, Pennsylvania area, up in the mountains, they’re very into hiding ammo cans way back in state game lands and state parks and state forests. Those caches are still being hidden. You just need to apply some filters to find them, and the tools that the site provides to do that have improved greatly over the years, so it’s just as easy. There’s more caches now of that type. There’s more caches of every type. And for the people who might not be able to do a 10-mile hike up a mountain, those park and grab caches, those cemetery caches, the historic marker caches also serve a great purpose so that geocaching can cater to more people and a more diverse audience, which ultimately I think is great for the sport.

08:35 CR: Speaking of diverse audiences, it’s such fun to have voices here from four different continents. Bruce in South Africa, one of the continents that I have regrettably not visited just yet, it’s always interesting to hear about how the game is played in different parts of the world. What about geocaching in Africa?

08:56 Bruce: Well, when you consider, I think that Africa area-wise is bigger than continental America, and yet so few caches. So our reviewing is the entire continent plus the Indian Ocean islands, so it is a huge area. So fortunately, later on, we got our earth cache reviewer, Africa Rocks. So he does a lot of work traveling through Africa, so he mainly picks up the rest of Africa reviewing, ’cause it was very difficult to review a cache in Kenya or Egypt or whatever, when you haven’t been there to know what local conditions are like and what restrictions there may be. So at least that fell on him and it worked very well. So we consider… So Rodney and I concentrate mainly on South Africa itself. And I think there’s just 20,000 active caches in South Africa alone.

10:00 CR: There are so many years of reviewing experience here. What are some of the points that you would most like to share with geocachers?

10:09 Pete: We would just say that the reviewer’s there to help you make the best of your placement that you can. They’re a knowledge source that you need to use and make good use of.

10:23 Paul: Well, from the outset, it’s obviously, “Read the guidelines, understand the guidelines, please,” [chuckle] is what I would say to people, because that is where we have to say no, if a cache goes against the guideline. Having people understand that before they jump in makes it a lot easier on us, ’cause we don’t have to do a great deal of work to publish a cache. We just have to make sure it does comply with the guidelines, and if you’ve already… If a hider has already done that, that’s brilliant. It makes easy work that we can then enjoy just reading the description, seeing where the location is, seeing why that person has picked that location, and then thinking, “I’d love to actually go there.” And that’s one of the things I do think, obviously, it’s not a review thing, but I do tend to think, “I’d love to go there and find that cache while I’m reviewing it.” And anything else, if they really have this… Really do need guidance, then just find out who your local reviewer is, send them an email. Speak to us. We are here, not just to be there when you submit a cache. We are here to help anybody with any cache-related queries.

11:40 Bruce: But for me, the thing I’d like to encourage the community, especially the newbies, they’ve got so much enthusiasm. I always try and say to them, “Well, rather find a few caches first before you try and publish your own. Get a feeling for the game,” ’cause they’re so… After their first find, they’re so fired up, they want to try out everywhere, and they’re not always the most ideal places or whatever. I sometimes try and just mute it sort of quietly and just say, “Just maybe find a few more before continuing with this, and get a feel for it.”

12:17 Helen: Encouraging people to go to events is a good way to link them in with other geocachers, so that it’s a face they can ask a question to, not a whole lot of mumbo jumbo of words, which that’s what it is to some people.

12:33 CR: I’d like to touch on the Geocaching forums. Paul started as a volunteer forum moderator before becoming a reviewer. Dave, you have been a forum moderator almost as long as you’ve been reviewing. And on the surface, reviewing and forum moderating may seem very different, but there do seem to be a lot of similarities as far as helping to provide education about the game.

12:58 Dave: Yeah, that’s the biggest impact I have as a forum moderator is answering questions and explaining the cache hiding guidelines. I do that as a reviewer, but it’s all one-on-one, so it’s in the context of a private conversation with that cache hider. Great, now that cache hider understands the reasons why we don’t publish caches hidden underneath highway bridges, but I’ve only reached one person. If I have that same conversation in the forums, thousands of people could potentially read that conversation. Even if they don’t participate, I think one of the benefits of the forums is that lurkers, people who read but don’t post, take back the information that they gain by reading forum debates to their local communities around the world, and I rely on those people to be the ambassadors of, “Here’s the latest and greatest answer on why we don’t publish caches under highway bridges, or why the cache saturation guidelines are as they are,” or whatever the issue of the day that’s being discussed in the forums.

14:10 Dave: I know I see quotes from forum discussions repeated into local Facebook groups, I hear it discussed at events, “Hey, I read about this in the forums,” somebody would come up and asked me about it. So I still believe that it has a great reach and great purpose even if the volume of postings has fallen. And I like being able to reach thousands instead of reaching people one at a time. It’s a great resource to get answers from experts about questions, whether it’s a particular brand of GPS or how to build a Wherigo cartridge or how to set up an Adventure Lab. You can get instant answers from experts. I’ve noticed in contrast, in Facebook groups, the quality of the answer you get depends on whether there’s a person in that local community who is an expert on Adventure Labs or Wherigo. If there is, great. But if there isn’t, the Geocaching forums are a great alternative.

15:20 CR: Well, as we wind down, any final thoughts to share with geocachers?

15:26 Paul: Yeah, I just say to people out there, we may hold the title of reviewer, but at our heart, we are cachers.

15:37 Bruce: Absolutely.

15:38 Paul: We were cachers first before, we are cachers first now. We love this game and we wanna keep playing it.

15:46 Bruce: And we love the community.

15:51 CR: There you go another fun chat with a great bunch of community volunteer reviewers. You can hear previous episodes of Inside Geocaching HQ with reviewers wherever you get your podcast or by visiting geocaching.com/blog/podcast. And as always, if you would like to get in touch about the podcast with a comment or a suggestion send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. From me and all my fellow lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

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00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello there, welcome. This is Inside Geocaching HQ, a podcast from Seattle. I trust that you are in the right place. If somehow you got here by accident, stick around, hear more about this great game that we play, the game of geocaching. My name is Chris Ronan. My user name is Rock Chalk. On this episode, we have another in our series of conversations with community volunteer reviewers. This one is with reviewers from Southern California, Utah, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Wyoming, Iowa, and a Geoaware, which is EarthCache reviewer. Now, you may wonder how we came to talk with these particular people. Well, we put out an invitation several weeks ago to the reviewer community. Anyone who wanted to participate could sign up for a time slot. And then we conducted several recordings, which you have been hearing over recent weeks. I’ve heard some good feedback about the episodes, which is always appreciated. This is something we may revisit from time to time because it’s always valuable to hear from reviewers and learn more about how to make the review process go as easily, as smoothly, as most efficiently as possible for everyone involved. So let’s get on to it, a conversation with six Geocaching and EarthCaching reviewers.

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01:44 CR: So we’ve got a full house with, I think, six community volunteer reviewers here, and they run the gamut of number of years that they’ve been doing it. We’ve got a couple that are relatively early in their reviewing career, and a couple that have been doing this for many, many years, and a lot of great insights to hear about. So just wanna start by going around, and everybody say a little bit about themselves, your reviewer name, where you review, how long you’ve been doing it, and how you got into this crazy volunteer role that you’ve been doing. So we’ll start with you, Becky.

02:22 Becky: Okay. Hi, my name is Becky. I am known as reviewer Bec. I’ve been reviewing for just a hair over 13 years, started July of 2007. I review for Wisconsin again, been doing it for quite a long time. It’s a great gig. I get the biggest kick out of it.

02:43 CR: BlueRajah, how about you? I think you’re next up on the seniority list in this group.

02:48 Dick: Yeah, my name is Dick Nielson. I’m from Utah, and I have done this for 11 years. I go by two monikers. So I go by BlueRajah and then Geoawareusa2. I’m not really even sure why I was chosen. I was just asked out of the blue, and no one’s ever explained why they went with me, why they were crazy enough. But I had been geocaching for a year when they asked me, and then it was about a year later that they needed help when the Geoaware was bringing in more reviewers for the first time to do EarthCache. So a few of us volunteered to be part of the first group of Geoaware reviewers.

03:37 CR: And we’ve got one other Geoaware here with us and that’s Brian. How did you get into this whole thing?

03:44 Brian: Well, I’m Brian. I am GeoawareUSA10. And, actually, I was approached by another Geoaware who was wanting to retire and tend more to her family and everything. So she actually had reviewed several of my submissions from my area as well, so she just wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing it. And I said, “Possibly. What do I have to do?” And she said, “Basically, kind of what you were doing before. Just except now, you would be the actual one looking at all the reviewing.” So I said, “Sure, why not? Let’s give it a try.”

04:19 CR: And that was relatively recently, right? Within the last couple of years?

04:22 Brian: Yeah, I actually started March of 2019, so just almost a year and a half now.

04:29 CR: Well, over on the West Coast, James, how did this whole reviewer experience begin for you?

04:37 James: I have been caching since 2005. During all of that time, had gotten to know Tom pretty well, who was Marko Ramius. And after about seven years or so, he called me up and said, “Hey, do you wanna be a reviewer?” And that’s largely how I got into it. It was sort of one of those questions that I had actually thought about quite a bit beforehand, what if they ask me? And to be honest, I didn’t have the answer when he asked. “I’m gonna have to think about that a couple of days.” It’s one thing when it’s an abstract question. It’s another when it becomes real.

05:18 CR: And you review in Southern California. How did the user name Lava Lizard come about?

05:25 James: In truth, it largely came about because the other 46 names that I picked before that were already taken. It actually came from a trip that I had taken the year before to the Galápagos Islands where lava lizards are largely the only kind of lizard that exists on the islands. I kinda liked the sound of it, so that’s where the name came from.

05:52 CR: Heartland Cacher, you’re in Nebraska, and folks are only going to hear this podcast, I think, but if they could see you with… You have the most… I’ll say the most impressive Zoom background of the group with what you explained to me is called Carhenge.

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06:09 Dick – Heartland Cacher: That’s correct. It’s in the western part of the Rosedale, up by Lancaster. They tell me it’s one of top tourist attractions in the state of Nebraska. I don’t know how many times I’ve been… It was never there before I started geocaching, but I don’t know how many times I’ve been there since. I started in March or April of 2006. I’ve been geocaching since 2003, and I don’t know if any of you remember, electric mouse, but she was reviewing in Nebraska… Well, I should say I review a Nebraska and Wyoming. But Carlene was reviewing in Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and she was getting ready to move to Illinois. And, one day we were at an event some place, I don’t remember where we were, and she said to me, “How would you like to become a reviewer?” And of course, I about fell on the ground and I said, “You better let me think about that for a few days, like some of the others did.” I came home, I talked to my wife, ’cause I knew she was gonna have to put up with it. And I really didn’t know what I was getting into. We had none of the tools like we have nowadays, we had to plot everything, I was using MapSource. I had to plot everything on MapSource if I wanted to see how close I was to another cache… It’s just so much better for everybody, reviewers and cachers alike the way things are now. They’ve improved so much over the years.

07:34 CR: And the newest reviewer in the group here is a Thingamabob. And I love that, that reviewer name. How did you get roped into this Bob?

07:46 Bob: They suggested that a husband wife team would work really well. My wife’s as much of a geocacher as I am, we geocache together, that’s how we met. Our wedding, four years ago was a geocaching event. We had one of our geocacher friends was the… Presided over the wedding. He helped us out. Yeah, we’re geocachers, we’re crazy geocachers in some ways. Then I received the phone call from Mark and he said, “Hey, would you be interested in… ” I was a little confused. But he was more clear and he asked if I would be interested and if my wife would be interested. My wife, her first name is Robin, and her reviewer name is Thingamajig. I came up with Thingamabob and she thought that was really neat and I thought it was neat, and it was an easy transition to put us both in as reviewers.

08:48 CR: There’s such a wide range of experience levels here. I’d love to hear a little bit from a few folks about what you love so much about it, what keeps you engaged with this volunteer position that you have. Becky, how about you?

09:02 Becky: I like to look at the geocaches because you get to see what somebody is… What they’ve created for you to see. And there’s usually a reason why they want you to go there. It’s like a little adventure, you get to go on. I can see where the coordinates are, I can see the location, I can see the puzzle, so I can really get a feel for why this is important to them, and that really keeps me going all the time, that and just the fact that, like Dick had said, everything is changing and evolving and getting better and better, so geocaches are getting better. They’ve got all of these gadget caches now, just things that are amazing that are nothing like the early days of finding a Tupperware container just out in the woods. It’s just something exciting every time I look at a cache page.

09:48 CR: BlueRajah, how about you Dick, you’ve been doing this for an awful long time too, what keeps you going with this whole thing?

09:57 Dick: It’s gotta be the people. You know, I’ve had the opportunity to do caches all over the western United States as a Geoaware, but I’ve also… Heartland and I both worked in Colorado and New Mexico for about a year, before a new reviewer was brought online and just the people, wherever you go, meeting them, the communication with them, everyone is just so great to work with. There’s always one or two people that don’t like the decisions that you make and will argue with you, but the people are just the best part about the whole game and then to see a new place that pops up, especially doing EarthCaches, because I feel like I know my state really well, but when something pops up in Montana or Idaho or just distant from me and I sit and go, “I have to go there now and see that, ’cause that’s really cool.”

10:56 CR: I don’t know if it’s possible to really answer this question specifically, but I wonder if we could maybe get a sense for how much of a time commitment this is, and I’m sure it varies based on the time of year, there’s certain times a year that are busier than others, and all that stuff, but James, for you, for instance, of how much time would you say that you spend going in and reviewing caches?

11:21 James: Well, it’s really changed considerably over the years. When I first started Markuranius and I had all of Southern California, and at that point, we were probably publishing at about 11,000 caches a year. And that doesn’t count all the ones that, of course, we didn’t publish. You’d open up the queue in the evening and you’d go, “Oh, crap, there are 80 caches in here.” And you can’t just let them slide because there’s gonna be more tomorrow and more the next day. Over time, a couple of things have changed, one is we brought in two other reviewers, so all of us have a little bit less share of the load, and for the most part, over those years, the number of caches that were being placed was going down. We’d still get these massive 2000 cache power trails sometimes, sort of the numbers have been coming down up until last March, and then something happened, I don’t know what, but suddenly the number of caches has jumped up again, and now you can open up the cue and find 40 caches in there. Whereas a year ago, I’d find 15. Now how much of a commitment, right now, I do two days of the week, probably about an hour and a half to get through 40 caches or so. And it really depends on what they are, so it’s a mix.

12:46 CR: Well, as I heard you talking there, I wondered about the geoawares in this group and the EarthCache review process, because I’m guessing that there aren’t a whole lot that you just do in a couple of minutes. Brian, how about that process and the amount of inspection that you do on EarthCache submissions?

13:09 Brian: I’m kinda one of those… With my email, I’m what you call a zero inboxer. I always wanna have my stuff all done as soon as possible, as soon as I see it. I try to stay on top of my queue pretty well. Definitely, it’s not just to get in there, quick 30 seconds, I have to look at it. A lot of this is back and forth two or three different times, changing their actual write-ups, maybe their geology might be off, permissions with the land owners and national parks and that kind of stuff. There are some that… I would say a quick one might be maybe 10, 15 minutes doing everything, and there’s some that… 10 months. There’s some that we kinda bounce back and forth and issues with this permission, that kind of stuff, and so yeah, it can be a pretty extreme gamut to run.

14:05 CR: I’m sure that when you all are out in the community, you’re asked questions about the review process, and I’m curious what kind of tips you give to people to help the process go as smoothly as possible. Bob, in the short time that you’ve been doing this, what kind of advice have you tried to pass on to people?

14:26 Bob: Maintenance is the one thing that I talk about all the time to geocachers. It’s the one thing I get asked about. It’s constant and continual. Every day, I go into that queue, every day I’m sending emails asking people to do maintenance.

14:42 CR: Yeah, maintenance is a really important topic. Becky, up in Wisconsin, what kind of advice do you like to give people about the review process?

14:50 Becky: Two big ones. First one is, if you have to ask me if you need to get permission, yes you need to get permission. Don’t always assume that you have permission because other people have placed caches there. Get permission. That’s my one big one and the second one is, when you submit your geocache, give me a good two reviewer notes. Let me know the nature of the location of the geocache. What does it look like? How is it attached? What kind of container is it? What is it near? It’s gonna help me more smoothly get through the process and get that cache published.

15:29 CR: From an EarthCaching side of things, Brian and Dick, what kind of advice do you give people for helping that process go smoothly?

15:37 Brian: I always tell people, start with a general idea, and once you have that idea, even before you start writing things up, start with the permission part. Because you don’t wanna get… A couple weeks into doing your thing and then all of a sudden that place says, “No you can’t do it here. I’m sorry.” Then they feel like they’ve wasted all that time and they kinda get frustrated with it and they may not pick it up again for a while and try to develop a different listing.

16:03 CR: How about you BlueRajah?

16:05 Dick: Read through all the guidelines in the help center first. There’s four little pages in the help center, five little pages that kind of give a lot of advice on how to do logging tasks, what kind of things are acceptable and what kind of things aren’t. And then if you know that when you’re… If you’ve read through those at some point… I’ve just been driving down the road and I’ll see something and I’ll say, “That’s cool. I wanna do that.” I already know that’s possible, and I can kind of get some ideas of how I want to structure the page or how I’d like to do the logging tasks and so I see… That’s probably one of the key things, ’cause I think I… At least here in the west, I get a lot of people on vacation coming to see Yellowstone or Zion or Arches National Park. They go in, they find something they think is very cool, then they go home, and it’s something they need a little more information, but they’ve already left the site and they’re not ever gonna go back. And then it’s really, really hard to try to assemble a logging task or something when they’ve already traveled 4000, 5000 miles back to Europe.

17:23 CR: Well, as we start wrapping things up here, I’d love to ask each of you if there’s one thing or a couple of things that come to your mind that you would love for people to know about reviewers or about the review process.

17:37 Becky: Probably number one, and I kinda thought maybe people realized it, but it comes up probably week to week, we don’t go to the geocache. We don’t go to every single one and look at it. We actually do it from our desktops. [chuckle]

17:52 CR: Heartland cacher. How about you, Dick?

17:54 DC: Becky took what I was gonna say [chuckle]

17:58 Becky: Sorry [chuckle]

18:00 DC: But one thing, like I said before, the communication is very important. And reviewer notes, and any way you can communicate with your reviewer because we’re here to publish caches and that’s what we like to do. I don’t know anybody that likes to archive caches as a first choice. Sometimes you don’t have any other choice, but we’d like to publish caches and if there’s one that needs some work that we can get back up and running, we like to help out as much as we can. We like to help you out. At least I do, anyhow. I think most reviewers try and help the people that are in their reviewer area.

18:32 CR: James, I don’t know if you guys make mistakes in sunny Southern California, but [chuckle]

18:36 James: Yes we do.

18:38 CR: What comes to your mind as something…

18:41 James: We just don’t talk about it much. The biggest thing I’d like people to know is just, we’re geocachers first and reviewers second, our goal is not to deny people their cache or to archive people’s caches, our goal is to help them have caches that are publishable and well maintained and so forth. That’s what we like to see. That’s what makes us happy. We are human, we do make mistakes. We do make a mistake, we’ll try to work with you to fix it and make it right.

19:11 CR: Brian, how about you?

19:12 Brian: I would say, I always tell people, don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know how to do something or they shouldn’t feel embarrassed about it, everybody starts from somewhere, and even if they ask me and I don’t know the question, I’m going to other reviewers who have done it longer as well, and the more that people will know about it, the easier it’ll come later down the road, so that’s my first thing is don’t be afraid to ask it, and if I don’t know the answer, I will find out the answer for you.

19:40 CR: Bob?

19:40 Bob: I guess there’s two points I would make. The first one is that everyone here that’s talking was once a brand new geocacher, and one of the things that I really enjoy right now is seeing all the new geocachers and going through the experience of that first geocache being published, and just simply because I remember it, I remember being a new geocacher, I remember the very first geocaches I put out and what I put into it. Right now, I even have a clipping that I use in my review in for new geocachers where I’ve had to kick their geocache back a couple of times. That just says, I was a new geocacher once before. Please don’t get discouraged, I’m here to help. The second thing, I guess, I wish I could tell everyone in the world is that by and far, I have found that geocachers and the geocaching community are some of the best people, nicest, most fun people that I have met in my life. I feel that way. My wife, Robin, Thingamajig, she feels the same way. You really have to experience that part of geocaching to know and understand it.

20:56 CR: BlueRajah, we’ll give you the last word here.

21:00 Dick: Communicate. That’s just so huge. I don’t know how often I’ve heard somebody say, “I was so upset with you about this cache or this experience”, and I was like, “Well, just communicate. Let me know. We’re not perfect, we make mistakes.” And I think that’s just so key, and the second thing with that is when we make mistakes or you feel like we’re too strict with a rule, I’ve never been upset at somebody for going to appeals, having somebody… Having somebody at HQ say, “No, that’s not right.” Or “Yes, that’s fine.” If somebody doesn’t feel we’re doing something right or feels like something… We’re being too harsh, talk to us and go to… If you need to go to appeals and see what comes of it.

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21:48 CR: That was a nice talk with Lava Lizard, James from Southern California. BlueRajah, who is also GeoawareUSA2, Dick from Utah, Beck or Becky from Wisconsin. Heartland Cacher, that’s Dick from Nebraska. Thingamajig from Iowa. Thank you to Bob and Brian, who is GeoawareUSA10 My thanks to all of them for taking time to participate. If you have an idea for the podcast, please drop us a line, podcast@geocaching.com is the address, and while we wait to see if you drop us that line, waiting patiently from me and my fellow lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

(link to podcast file)

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00:16 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. Hope you’re all doing well out there in geocaching land. I am Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. I and around 80 other lackeys work for Geocaching HQ in Seattle. And on our podcast, we are continuing to share conversations that I have had with community volunteer reviewers. This talk you are about to hear is with four reviewers based in the United States. ThunderEggs and GeoCrater, also known as Marla and Chuck, are based in Oregon, while NCReviewer and Dogwood Reviewer, Matt and Rob, are on the other coast in North Carolina. Of course, all reviewers bring their real life experience into geocaching, for instance, Marla worked in a hospital for many years, while Rob is a scientist at a university, which informed their approaches to reviewing during the pandemic. And that is one of many topics that we touched on during this episode. So here we go, me and four community volunteer reviewers talking geocaching.

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01:35 CR: Well, as it turns out, we have each coast of the United States covered here. We’ve got two reviewers from Oregon and two from North Carolina. And I was counting it up between the four of you, 115,000 geocaches that you’ve published since you’ve all been… The four of you, since you’ve been reviewers. And I think that means you must like doing it, but we can get into that. Let’s start with how you got into reviewing. And I wanna ask first, since you’re the elder statesman, NCReviewer, you’ve been doing this since 2005, so this year’s your 15th anniversary. And I assume that means you like this or there’s just something wrong with you. Which one is it?

02:19 Matt: A little of both most likely. I certainly enjoy it. I enjoy participating in the community. I enjoy being part of the reviewing team. I think at this point, some of my best geo pals are people I’ve met through the review team and some of the lackeys at HQ. I’ll point out Chuck’s got the elder statesmen in terms of age but I’ve got the seniority reviewer advantage just to clarify that part. How did I get into it? I got into geocaching, I saw an article in the newspaper back when we used to hold those things in our hands and get ink on our fingers on Sunday mornings. About three or four years later, a Virginia cacher named HuggieD1, who had by default taken on the mantle for reviewing Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder one day at an event and said, “Hey, I need some help. How about you do North Carolina and I’m gonna find somebody else for South Carolina?” And I couldn’t come up with a good reason to say no, so I said Yes.

03:20 CR: Yeah. Little did you know 15 years would go by. [laughter]

03:25 Matt: Other than my marriage, I believe it is the longest I’ve done any continuous one thing.

03:30 CR: Oh. Well, Marla, 2006 for you, and so you were right behind Matt there. How did you find your way into reviewing?

03:40 Marla: Well, I started caching because a friend told us about the hobby. And it took a little while, and we started caching and creating puzzle caches and whatnot. And then I got an email, ’cause as they say, anybody who volunteers for this job is really crazy. So I got an email from the then current Oregon reviewer that they needed help, and I pondered and consternated and contacted the Washington reviewer, who I knew through geocaching ’cause they used to come to an Oregon event, and reluctantly said, “Okay, we’ll give this a try.” And 14 plus years later, we’re still trying, so that’s a good thing. I would echo Matt’s statement that some of my favorite geo pals and best geocaching experiences have been with reviewers all over the world. It’s fun to be part of helping others enjoy the hobby in a way that very few people get the privilege of doing.

04:36 CR: GeoCrater, you’ve been at it for 12 years now. So what about yourself? How did this all start for you?

04:44 Chuck: Well, I started caching back in 2003. I had read an article on a Sunday morning and then Sunday evening, a couple of guys showed up and they had this geocaching.com sticker on their car. So I asked ’em, “Hey, what’s this? Tell me about it.” And a week later I was out… I had a GPS and was out caching. And then I was, as Marla said, one of those crazy people who volunteered to be a reviewer. I had let folks know, Marla included, that I would be interested. And months later, I got tapped on the shoulder. And in terms of the reviewer family tree, she is the branch that I tied to, so I’m very thankful for that. And I volunteer and do a number of different things, this is just one of about three or four, one of the longest ones that I’ve done and one of the most rewarding. I enjoy giving back to the game quite a bit.

05:48 CR: Well, Dogwood Reviewer is the “youngster” of the group in reviewer age. You’ve only been doing this, I’ll just put that in quotes “only” since 2012, but eight years of volunteering, what is your background in reviewing? How did it start for you?

06:07 Rob: You know Chris, I’ll take any time I’m junior I’m the youngest now because it’s very rare to get that. I started caching in… I actually have to have… I actually have to go and check really quick, in 2002. I actually saw it on a local cable program in outdoor activities North Carolina, it was actually a local cacher who was doing a little article about geocaching. I actually have not tracked down who that cacher was. I went out that afternoon and bought a GPS from Walmart, and much like you guys, it’s probably been one of the longest hobbies I’ve kept going. I tend to be quite, I tend to have quite the wanderlust with various things, and the caching’s definitely been a continuous hobby over the last kind of… Almost what feels like almost, it’s 20 years now. I came into reviewing because of Matt. I know I wasn’t his first choice in North Carolina, but I was good friends with him and we obviously cached a lot as part of a little group of cachers which was… Went on crazy trips. And that’s been… That was basically the origin of my reviewing experience.

07:10 CR: So between eight to 15 years between the four of you folks, and I already talked about how many, over 115,000 caches published. And so you obviously get something out of it, you must enjoy it, and I wonder if we can talk about just what compels you all to want to keep giving this amount of time, because it must be hours every week that… Some caches are easy to publish, but others take a lot longer and take a lot more back and forth with the cache owner, so maybe Marla start with you. What is it that makes you wanna keep getting up and doing this every day?

07:51 Marla: Again, contributing to the game, it’s always interesting. You meet an individual because you know a name that they’ve selected, you know nothing about them, although you can kind of infer approximately where they might live based on how far the cache is from their home. And then later, many of those folks, it’s like “Oh, you’re so-and-so.” And you see them in an event and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t just this nameless entity behind the computer, this is a real live person who has their own joy of the game,” and it might be a very different joy than my own joy, which is fine, it’s part of the diversity that’s great about this. So again, it’s that, it’s the community and action and feeling like I have a way to contribute to it in a way that is flexible with my own schedule. For many years, I was working 40 plus weeks, and so the reviewing was a nice way to use my brain in a very different way than work was, and on my own schedule, which is a big challenge for someone who’s working full-time.

08:55 CR: Matt, you started this, again 15 years ago, you couldn’t possibly have had any idea that… Well, I would assume you couldn’t have possibly had any idea that this is something that would be going on for this long. What is it that has made it so enjoyable for you to wanna keep at it for so many years?

09:15 Matt: There’s two aspects to it. One is that I keep on caching because I keep seeing new things that I haven’t seen before, I keep meeting new people, and the caches take me to unusual, educational, entertaining places that I wouldn’t find or see if there wasn’t a geocache hidden there for me to go after. I visited the family farm where Jesse and Frank James grew up in Missouri when I was out there for GeoWoodstock a few years back. I’ve gone hiking on trails outside of Seattle because I flew up there to meet some people and go caching. I’ve been out in one of the darkest places in the whole country in terms of light pollution to do some of the ET trail with Rob and a few other people. And if there weren’t geocaches to find in those places, I likely wouldn’t have traveled to some of those places, so that’s what keeps me playing the game. And as I tell people who claim I’m picking on them or making it personal, I really wanna publish your cache because the more caches I can publish, the more caches that are out there for me and everybody else to go find.

10:22 CR: Again, sometimes caches are pretty easy. Everything, all the boxes are checked, and the process is pretty quick. Other times it can be a little more challenging. What do you want cache owners to know about placing a cache before they go and submit it? What are the things that they can be doing to make that process go smoother for everybody? And start with Rob on that.

10:48 Rob: I can give you the obvious answer which is to read the guidelines. I think that the main actually is a point that Matt touched upon, actually, and I do a lot of that kind of reviewing for work as well, I’m a scientist, so I spent a lot of time reviewing other people’s work and giving feedback. And what people don’t realize in that career as well, is we’re not trying to ding, we’re not trying to reject stuff, we’re trying to make it better and trying to make it as good as it can possibly be. So in our world, in the caching world, that’s obviously to get published, and I think that’s a big facet that people don’t realize sometimes, is that we’re not there to try and block. We’re there to try and make the caches comply, keep the hobby going, not put the hobby into some kind of penalty box in certain areas. And that’s kind of really… And that also kinda goes back to why I enjoy it. I enjoy being some kind of steward of the game as well and making sure that it still exists. I don’t want my main hobby and obsession being screwed up by some very strange hides.

11:50 CR: Are there things that… Again, all of you have been doing this for many years. Are there things that you think about more now, or has your process changed over time compared to when you first started reviewing? Are there things that maybe you didn’t… That weren’t top of your mind back then, that are now or… I don’t know, I’m just curious about how, as you do this over the course of many years, how your approach to reviewing changes or how you’re able to for yourself make it more efficient or more enjoyable or whatever. Chuck, do you have any thoughts on that?

12:25 Chuck: Well, certainly the obvious change recently is the whole COVID issues. With the country and the world locking down, reviewing has changed significantly during this period of time. You wanna make sure that people are… Remain healthy. So there are caches today that Marla and I are not publishing in Oregon due to social distancing requirements and things like that, so a cache in the front yard of the cache owner would have been fine this time a year ago, but we’re not listing it for those social distancing reasons today. In terms of the overall game, I would say that the tool set that we have today is significantly better than what it once was, certainly a decade ago. It is easier to see things, to learn things, but still, one relies on the input from the cache owner as to where they hid it, how they hid it, why they hid it. And if those folks could provide that information upfront, in terms of, do they have permission? Have they buried it? How is it attached to the tree? Etcetera, etcetera. That would help us speed the process along and get their listing listed faster.

13:50 CR: Well, and you mentioned COVID. We might as well talk about that a little bit because that certainly is something that the impact has been different in different places all over the world. And by extension, the impact on Geocaching has varied as well, and so we’ve got two reviewers from Oregon two from North Carolina. How have you all tried to navigate this whole thing, just strictly from a geocaching standpoint? We get into life stuff too, but how have you guys tried to navigate it? How have you gotten feedback from other reviewers around the world and from HQ and trying to make sense of all this from a reviewing standpoint?

14:34 Marla: One of the things in my former day job was working in a hospital. And part of that responsibility included being part of the hospital command center, and as you can imagine, the hospitals were early in their understanding of COVID and the implications. And shortly after the command center opened back in March, I called Chuck and said, “Oh, what are we we gonna do about this?” And we had several lengthy phone calls, we live about 100 miles apart, and we said, “Well, what about this? What about this? Let’s try this.” And then I think he did the first draft, but we both edited it enough that it’s got some of both of us in, and we said, “Well, this is how we’re gonna do it while we’re in full quarantine.”

15:18 Marla: And then Oregon announced, Well, this is the reopening process. So then we got back on the phone and we said, “Well, what changes for the areas that are reopening sooner versus the ones that are not reopening?” And of course back then, we hadn’t really dealt with the fact that some might re-close, but we’ve continued to evolve it, much like the overall guidelines evolve. Somebody writes down some things and says, “This is what’s okay, this is what’s not okay,” and then you encounter something new and you adjust. We’ve probably had more communication in the last three months about, “Do you think this one is publishable in so and so county?” Whereas pre-COVID, I would know I can publish this or I can’t publish it.

16:06 Rob: So, I was gonna echo what I think Marla said about what’s been really good for me is the flexibility of this “job”. But my life experience got very much changed when COVID happened, much like Marla’s did, and we ended up having to mobilize a lot of stuff at work and really kind of changed tack into what we… I normally research things like burn injuries, but I’m very much involved with a lot of groups here who do coronavirus research, and we’ve actually be researching coronavirus in this institution for 30 odd years. We are probably one of the best places for that work to happen. And I ended up running the central processing lab, but actually collected and distributed COVID-positive samples to other groups working here. So, I got really, really busy, Matt… And that’s just a reflection of how we’ve worked together over the years, we were able to just… Matt basically said, “Let me do this, let me just handle reviewing for a couple of months, three months, however long it takes.”

17:02 Rob: So Matt let me have a breather and really focus on work. It was good to see other places and how they’ve responded to it. I’m still very much torn. I love to go to events. I think events are completely inappropriate at the moment. This is still very much on the increase in this first wave. We’re gonna have issues next year as well. So I personally think that it’s, local laws aside, I think the all regional events should be, basically have a moratorium on them for at least six months plus, if not longer. But again, that’s the scientist in me talking, but the geocacher in me obviously wants to go to Georgia, wants to go to Seattle, but I just feel a bit that that’s completely inappropriate at the moment.

17:46 CR: Now, each of you can bounce ideas off each other, Marla and Chuck for Oregon, and then Matt and Rod from North Carolina, but then to have this larger community of reviewers, hundreds of people all over the world to be able to get feedback from, must be a really helpful thing.

18:03 Chuck: Oh, it is. Especially for… Even though most of us are a decade or close to a decade of reviewing, there are always new situations. And this is at least for me, my primary means of getting feedback on whatever is new. You can take it and say, “Hey, what about this cache, is it publishable?” Because again, that’s the idea, or how can it be salvaged? And other reviewers globally have perhaps seen the situation, perhaps not, but they can add their two cents as to how we can coach the cache owner to make sure that it meets the guidelines and to get it listed. That was the aim.

18:49 Marla: One of the people that’s become a dear friend of mine, and I know Matt’s and many other reviewers, is an Ontario-based reviewer, and he regularly says things like, “Geocaching is a global game played locally.” And recognizing different jurisdictions and different cultures and the like, while the guidelines are universal, certain elements of the implementation vary by jurisdiction, and so… But yet it’s important that collectively the reviewers worldwide are as reasonably consistent as possible, notice I don’t say 100% consistent. And so it’s really helpful sometimes we learn that, “Oh, in Oregon, we’ve been really lax on X, Y, Z, and everybody else is strict, and maybe we need to rethink that.” Or, “We’ve been really strict and everybody else is lax, maybe we need to rethink that.” So it’s really helpful to get those other perspectives.

19:46 CR: So I think what I’m hearing from all of you is, whether it’s COVID or non-COVID times, read the guidelines and get familiar with the game a little bit before… As exciting as it is to think about going out and hiding a cache as soon as you can, have your feet in the water for a little bit longer before you start with that part of the game.

20:08 Rob: Yeah, but as we’ve all seen, there’s always chat about should there be a minimum number of caches you find before you hide some. I think I’m definitely in the camp of “no”. I’ve found caches hidden by people which are absolutely remarkable hides, and I’ve only found two or three caches. Again, it’s hard to have one brush that paints all, but, yeah, certainly familiarity of the game, read the guidelines, at least very much the basics about hiding the cache not too close to another, there’s plenty of stuff they can read up about. And I like the videos which Groundspeak have done… Geocaching have done, which kind of really ease people into the hiding aspect now.

20:48 Marla: And I also really like the notion that, and it’s right there in the guidelines which I just pulled up, that Briansnat, a charter member has said, “When you go to hide the geocache, think of the reason you’re bringing people to that spot. If the only reason is for the geocache, find a better spot.” Many new and experienced cachers look to hide things in parks, in natural areas, and whatnot, and most cachers prefer those hides to the ones in parking lots or in guard rails in places that don’t have a spectacular view. They’re all within the guidelines, so we publish them, but if somebody brings me to another parking lot of another grocery store…

21:33 Rob: Super quickly. So whenever we see a zero-zero hider, so the first cache they’ve hidden, where Matt and I always send them a welcome note, which is like a block of text, we personalize it a little bit with their name, et cetera, but we always include Brian’s quote in that email as the parting words that basically kind of follow this advice. But yeah, I enjoy finding caches, I mean any kind of cache. I’m somewhat of an omnivore when it comes to cache finds. But yeah, I’m with Marla. I still would prefer to go somewhere more natural, nice view, somewhere interesting, and not the kind of Walmart parking lot.

22:10 CR: Well, before we wrap up, I’d just like to ask each of you if there’s something or some things that we haven’t touched on that you would just like people to know about reviewing and about what you do. It may be something that people don’t know, it maybe something people don’t realize. Marla, is there anything that comes to mind for you on that?

22:30 Marla: I think something that a lot of new cachers don’t realize when they see that the reviewer has very few hides and/or very few finds, like, “How come this inexperienced person is reviewing?” And so my profile even says, “Don’t believe everything you read, my player count shows that I’m an experienced person,” and so that’s one important thing. Your reviewer may look like they’re zero-zero in terms of hides and finds, but they’re not. And then the other thing, at events when we can go back to doing those, I love what Matt sometimes says about the different hats. So sometimes I wear a shirt like this, that’s community reviewer, sometimes I specifically don’t, but if we’re at an event, chances are we wanna enjoy it also, and we’re happy to do reviewer questions at times, but we’re also a regular cacher and a regular member of the community, and wish folks would respect that as well.

23:27 Chuck: One of the things that we haven’t talked about at all is the other half of the job, is sweeping. We reviewers have the responsibility to remind cache owners of their obligation when they place a cache. You can’t just, or shouldn’t just put it out there, and then ignore it. If it goes missing, if it gets damp, if it gets damaged, the cache owner has the responsibility to go out and fix it, and address notes as they come in on the cache log. And we’re the reminders, if you will. So as I cache, if it gets identified to us as having issues, we will put a little nag note out there. It is not because we’re being mean, it’s not because we wanna hammer someone, we want to assure that the next cacher’s experience with your cache is a good thing, but if you go out and you find the first five caches that you find are soggy, moldy, broken, that’s going to discourage that next cacher. So we want you as a cache owner to be responsible, take pride in your cache, take care of your cache.

24:47 CR: Well, this has been very enjoyable for me, and I think the community will have enjoyed the opportunity to get to know each of you a little bit more, and thank you for your time, not just with this, but again, for this collective amount of time that you’ve given to the community and the over 100,000 caches that the four of you have published. It’s just amazing, and you all deserve a lot of thanks for all of that, but then also just for the time that you’ve given here to share a little bit about yourselves here on this podcast. So thank you.

25:20 Rob: Thank you Chris.

25:22 Marla: Thanks.

25:23 Chuck: Thanks Chris.

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25:25 CR: Another interesting conversation with some interesting people… ThunderEggs and GeoCrater based in Oregon; NCReviewer and Dogwood Reviewer in North Carolina. I hope you enjoyed that. More reviewer interviews are on the horizon, so keep an ear out for those. If you would like to share any feedback about our podcast, send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Thanks for listening, we really do appreciate it. From me and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

(link to podcast file)

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00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the 80 or so lackeys who works for Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Of course, we’re all still working from home right now, but the podcast rolls on remotely. And today, I have for you another conversation with community volunteer reviewers. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to interact with volunteers almost every day from all over the world and I hope you find it as interesting as I do to hear about what they do for the game and why they do it. This recording includes reviewers from four countries, Italy, Norway, Canada and the United States. Let’s get to it.

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01:06 CR: So we have reviewers here from several different countries, which is really exciting to get all these viewpoints from different parts of the world. And as we start, I’d like to just ask each of you to give your reviewer name, where you review, how long you’ve been doing it for and if you can remember back to how you started reviewing, maybe how you were asked or why you decided to say yes. [chuckle] Let’s start in Southern California with Marko Ramius, Tom.

01:39 Tom: Hey. Hi, my name is Tom and I’m Marko Ramius, my reviewer name for regular geocaches and also GeoawareEU1 for EarthCaches. Let’s see, my reviewing territory is Southern California, which starts at 36th Parallel if you will and everything south in California. Along with three other people, we have a team of four people for Southern California and I’m the longest standing, I guess, reviewer for that area. I was… I got my account opened in January 31st of 2006, I think it was. I’m coming up on 15 years, I guess in 2021 if we can ever get out of 2020. It seems like if I go back in time, this guy named West Coast Admin was the reviewer for all of the West Coast of the United States I think and he was getting burned out. He was just looking for some help and I think he asked somebody else in Southern California and they said, “No, but maybe FlagMan will do it.” That’s my player name. And so he called me up and asked me if I’d be interested. And I thought, “Well, sure. Why not? See what it’s like.” I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years and reviewing has really changed dramatically over the years and the tools that we have now are light-years ahead of what we had back then.

03:06 Tom: And some of the things we look at are a lot different than we did before. I guess the reason I wanted to do it, well, partly because I thought it was sort of an honor to be asked, but in addition to that, I just thought this was a great, great sport that I am involved in and I’d like to have an opportunity to give back to the sport and the game that’s really been a lot of fun for me.

03:31 CR: Let’s check in with Hans Christian in Norway.

03:35 Hans Christian: Yes, hello. My reviewer name is Hexa Nomos and I’ve been reviewing for a little bit more than seven years. I am one of six reviewers from Norway and I think on the statistics, Norway is Country number eight or nine or ten or something. Geocaching is really popular in Norway and also in other Nordic countries. We have a team of six members on the reviewer team and we also publish geocaches for the Spitsbergen islands blowing Norway in the North, but we have a split, the maintenance sweeping work, between us and fixed counties. I think I asked one of the older reviewers once on an event or something. And the year after, I was asked to join the team and I was very honored, of course. I think the driving force is to give something back to the community, the geocaching community so that was my goal then and it’s still is, trying to educate and trying to solve the big and small issues along the road.

04:53 CR: Staying over in that general part of the world, we have Andrea from Italy.

05:00 Andrea: Yes. As Chris said, I’m a reviewer for Italy and I’m a part of a team of three people. We also review the microstates inside Italy, San Marino and Vatican. I’ve been a reviewer since February 2008. It’s about just a little bit more than two years. And recently, during lockdown, we just decided to share an account for EarthCache reviewer for Geoaware and Italian Geoaware because before it was covered by Tom. Italy was covered by Tom. I’ve been asked by the first Italian reviewer, Kazuma to become a new reviewer about two years ago as I said. I had the chance to meet him because we were both part of a scientific nonprofit association. We had the chance to get to know each other. And when he decided to retire from his reviewer role, he asked me and I was the one to take his place mostly. I was very well, very much happy to be asked. I’ve always wanted to see how the game is from the other side and I like this part of the game, mostly in the way of helping people to publish a cache, to educate them about how to follow the guidelines, how to improve their listings and their caches to make them fit the guidelines more. And also I like very much to see what the caches that are sent to review because I always live geocaching as discovering of places, of stories. And so reviewing caches from all around the country, I had the chance to know a lot more than just finding caches.

06:49 CR: And we also have from Ontario, Canada, we have Cache-Shadow, Roy.

06:55 Roy: Well then, yeah. So my player name is RCA777, and reviewing, as Chris said, as Cache-Shadow since 2011, I think nine years, we’re at almost, almost 10. So I first got into the game itself, a family member had bought a GPS, and had actually called me to look up some coordinates on geocaching.com for them, and I found it interesting. I went with them, loved it, and then a few years later, two of the Ontario reviewers, there are currently three, there used to be four, they had seen how I had worked with the community and organized some events and thought, “Well, perhaps I could help out in a capacity for tidying up caches that had been abandoned.” So we call it sweeping. I was quite good with automating tools and working through computer programs, was very good at dealing with people in the community, and I said “It sounds like a good mix.” And I tackled that fairly quickly, and then found that I could probably offer more if I started actually reviewing caches, not just tidy them up.

08:00 Roy: And I was tapped on the shoulder and the qualifications essentially being that I’d like to work with everybody in the game, and I just wanted to give something back, and same as everybody else, it’s… The game made such a difference to me, it gave me this extra community that I could be a part of, it let me make great friendships. And to this day, I’ve traveled the world, seeing people I’ve met through the game, and just having that tap on the shoulder is a great privilege and a great honor, but I actually do something and not just sit at home and talk about it. And particularly within our reviewer team, we’re all different opinions. And so we all talk about different way things could be done, and it was a great opportunity for me to take that and use that voice and HQ listens to voices. And that was one of the other things I thought I could probably do about making the game more of what I thought it could be and other people thought it could be. And here we are, almost a decade later.

08:57 CR: Each of you has mentioned that you review as part of a team. And I’d like to ask a little more about how that works, as far as bouncing ideas off each other, things… Just how does the team dynamic work for reviewing, Hans Christian, in your area? How does that work, being part of the Norway team?

09:18 HC: In the Nordic countries, we used to have an annual meeting, most of them, both the Swedish, and the Finnish, and Danish, and Norwegian reviewers meet once a year, at least on a four-year rotation. We move through the countries, and that has been very good, both socializing with your own team and also the other local teams. And we have, of course, advantage with the languages, the meetings are in English because of the Finnish reviewers, but I think that’s a good thing. In addition, the Norwegian team also has an annual meeting, where we meet, and we have also a third meeting and a more technical meeting dealing with the software, the new sweeping system and so on.

10:06 CR: We have a great range of reviewing experience here from, Andrea, who just started within the last couple of years. Tom, I think you said you’re coming up on 15 years. I’m curious to ask a few of you how reviewing has changed over time. Roy, you’re right in the middle, I think, of the experience levels here. How would you say that reviewing has changed in your eyes, in the time that you’ve been doing it?

10:32 Roy: I think the way that players approach the game is a little different today than it was, say, 10 years ago as a player or even nine years ago as a reviewer. And I think that it’s easier for people to be involved in the game, and therefore they may not spend as much time making themselves aware of the nuances or of the guidelines, because they’re excited, they’ve got something that is easily available to them, and they just wanna go out and do it. And it’s a great thing. Whereas in years gone by, playing the game involved an investment. You’d buy a GPS unit, and that was your only option, and that wasn’t necessarily a cheap investment. And then you would painstakingly go through all the different requirements of playing the game. So on the reviewer side, the change in approach of geocaching being more accessible, sometimes can mean that the way that you take care of the reviews, you gotta ask more questions, because people have a tendency to want things now, which makes perfect sense.

11:34 Roy: But as far as being in the reviewer seat, the improvements in technology, and by technology, it really is the software environment, as HQ have released updates for players to improve the game, maps, features, etcetera, etcetera, they’ve not left reviewers behind, because they also improve tool-sets that we use on our side, which aren’t vastly different from what players use, just a few more extra buttons perhaps. Those have increased along at a similar pace. And so we’re now able to get more information upfront, to be able to help a geocacher get the cache published. Whereas back in the day, you might be taking information you’ve been provided and copying and pasting it into your own software or another third party tool. So that’s definitely changed, is there’s more of a… I guess from reception to publish can be more of an automated process, but you still need those eyes to read the cache pages and that certainly hasn’t changed.

12:34 CR: Andrea, you had mentioned earlier that before becoming a reviewer, you were curious about what it might be like. Is it what you expected? Is it significantly different than what you thought it might be?

12:48 Andrea: When you think about what a reviewer could… What being a reviewer could be, you always think about the good parts, like knowing the back side of the game. Then later you realize that it’s not only that, but I’m also trained in martial arts, I’m a martial arts instructor. I think it’s more or less the same theme. In martial arts there are levels like the belts in karate or something like that. The more you have a higher belt, it’s not about having better perks, better things for you but the higher the level, the higher the responsibility you have toward your community, toward the game itself.

13:33 CR: I know all of you attend events in the community, you’re very active in your local areas, I’m curious, when you meet people in the community, what are the most common questions that you hear from players? Hans Christian.

13:49 HC: People ask us about different things like how long we used to go through a cache page, what we look for, and some are very curious about the tools, but I reply that the tools are the same as you use, but we have a few more bells and whistles as someone said earlier. I think people are very polite and some ask questions and but I think generally, the community think we’ve done a fairly good job. It’s very good when you get some positive feedback. To be honest, I expected more negative feedback, but we try, well, at least myself, I try to treat people in a good way, and I’ve been working as a teacher for many years and perhaps that helps.

14:41 CR: Roy, I am reminded of a time, a few years ago when I had a chance to attend an event with you in Canada, and I was struck by how you seemed almost eager to engage people in various topics, some of them very, very challenging. It was something that you seemed to really enjoy and the folks that were there seemed to get a lot from it too.

15:05 Roy: Yeah, I’ve always taken the approach that if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone else, you have a better idea of how you can make those shoes more comfortable for them, and I do this in my own work as well as with my reviewing. I try and create an environment where the geocaches know that I respect that they are what makes the game happen, and I just hope that they respect that my reviewer hat when it’s on my head is doing its best to fulfill a role and enforce the guidelines. But there’ll always be situations where it might be not a one or a zero, it might be some middle ground or some gray area, and without our reviewer team, we take approach, the three of us that we like to try and nail down as many gray things as possible and make them one color or another. And so I find the best way to do that is to go and put myself out there and say, whether it be on social media ’cause I’m quite active in groups in Ontario here, “Do you have any questions?”

16:07 Roy: “Well, what can I help answer now, ahead of time to get ahead of your stresses that you might perceive are going to happen that may not.” And the reception has always been great. I’ve had people who, they’ve got their heart and their emotion, their soul into their design of a geocache, and it may not be guidelines-compliant for something that… It could be something they’ve overlooked or it could be a nuance they weren’t aware of and they may obviously be frustrated for a few moments, but invariably the end of the conversation is a thank you or they’ll see me in person at an event and go, “Listen, I’m really sorry if I gave you a hard time.” Like, I get it, I totally understand. And so I’ve just found that being out there and being, I guess, attainable in my own time really helps keep the community up-to-date and informed and at the same time lets you bring back things to the reviewer team so we can say, “You know what, that person’s got a point, what’s a good way to address that within our region” or even go to HQ and say, “You know what, what’s a good way for us to look at this maybe outside of our bubble of Ontario, Canada?” And yeah, I love events for that.

17:16 CR: Since I have a couple of EarthCache reviewers here, I’d like to ask about the EarthCache process because I will admit I’m completely intimidated by it. I don’t feel like I could personally hide an EarthCache ’cause it just seems so overwhelming to me. Tom, I’ll start with you. What are tips that you give to people when it comes to trying to successfully navigate the EarthCache review process?

17:39 Tom: Oh, well, that’s a… Very few earthcaches get approved on the first round. [chuckle] I must say that unless it’s an experienced hider of earthcaches. Instead there are some technical requirements, the reason that a cache get thrown back or pushback is that they haven’t provided an adequate science lesson on the cache page. It’s not good enough to just point out a location and say “Oh, is this cool” and answer some questions about the geology. There has to be like a robust science lesson about this specific site that could be reviewed or the cacher when they go to the cache they will be able to look at this particular location, find something very interesting in a geological manner and be able to answer questions about it that can only be answered if you’re at that specific location and the questions relate to the science.

18:37 Tom: That’s a… It’s a long-winded way of saying EarthCache guidelines pretty clearly state that you need to have the specific science investment and logging task that relate to the science lesson that also prove that you visited the site. And that’s… Those are the primary issues. Once you get past that then the other sort of technical things that we ask for is if it’s in a foreign country, then you have to have a listing in the local language, and you can have any other language you want and for me, I need English ’cause I don’t speak any other languages. So I ask for an English translation. And then also that you provide the answers to the logging questions in a reviewer note that will get deleted when the earthcache is published. So those are the issues that I see mostly.

19:26 CR: Andrea, is there anything you would add to that?

19:28 Andrea: Well, I mostly agree with Tom. The main issue is that people hardly find a connection between the place and the geological science lesson. And sometimes they are just trying to publish a cache that, they could not place as a traditional, they are trying to make it an EarthCache, so they can… Publish it anyway, but further more a general way, I would say that the same tips that I would say to a normal for normal viewing, like learn about the guidelines and about what you’re doing, and mostly communicate with your reviewer.

20:11 CR: While we wrap things up here, I could talk to you guys for hours, but, I want you to get on with the rest of your day, but, I’d like to just ask each of you if there’s anything that you wish people knew about the reviewer role, about what reviewers do, or about… Anything people can do to make reviewing smoother just any thoughts that you might have about what you do and why you do it, and maybe something that people don’t know about what reviewers do Tom, we’ll start with you.

20:43 Tom: The biggest thing that I would like people to know about reviewers, is that we’re on your side. We’re on the side of the person trying to hide the cache. We want caches to be published because we’re cachers ourselves we love to go caching. And the last thing we want is to be able to do is to… We’re not looking for ways to prevent a cache for being published, we’re, looking for ways to get caches published that fit within the guidelines.

21:09 CR: Hans Christian, what are your thoughts on that?

21:12 HC: I already told to them to in… This team, we’re all on the same team. There are not two teams there is only one team currently working on the same team. So I think being friendly with especially new comers, try to guide them regarding the guidelines and the idea of the game, if we need to tell them that, to act family to them. If you get a strange questions, try to always answer polite if I have a bad day, perhaps I should not review that day. And I think act positive and try to be a good guide for them, to guide them. And I think, for new comers it could be positive to join in some local events and to try to talk to a local experienced new cachers to get advice from them.

22:15 CR: Andrea, what are your thoughts on that?

22:17 Andrea: Well, Tom and Hans Christian just said pretty much what they think, learn and communicate the two main things that the geocacher should do when he wants to hide a cache, and with those, you will see the improvements in the caches in the whole game.

22:38 CR: Roy.

22:39 Roy: Reviewers support geocaches as much as they can, geocachers are the ambassadors of the game, every geocacher has it within them to make the game the best it can be. But reviewers themselves, they’re not infallible, and the reviewer a hat, when you’re wearing your reviewer a hat, you have a set of guidelines you’re working with to try and stop there from being absolute chaos, so there are different things in different places that work in different ways. So when I think of reviewers, first of all, it’s a volunteer role, the hours are very flexible to vacation times unlimited, but a lot people don’t realize that the pay is not that great at all because it’s a volunteer role. I put myself in a position when someone says what it’s like to be a reviewer, or could I ever be reviewer, say, absolutely. If you love the game and you’ve got a great knowledge of the community and the guidelines, that’s fantastic, but it’s really almost a customer service role and that you are trying to make the experience better everybody. And for some folks that itself can be intimidating, and for others, it just seems to be right up their street, and I’m here right now with a group of folks who definitely understand what it’s about. It’s a pleasure.

23:56 CR: That was Tom, aka Marko Ramius, aka GeoawareEU1 from California. Hans Christian, aka Hexa Nomos from Norway, Andrea aka Giulia_Tofana from Italy, and Roy also known as Cache-Shadow from Ontario, Canada. More reviewer talks are on the way. Stay tuned for those. If you have an idea for the podcast or any feedback on the podcast, we would love to hear from you, send a message to podcast at geocaching.com. In the mean time from myself and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

(link to podcast)

[music]

00:14 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast about the goings on at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My user name is Rock Chalk. And on this episode a special treat, I am having a conversation with a number of Geocaching volunteer reviewers from around the world. This is the first of several conversations that I’ll be sharing here on the podcast. These are the people who spend countless hours reviewing cache submissions, serving the geocaching community, and just doing a lot of really great things for the game of geocaching. Through the magic of Zoom, I have connected with volunteer reviewers from countries all over the world. And in this first conversation, I am chatting with folks from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Arkansas here in the United States and Israel. And in future episodes, I will share conversations with reviewers from even more countries as we get some really great insights into what these volunteers enjoy so much about being community volunteer reviewers. So I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.

[music]

01:40 CR: Okay. Well, we have a very internationally diverse conversation here with reviewers in four different parts of the world, and I think it’ll be great to hear the different insights that you all have and a lot of, a ton of experience here among this group. So let’s just start by everybody introducing themselves. I’ll start with Urs. What is your reviewer name? Where do you review? And how did you get started in this whole community volunteer reviewer role?

02:12 Urs: Yeah, my name is Urs. My reviewer name is srebeelis. And I am part of the team that reviews in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. I think I’ve been doing it for three or four years. I’m not even sure without checking. And I got into it by being asked by my colleagues who are reviewing in Switzerland. They had a vacancy with somebody stepping down, and they approached me. And actually the first time they asked me, I turned them down because it was just not a good time in my life. We had just bought a house and moved and I didn’t think I’d have the time, and then a year later they came back and asked again and I said, “Yes,” and here I am.

02:55 CR: Rene, what is your reviewer name, and how did you get roped into this whole thing?

03:02 Rene: Well, my story is quite similar. My reviewer name is Diogeones, that’s the Dutch pronunciation, or Diogenes for the English audience. I became a reviewer I think almost six years ago, and like Urs, I was asked by other reviewers because I did a lot of work and two little hands. So I just stepped in, and unto today, it’s a fantastic job.

03:33 CR: That’s great. Jonathan, how about yourself?

03:38 Jonathan: I’m the reviewer for Israel. So I have a little bit of a different story from others because caring for an entire country changes your perspective in the way you deal with the job. So. My reviewer name is Matmonai. Everybody in Israel knows me very well here. I think I have a large fraction of the population here, the geocacher population on my cell phone on quick dial. So I can tell them, “You’ve done a bad job here. You’ve done a good job there.” I can ask for clarifications. It’s really a different job in my case, I think. So my name Matmonai is Hebrew for… It’s actually a very interesting word. It’s the person whose job is to deal with treasures. Okay. There aren’t many languages where there’s a word for that, but there is in Hebrew. So I grabbed it. Everybody really likes it, I think. And, yeah, I’ve been doing it ever since and been involved for about five years.

04:43 CR: And I saved for last, the one reviewer name that I feel confident in pronouncing without asking for help, and that [chuckle] is Chuckwalla from Arkansas. Hello, Frank.

04:56 Frank: Hi, this is Chuck Walla. As Chris said, I’m the reviewer for Arkansas, and I also review for Oklahoma, which for those folks in other parts of the world that don’t know the US, they are neighboring states. I’ve been the reviewer for Arkansas since 2006. I guess I’m the old man in the group here. And Oklahoma I picked it up in 2017, so three years there and 14 years for Arkansas. For a short while I did Louisiana as well for about a year. And that was probably about four years ago, but like I said, I’ve been a reviewer that long. And as I was telling the other reviewers, my name is basically a desert lizard that resides in the deserts like in Southwestern US, like Arizona. I used to live in Arizona for a while and enjoyed seeing these lizards that are kind of interesting creatures, and when I was looking for a reviewer name I decided to pick that. So I’m not… My name is not Chuck.

[laughter]

05:58 CR: Well, I was just thinking as we talked about this a little bit before we started recording as well. I think we can almost do a blog article about Geocaching user names, not just reviewer names ’cause how many times do you meet somebody just out in the community and you hear their… You haven’t maybe met them before, but you’ve seen their username on logs or on cache pages, and then you actually hear the username and you think, “Gosh, I’ve been totally saying that differently for maybe a long time,” and with at least three of you here that’s… [chuckle] I’ve been saying your reviewer names one way in my head for many years, but now I’ll have it down. [chuckle] Well, let’s start by just talking about what all goes into being a reviewer from your own standpoint because I’m looking at each of you, varying levels of experience, but each of you have been doing this now for at least four years, which is quite a long time. Urs, when you first got into this, Was the level of commitment what you thought it would be now that you’ve done it for a while?

07:06 Urs: Yeah. Pretty much. My colleagues who brought me into the role were fairly open about how much time it would need. So in those years that I’ve done it, it’s pretty much matched what they told me to expect. Of course, it varies. In summer and spring, it’s a bit busier than in autumn and winter. But overall, I think it’s pretty stable.

07:29 CR: And you are part of a team. Correct?

07:32 Urs: Yeah.

07:33 CR: And so how do you all balance things or bounce things off each other? What is the dynamic like within your team?

07:42 Urs: I think we’re a bit unusual, compared to other countries in that we take shifts, seven people spread across five teams, and we split Switzerland and Liechtenstein in half. So we have two local cues that are roughly of the same volume, and we have one team covering each half of those two countries for a week. So we have one-week shifts, and basically we work one week on, one week off. And the fifth team is more or less there to cover for holiday absences and so on. So roughly we work two weeks out of four, maybe we get a two-week break every once in a while. And during that week, we’re responsible for that half of the country that we’re assigned.

09:09 CR: Rene, besides being on a team that has multiple people, your wife is also a reviewer as well, correct?

09:16 Rene: Yes, she is. And like in Switzerland, we have seven regular reviewers, plus one earth cache reviewer that is also part of our team. And unlike Switzerland, we don’t have any shifts or divisions. We just take the cue for Netherlands and whatever is there, we take it. We don’t keep our caches with us. We just put them back, and if they come back, they’ll come in for the queue for general grab. My wife has one of the special roles in the team, and that’s the reaping part. Of course, it’s very important to publish and review new caches. It’s just equally important to make sure that the quality of the caches keep a high standard, and that’s where the reaping comes in place. And I think we are doing a pretty good job now in the reaping process. That’s how the Dutch team operates.

10:21 CR: I would think that it would be nice to have someone… It would be nice to have teammates, but then also to have someone… Hey, there’s Ingrid. [laughter]

10:29 Rene: Hi, Chris’ wife.

10:33 Ingrid: Reaping.

10:33 CR: The wonders of Zoom.

10:35 Rene: She’s reaping now.

10:36 CR: Oh, of course. So not just to have teammates that you get to work with, but then also having someone right there, 10 feet away. If something comes up that you might not be quite sure of to be able to collaborate on things.

10:49 Rene: Sure. It’s quite convenient just to have a sparring partner. If you have doubts or questions about a certain cache, we can just discuss it with one another.

11:00 CR: Frank, there in Arkansas and Oklahoma, you do not have a team that you’re working with. So how do you get feedback or collaborate if there’s questions that you might have about a cache submission.

11:12 Frank: Most of the time, if I have a cache that I have a question about or sitting on the fence about, there’s a place where we can go, special forums for reviewers. And so I’ll post a question there and ask about, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And I usually almost always tell the cache owner, “Hey, I’ve got a question about your cache. I’m gonna get the opinion of other reviewers.” And I tell them what my problem is with their cache, so they’re aware of it. Sometimes they’ll come back and actually make a change based upon my just making a comment or having some doubt. Other times they’ll wait and see what the other reviewers come up with. And it’s a good forum to get feedback. Sometimes I’m off base in how I’m looking at something, or maybe I’ve misinterpreted stuff. And a lot of times, that’s not the case. So that’s basically my network there as a single reviewer. Of course, I’ve had a lot of reviewing over the years, and so a lot of it’s just plain experience in handling situations in the past and knowing how they were handled and how they were resolved either the feedback from other reviewers or feedback from Geocaching Headquarters.

12:24 CR: I would think some people might look at it and say, “You’ve been doing this for 14 years now, you’ve seen it all.” But the game’s always changing, isn’t it? And new stuff is always popping up.

12:37 Frank: Cache owners always, they have a way of coming up with new stuff all the time. It’s just amazing what they can come up with, what new ideas, what curve balls they can throw at me in the reviewing process. I know one of the things there was a moratorium on challenges a few years ago. And it’s amazing how many new challenges people can come up with, and as reviewers we have to look at it, “Does this meet the guidelines?” And it’s amazing what people could come up with is challenges. Most of the time they’re, “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s okay.” Sometimes it’s like, “No, you can’t do a challenge on that.” So yeah, the other thing is although I don’t have a team, if I need to take some time off, if I’m traveling where, sometimes I like to go to places where there’s not Internet service amazingly. I like to go through the Grand Canyon, raft through the Grand Canyon about every three, four years. No Internet service there, plus I don’t carry my phone or my computer with me. So… But I reach out and there’s other reviewers in the US that’ll help me out. Hoosier Reviewer has been one that I’ve had help from. He reviews Indiana. And then Isht Kinta out of Louisiana has helped me out in the past. He also does Mississippi.

13:54 CR: Jonathan, you kind of referred to this earlier, that Israel is kind of a unique situation where the game is kind of at a different phase of its, maybe you’d call it its maturation process. How does that affect how you have approached the volunteer role there?

14:14 Jonathan: Okay, so the volunteer role is, as I said, a little different in Israel. And I’m sure it’s similar in a lot of small countries like Israel. I get a lot fewer caches in my queue than the others, maybe a quarter of whatever reviewers get. However, I spend a lot more time per cache. A lot of caches that I get are written in [14:39] __ or English. So I have to spend quite a bit of time, sometimes 20 minutes, half an hour editing, typesetting, making sure that the cache is readable and okay. And then we have security issues, and issues like people putting it in an archeological site. We had a cache not long ago that they wanted to put in the International Airport in Israel, and you can imagine what kind of security issues we have there. And we got it done. We got it done. I managed to contact the head security person of the Israel International Airport and make sure that that was okay. So we go that extra mile for our caching community. It’s more personal, I would say, in Israel. And we try to really do a little more because we have a little more time and there are fewer caches.

15:42 CR: I know you said that you’re… I think you referred yourself as a part-time translator, but I do wanna just hit on that a little bit, that volunteer role of translators. Just maybe just give a real brief overview of what that is for people that might be familiar with reviewers, but they don’t know as much about the folks that translate for the website and the geocaching apps.

16:08 Jonathan: Sure. So we get every now and… I say, “We.” I get an email from Geocaching HQ every several months, I would say, with the new projects, a group of things to translate. Sometimes, these are announcements. These are Facebook posts, and of course the big one, the movie, the International Film Festival. It requires a lot of work. Usually, I am not able to do it all myself. I lasso a few other volunteers that help me with those, and there’s always people that are happy to help. And we divide it up between ourselves. And so we can get it done in a timely fashion. In the case of the film festival, I usually treat everybody that helps for a little for an extra geocoin or something like that as thanks. And then oftentimes, I host the film festival over at my place or a place nearby. So we have an opportunity to do something for the community ’cause as I said, a lot of people in Israel don’t speak English. And we thank the people that help.

17:20 CR: Well, I would love to hear from each of you some tips that you have for the community people that are thinking about placing geocaches, how they can make the process of cache submission go more smoothly for you and for them. Urs, let’s start with you. What’s some advice that you like to give to people when they ask?

17:43 Urs: Well, I think the basic thing that would really help is if everybody has read the guidelines before placing their first cache. There’s so many things, small things that take up time in your reviewing that could be avoided if people had a look through the guidelines and would know what they can do or shouldn’t do. So that would be a first step, and the other thing is really to be communicative. They have the chance to give us information to help us review their cache, and very often we just get very short sentences or a brief paragraph, just providing the minimal information that they have. And sometimes it would be easier if they just said a little bit more and volunteered some information on their own without us having to go back and ask for things. So if you could sort of save doing the loop at the start where we have to go, “Okay. Basically, it looks okay, but I have those questions. And if you had provided this information on your own, we wouldn’t need to do this loop.”

18:51 Urs: The final thing, I think, is to really read our notes that we write when we hand back a cache to be adjusted, to read those notes carefully because we give them the information that we need. We tell them what the issues are. We tell them what they need to adjust, and very often, they look at one of those things or address one issue and just skip over the other three that we also mentioned in the note. And that makes for a lot of extra effort and delay that is not necessary if they were more careful in reading our notes. That would be my biggest wish, I think for more careful reading comprehension.

19:29 CR: Rene, how about advice from you?

19:32 Rene: Yeah. I can fully find myself in the worst of worst on the submission process. We have similar issues in the Dutch community. Besides what we also see, the Netherlands is a densely populated country, and it reflects in a very high-cache density. So that’s often results in conflicts with other caches. What we are recommending players to do, before they submit a cache is, let’s have your location tested by us. We have a process called saturation check. They can submit the cacher page. It can be blank, but we can provide a yes or a no for the location they have found. It saves them a lot of work and frustration, and it saves us some work because most of the conflicts that we have in the cache process could have been avoided. So that’s one tip.

20:33 Rene: The other tip. People, please find a lot of caches before you even consider placing one of yourself. We see there’s a relationship between the quality of the cache page, the review process, and the cache itself, and the number of finds the CO has.

20:54 CR: Frank.

20:55 Frank: I’ll have to second what everybody else has said so far, because I think the guidelines are very important. I would also tell new geocachers, go to the Help Center. There’s a Help Center. There’s a link for it at the bottom of the page, when you log into the website if you’re using a computer. And the Help Center really has a lot of useful information about hiding geocaches and topics related to geocaching. I would suggest go in there ’cause a lot of times I get questions. If people had just gone in the Help Center, they would understand or they would already know the answer. There’s also regional policies of geocaching policies. There’s a Wiki for that, and for Arkansas, I’ve set up one and in Oklahoma, I’ve set up a separate one. I would advice new geocache hiders to go to those Wikis and see if there’s any special requirements. For example, National Parks typically don’t allow geocachers to be placed within them, but there are certain places that maybe the park superintendent will allow it. You need to get permission from them and get a permit.

21:58 Frank: National Forests within Arkansas and Oklahoma require permits. State parks require permits, that sort of thing that people need to be aware of that. And I see a lot of new geocache hiders, typically, submit a cache in a State Park and they don’t realize a permit is required first from the State Park. I second the part about finding several geocaches. I actually responded to a geocacher this morning who wanted to make… They’d done one geocache hide, but they wanna do a better one. And I said, “Well, look in your area and find one with lots of favorite points. Go and see what made them favorite caches. What was good about them? And that will give you some ideas on how to improve your geocaches.”

22:39 Frank: One final thing I’ll throw out is, when you record your coordinates, check them. Make sure they’re right. And when you put them on the cache page, when you’re developing the cache page, make sure you type them in correctly ’cause that’s one of the biggest problems I see is either coordinates that are quite a bit off from where they said the geocache is hidden or for example, I found geocaches submitted for Arkansas or Oklahoma, they’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, China, Africa, the Pacific, you name it. I’ve seen it in different places and said, “Well, this can’t be there,” because they entered the coordinates incorrectly when they were typing in the cache page. It’s a simple self-check. And that’s the key thing. Just self-check your page before you hit Submit for Review.

23:23 CR: Well, as we are all sitting in our homes because of this pandemic, I feel I should ask about how the pandemic has affected the review process for each of you in your different locations. I imagine that it varies a little bit in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Urs. How has reviewing in the pandemic been different than prior?

23:46 Urs: Well, we had a total suspension of all reviewing activities from mid-March till, I think it was late May, not so much because we were forced to by government rules. We were lucky in so far that, though we were recommended to stay home, we were still allowed to go outside, as long as it was close by to our relief. Caching was an ideal activity to do for people who wanted to get outside. However, since we’re a small place, and we’re also densely populated with caches, if we publish a new cache, very often, these first-to-find hunts turn into spontaneous mini meetings and mini events of, I don’t know, maybe two or three or sometimes up to half-a-dozen or a dozen cachers, who meet at ground zero, which is fun, and really a cool thing to happen, normally. But with social distancing, it was something that we said, “It’s probably not something we should encourage, and there’s plenty of caches to be found without new ones being placed to encourage people to meet in this fashion.”

24:57 Urs: We stopped publishing and reviewing during that time, which in large parts of the community, was met with very much understanding although there were the odd cacher who didn’t like that decision. For us, it was a nice break, except that we paid for it when we started again because during the first few weeks, we had probably 10-12 times the caches we normally reviewed. The first week I pulled a shift, I think I spent four or five hours a day just playing catch-up. And I’d go through my queue and I’d think, “Ah, I’ve probably cut it in half,” and I’d press Refresh and then the screen came up again. It was double the number it was before we even started. [chuckle] But we’ve been publishing again since mid-May, late May. And caching and reviewing-wise, things have returned to normal. Also, we started sweeping again in June. As far as geocaching is concerned, we’re back to normal operation.

26:04 CR: Rene, how have things been affected in the Netherlands over the last several months?

26:09 Rene: Yeah, it’s quite similar to what Urs just told. We stopped our submission process mid-March, and we got back, I think, early May. And because we were expecting quite a tsunami of new caches, we decided, “Okay, it’ll happen anyway, so let’s review them and publish them all on the same date. That gives a lot of people opportunities to claim a first-to-find… And it’s… Well, it’s worked out well and after that, we just reconvened to the normal review process and normal publishing, except for the events. That took a little bit longer, because we felt not comfortable to publish events again because of the social distancing rules, because of the stay-at-home policies. That started back in back in July, we started to publish events again, but with restrictions. Most of the community understood what we did. They supported us.

27:23 CR: And Jonathan, in Israel, how has the pandemic affected the review process for you there?

27:30 Jonathan: Well, we basically had the same process like everybody else, but we had an interim period. I don’t know how it was with other countries. We had a few weeks where the law was, you can leave within 500 meters of your house or to go to work. And there were people that were hiding in that period. And I was really on edge and I would call a few people up that were doing a little… Taking a little too advantage of that period, ’cause I was really concerned about people breaking the rules in order to get there first to find. I didn’t want that. We talked with the people involved and it was very helpful to have everybody on my phone book and we got through that. And then that’s a few weeks, after that, they opened it up so you can go anywhere. The moratorium was lifted and yeah, we had the same kind of deluge that everybody else had. It was kind of fun to see and invigorating and yeah, it was wonderful.

28:34 CR: Well, by my count, there is 31 years of reviewer experience in this group here. When you guys think about why you keep doing this, why you keep making this commitment, because it is a huge commitment as we’ve… As I’ve heard you all talking about, just what you do as reviewers, there’s a lot of time that goes into it. And Frank, you’ve been doing it the longest. I don’t know if you could have imagined you were signing up for 14 years of this when you first started. But what makes you keep wanting to do it?

29:04 Frank: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I guess… I guess it’s something to do. It’s like a hobby. I’m retired. I’ve been retired for nine years now, full-time retirement. Although, I did work part-time as a contract engineer for several years, but now I’m not even doing that. It gives me something to do in the morning. When I get up, I grab a cup of coffee, sit down in front of the computer and work my way through the review queue and see what’s out there, what people have submitted for review. Basically, it’s, yeah, it’s just a hobby. It’s something that keeps me interested. It’s a way, also, I feel I can give back to the geocaching community, kind of a service, if you would. And it’s good to have a network of friends worldwide that you communicate with and learn about their experiences and see different perspectives of how geocaching works in their countries or how different things are being affected by such things as a pandemic.

30:02 CR: Rene, how about yourself? You’ve been at this for about six years now, you and Ingrid. What is it that you all enjoy about this so much?

30:12 Rene: Well, what’s not to like about it? It’s a fantastic job. I’ll do it now for a long time and do it with a lot of pleasure. It’s supporting the game. That’s… I think it’s even an understatement, because you help people, you help the game, you meet great new people. And like last year, when we were in Georgia at the Mega event, we met a lot of American colleagues and that was so, so much fun. And yeah, again, it’s a lot of fun to do. And seeing your work results and you submit caches and everything goes smoothly, that’s one of the many rewards.

31:00 CR: Jonathan, besides reviewing, we touched on your translator work as well. There’s so much that you’ve been doing for the game now for seven years. What is it that keeps you engaged?

31:12 Jonathan: Well, I think back to myself. I remember it was 2005, 15 years ago, that I first basically fell in love with the game. It was really love at first sight. As soon as I read about it, I knew this was for me. And I just… It’s the passion for the game. If I can help other people, if I can guide people just starting off, if I can bring them into the, so to speak, the way I was and pass on the passion, then my job is done. There aren’t that many opportunities where a person gets to really make the world a better place. And I feel that geocaching, in the sense that it gets people into the outdoors, it gets people to break out of their four walls and confine, it really does improve people’s quality of life. And people that didn’t even realize how boxed in they are, you get them outside, even if you have to push them a little bit, it really improves them. And I’m just happy to be part of that process and make people healthier and make people enjoy it. And people laugh at me. I have all these friends that roll their eyeballs whenever I tell them, “Oh, it’s geocaching.” I don’t care. It’s for us crazy few and that’s fine. And find people of birds of a feather and help them out and show them.

32:49 CR: All great points. Urs, how about yourself? You’ve been at it now for four years. What keeps you going?

32:57 Urs: Well, on the one hand, it’s giving back to a game that’s given me so much enjoyment and pleasure and contributing to that and the community in itself is a reward. And on the other hand, I think it’s people on all levels. It’s contacts with the cache owners in Switzerland that I meet through the review process, but also at events. It’s working with my Swiss colleagues, my reviewer team, an extremely cool team that has a lot of fun next… Besides work, and not the least, the international community. I’ve met some of you in person, but most, I only know virtually through the reviewer forums. But even there, I think we have a very cool community that has fun. That works together well, that is a joy to be a part of and that’s what keeps me at it.

[music]

33:56 CR: How about that? What a great group to have a conversation with. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And stay tuned for upcoming episodes when, again, I will be chatting with other reviewers from around the world. If you have something that you would like us to chat about on the podcast, please send us an email. The address is podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We always love to hear your suggestions and any feedback that you might have about Inside Geocaching HQ. Thank you so much for downloading our podcast. From me and from all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.