Tag: lackeys

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 63): Not-so-hidden features in the Geocaching app

(link to podcast)

0:00:14.4 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody and welcome to inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about things that are happening at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk and we are in HQ at this very moment. Sometimes I’m in my house when I do this thing, but I’m at HQ because I get the chance to have a real life in person conversation with Nicole from the mobile team who I meant to look this up before we started. How many times you’ve been on the podcast, Nicole, because you’re part of like the three or four timers club. I’m not sure. Have you ever watched on Saturday Night Live? They have this running joke with hosts that have hosted X number of times. I feel like we should have that for the podcast. I think Brian would probably be the leader, but I think you’re right up in there. ‘Cause you’ve been on a number of times in your various roles at the company. So, we’re gonna be talking about the Geocaching app because you’re on the mobile team. But let’s get started first by telling people who you are, what you do at HQ and what you’ve done. ‘Cause you’ve been here for several years now at HQ.

0:01:23.2 Nicole Jendro: Yeah, it’s good to be back. Thank you for having me again. My name is Nicole. My username is Nykkole written N-Y-K-K-O-L-E. I’ve been at HQ for eight years now. And I started out on the team with you, Chris.

0:01:39.6 CR: That’s right.

0:01:40.9 NJ: Do you remember back in the day?

0:01:44.1 CR: And you escaped.

0:01:44.2 NJ: So I was doing review support, volunteer support and then I moved into a product role. And so I was a product manager on the website. And now for the last, oh gosh, three-ish, four-ish years, maybe I’ve been…

0:02:02.6 CR: Time’s just a mess now, isn’t it? [laughter]

0:02:02.7 NJ: I’ve been the product manager on the mobile app.

0:02:07.1 CR: Yeah. And so you’ve had this great amount of experience throughout the company over the years and now with the mobile team for a few years. And so, today we’re gonna talk about, I guess what we’re calling not so hidden features within the Geocaching app. And I think this conversation, the idea for it maybe even dates back to when we were in Colorado geocaching together earlier this year and we were walking along and you were showing me different stuff. And I think for some people… Somebody like me who thinks of themselves as a really experienced geocacher, and I think you can’t teach me anything. I know all there is to know, but somebody like me, I get into my routine. At least I know how I think to do everything with the app or with the GPS or whatever I’m using to go find caches.

0:02:55.9 CR: And I’m in a routine and I don’t really deviate from that routine very much. And then somebody like you says, “Hey, did you know about this?” And I’m like well, “No, not really, because that’s on a screen that I don’t think to tap on.” And so that’s what this conversation is about is kind of talking about some of those things that maybe you do know about them, but maybe you’re like me and you just look up one day and you’re like “Oh wait,” HQ’s mobile team has added a bunch of stuff since I started using this app and I’ve missed some of the stuff that’s… There wasn’t a huge announcement about it or maybe there was and I missed it. So that’s kinda what this is about and there is a lot of cool stuff. And I think the thing we were gonna start with was how to find cool caches or some of the tools that might lead you to finding some of the more interesting caches that are out there by using the Geocaching app.

0:03:47.4 NJ: Yeah. One of my favorite things that we released early this year is the indicator of highly favorite caches on the map. It’s that pink heart. And so as the map loads, you get about 300 caches and the top 10% will be highlighted. And so what I really like about this feature is that as you travel instead of using the filter to say, I want any caches that have more than 50 favorite points, well if you are in… I don’t know, rural Wisconsin, you might only get two caches. I don’t know that for a fact. No offense to rural Wisconsin.

0:04:21.9 CR: Yeah, That was a very specific example. Just throwing out rural Wisconsin. But there’s some great caches. I was there for the West Bend Mega earlier this year, which you’ve been to as well in the past.

0:04:32.9 NJ: I have. And that’s why I used this feature. And so I know for a fact that there’s a lot of cool caches in Wisconsin because we used highly favorite caches on the map to identify them.

0:04:42.2 CR: And I really love that feature too. And there’s been a lot of discussion I’ve seen among the community about, “oh, well they should use percentage of favorite points or as opposed to,” well, we’ve got the reasons. It would be a huge low difference. I’m sure to do percentage, but just total favorite points. Is such a big improvement over not having anything like it was before.

0:05:00.8 NJ: Yeah, we did actually look at what it would look like with percentage just, and between the two algorithm, there was only about a 10% difference. So, and there is like having the percentage, it has its own issues, right? No algorithm is perfect. And so if a new cache gets published and the first person gives it a favorite point, now it’s at 100%. But if you find a cache that I hide, I hope you give it a favorite point. That would be very skewed.

0:05:24.7 CR: So yeah, the high favorite point indicator is… I’ve really loved it as I’ve been traveling and it’s all, I don’t know, it’s kind of almost gotten a little exciting when I see the heart pop up and it makes me think, oh, that’s something I need to check out. So that’s a good one.

0:05:40.6 NJ: And I’ve actually used it with the filter of minimum favorite points. So, as every region is different, I’ll look at what is this area’s highly favorite caches. And so if it’s, let’s say it’s around 50 for that area, then I will put in 50 and then I will get a wider radius and know every cache on my map that’s highly favorite for that region. But I’ll still get the top 10% of those high favorited caches.

0:06:08.0 CR: Right. I never see right away we’re only what, three minutes into this thing. And I’ve already learned something that I hadn’t thought about. Well, that’s a great way to use it. I hadn’t done that before myself. So next time though, I’m gonna filters.

0:06:22.7 NJ: Yeah, I love using the filters depending on what kind of outing I’m planning. For example, when I go out caching with kids, I like to filter for regular and large, large-sized caches. And then I’ll make sure to bring some little toys that the kids can either leave and have a lesson in letting something go for other people or a trait of theirs, I’ll swag in the cache, attributes filtering for attributes. I do that a lot as well. I really like field puzzles and night caches, although for night caches, I must say it can be confusing to filter it because there’s multiple attributes that could indicate a night cache, like UV light required or flashlight required and if the… So yeah, so I’ll do multiple searches basically if I wanna do a night cache outing, I’ll filter for a night cache recommended at night, flashlight required UV light required, and I put them all on a list and then I have my night cache list.

0:07:19.6 CR: Mystery caches. And a couple of interesting things there that people may or may not know about.

0:07:23.2 NJ: Yeah. For mystery caches and multi-caches as well, I have a little bit of my own routine. So I don’t know there might be better ways to do it, but I use the personal note. So from the cache details page, you can tap the three dots in the top right to open the personal note. So I will copy anything relevant from the description that I need to answer a puzzle out into the personal note. And that’s where then we’ll have the final coordinates or the next stage. And then I copy those coordinates and then I go to waypoints and I paste the coordinates in as a name so that I can easily fill them into the fields for the waypoint.

0:08:00.0 CR: Yeah, that was a game changer when we added to where the personal note syncs with the website. That was something that for the longest time, way back in the day of the old app, when you could do a personal note but it didn’t sync. Oh that was the worst. And so when we added that, and that’s been a few years now. But that was really great.

0:08:23.3 NJ: So for Corrected coordinates, specifically for mystery caches, when you go to the waypoint screen and go into the posted coordinates, you can edit. Tap the edit icon and change them to the corrected coordinates and it’ll actually be the corrected coordinates icon and sync with the web and everything. And so then that icon is on the map where the final is and you… Instead of having an additional way point and remembering which of the caches you’ve already solved.

0:08:51.5 CR: Right. And kinda putting you on the spot here, but I’ll put one of my Christmas wishes to, I’d love to be able to change it for some of the other cache types.

0:09:02.1 NJ: I agree.

0:09:03.1 CR: Where I go letterbox, stuff like that.

0:09:04.6 NJ: Like any cache type that has a final coordinate should have that. And it is on my wishlist as well. I have a 200 plus item wishlist from…

0:09:13.8 CR: Oh, you’re a…

0:09:13.9 NJ: Me and players and lackeys that have come to me. It is very, very hard to prioritize and very painful.

0:09:20.6 CR: Over 200.

0:09:21.6 NJ: Yeah, I can send you a link to it, [laughter]

0:09:24.9 CR: Yeah. Well that’s just gonna make me sad. [laughter] I’ll be like ” Oh, I wanted that too.” So yeah, someday, hopefully we’ll get those on there.

0:09:33.6 NJ: Working through them.

0:09:35.8 CR: Yeah. So yeah, some stuff there on mystery caches then friends, that’s something that I feel like has been a higher priority in recent years to try to find ways that people can connect with other geocachers via the app.

0:09:50.2 NJ: Yeah. So we released the option to add friends via the app last year, so that’s also fairly new. We always had friends… For a long time had friends on the website. And now from the profile in the app, you can tap that icon of the two little people in the top to add.

0:10:06.6 CR: As we both go to our app.

0:10:09.6 NJ: As we go down to open the friend screen. And so that will give you a list of all your friends and then you will also see any friend requests if you have any. And then on your profile you can expand the header to get to your QR code. And so when you meet someone at an event, they can scan the QR code which allows them to add you as a friend.

0:10:36.1 CR: Yeah. That’s one that Cindy, who we both work with mentioned to me the other day when we were talking and I knew about it at one point. I think I… Did it debut right around the 20th anniversary celebration?

0:10:51.3 NJ: That’s correct, yes.

0:10:51.4 CR: Here in Seattle. Yeah. So I feel like that weekend we were all going around showing our QR codes to everybody and then I…

0:10:55.9 CR: And Signal had a QR code that puts yeah…

0:11:00.7 CR: Q signal had a QR code, and I wonder how many friends, Signal got that weekend. I have to go back and look. But yeah, it’s one of those things that then I kind of forget about it because it’s… I don’t often click on my little avatar there in the app. So I’ll have to remember to do that the next time I go to an event.

0:11:15.7 NJ: And when I meet people at events I will often then look at the will attends because from the lock screen you can tap on someone’s icon to see their profile. And from that you have the add friend button as well.

0:11:32.1 CR: Oh, okay. Yeah. Right.

0:11:33.3 NJ: So You don’t have to scan someone’s code. There’s multiple ways to add a friend.

0:11:35.0 CR: Sure. Yeah. There you go. Speaking of event caches, adding them to a calendar, that’s actually something that I only… I’m kind of ashamed to say, recently started doing. And again, kind of just one of those little things that makes a big difference.

0:11:52.1 NJ: Yeah. And we actually had an improvement that I don’t think we had release notes about because it was such a small thing. The add to calendar link in the app used to create a full day event in your calendar, and so then you still had to go to the GC code and copy it over and open the app or whatever to see when the event was actually at. But now when you tap add to calendar, it will actually create the event for the duration that the event is scheduled.

0:12:15.9 CR: Yeah. That’s great. What else about friends that comes to mind for you?

0:12:21.7 NJ: Yeah, all my friends who are geocachers are also my friends in the Geocaching app, because when I go geocaching and I am stumped and don’t know where to look, I always check the activity screen and we can see all logs, but you can also specifically see your friend’s logs and I…

0:12:41.2 CR: Very helpful if you’re looking for that phone a friend situation. Right?

0:12:44.0 NJ: And I also know which of my friends have more helpful logs or like hide little hints like you know the classic I was stumped at this location.

0:12:56.9 CR: Ah, yes.

0:12:57.0 NJ: Or there was something about nuts and bolts at a recent cache where… And the cache was a little bolt.

0:13:02.4 CR: Right.

0:13:06.7 NJ: And there was like a word joke in the log that helped me figure out what it was.

0:13:11.3 CR: We were laughing during a recent. I did a podcast interview with Ari and Jessica about the new logging flow and they expanded the number of characters that were possible for a log, which Ari loves because he types these gargantuan logs. And I hate because I have to scroll past those logs to get to ones that have some sort of a little hint, a little nugget that I can like stumped or whatever that might help me find the cache. So we were laughing about that.

0:13:42.2 NJ: Yeah. Another thing I really like is when you look at someone else’s profile, you can see their heights. So from someone else’s profile.

0:13:51.1 CR: Again, as we both go to the app.

0:13:54.6 NJ: Oh yeah. What’s the flow again.

0:13:55.3 CR: I wish we had video of this [laughter] You could see us just both looking away from each other as we’re trying to go to a cache and look at the logs, look at the activity. Okay, now I’m going to a person and there’s their heights.

0:14:06.6 NJ: There’s their heights. So yeah. So the finds and favorite points, line items, you can’t tap them. And you used to not be able to tap the heights line item, but now you can and you see a list of all of the active heights. And so I love seeing what my friends hit. I’m much more aware now what my friends have hidden than before. ‘Cause it was harder to see a list of someone else’s heights. Especially on the mobile when on the mobile, when on the phone. But also when I’m in an area where I might not know all the caches and hiders and I find a cool cache I can now see there’s another cool cache from the same CO nearby. That is one of my favorite features. You can also, another profile related cool feature we have is you can see your own finds list. So you can’t see other people’s finds, but you can see your own. And so if I wanted to show you the cache with the nuts and bolts, I can actually now find it in my finds list because I recently logged it. And so I can quickly show you, “oh, I was out. Here’s the cool cache I found.”

0:15:02.9 CR: Right. Well this is wild. I’m gonna… Again, I’m kind of, I feel a little embarrassed to say this, but I really haven’t looked at my friend’s hides via the app and it’s really kind of cool now I’m just kind of scrolling through the list of my friends and I was like “wow, I didn’t know that they owned a couple of, well, for instance, a couple of adventure… It shows of your own adventures too.” So, wow. Now I’ve.

0:15:34.0 NJ: And we just talked about Ari, when this feature came out, I looked at, because A, his geocache name states was ACs on top. So I looked at his heights and I realized he had a hide that was in walking distance from my house, [laughter]

0:15:46.1 CR: Oh, wow. I’m seeing he has two. He has one in DC in District Columbia. ‘Cause his family lives out there, so.

0:15:56.5 NJ: Yeah. And his puzzle caches are all kind of shout out to Ari.

0:16:00.5 CR: Yes. Shout out to Ari. Well, gosh, now I know what I’m doing tonight. I’ll just go through the list and play around looking at everybody’s hides. So yeah, there we go. You’ve added another thing for me to check out. And again, we kind of went over it pretty quick, but I really do like being able to look at which of my friends have logged a cache. Because again, it’s so great to be able to say, “okay, I can reach out to that person if I’m having trouble.” And it’s just so easy right there as you’re out in the field. So anything else with…

0:16:31.6 NJ: Well, friends related, adjacent lists when you plan on outing together the fortnight caches, for example, I’ll create a list and then I’ll share it with the friend that I wanna go caching with. And then they can make a copy from the website, but that all syncs with the app. So they will have the list that I created as a copy in their list tab as well.

0:16:50.8 CR: I’m not sure if we’re allowed to talk about stuff. We’re working on other stuff. I can say that. Right?

0:16:56.7 NJ: We are working on other stuff.

0:16:58.4 CR: I can’t be specific. I’m not gonna… Don’t worry, I’m not gonna spill any beans. I’m just saying we’re working on…

0:17:04.2 NJ: And I wish we had a video.

0:17:05.9 CR: We’re working on other stuff… I just, oh, I wanna say something. And I can’t say it. And I’m not going to. I’m not gonna say it.

0:17:11.6 NJ: But there’s cool stuff coming.

0:17:11.8 CR: There’s cool stuff coming. Thank you. I’m allowed to say that, right?

0:17:15.4 NJ: Yeah.

0:17:16.3 CR: You can say that?

0:17:19.4 NJ: You can always say that.

0:17:19.5 CR: It’s vague, but no, there is cool stuff coming and yeah, it’s great to be sharing your list with friends on the web and then making copies in the app. That’s great.

0:17:32.8 NJ: And then of course you can download a list for offline. I really like that feature as well, especially if I travel internationally and I’m not sure if my plan will allow me to access Connectivity.

0:17:42.8 CR: Yeah. And I still run into people that are very experienced that didn’t know you could do that so much or maybe they do most of their caching with the GPS. And they just haven’t used the app as much. And then they’ll say, Hey, is it possible to do this? Of course. Yeah. Of course. You’ve been able to do that for a long time. So I’m like you though. Well, if I’m traveling or if I’m gonna be here in Seattle, we have the mountains not too far away and you lose cell coverage. Pretty commonly out there. So having the list downloaded is really huge.

0:18:13.7 NJ: Yeah. Agreed.

0:18:17.8 CR: We wanna talk about experimental features. That’s maybe one of my favorite things about the app. And that’s a premium feature. We should mention that.

0:18:28.4 NJ: Yeah. Premium members get access to these experimental features. They’re different on iOS and Android for various reasons. Currently iOS has a couple of more and I know you are on iOS.

0:18:36.9 CR: Yeah. So, on iOS I have show favorite points on logs. I have ads/remove favorite points, view, select trackables in AR and caches with trackables. So those are the things that premium members have access to in iOS on experimental features. And before we get into talking specifically about these things, we wanna mention that, make sure that you have to go to your profile, your settings in the app, and then click on experimental features and turn on, toggle the ones that you want. And if for some reason you log out and then when you log back in, you gotta do it again. So, that’s a stumbling block for me sometimes is, sometimes I’ll either purposely log out or I’ll just be logged out for some weird reason and then I just forget to go into those experimental features and to… ‘Cause I do like seeing favorite points on logs in particular. That’s probably the one that I like the most out of what’s on there right now. And so I gotta remember to turn it back on again. So those are the things with iOS and then what do you have there on Android?

0:19:51.7 NJ: On Android we have filter for caches with trackables. So it’s an additional filter that you can turn on and MT DT grid search and which is also an additional filter, but you also see it on the statistics screen where you can… If you have not filled your grid yet. So for you these features would not be helpful Chris. There’s 80-150 loops. So how many do you have right now?

0:20:15.1 CR: It’s still a great feature.

0:20:16.8 NJ: It’s still a great feature. That one actually motivated me to fill my D/T grid because, I don’t know if you remember, but before we had that feature, I found it really difficult to figure out which caches I needed. And I reached out to you and you created multiple lists.

0:20:31.4 CR: I did.

0:20:32.0 NJ: For me to find, missing D/T grids, but with this feature I have filled my D/T grid finally.

0:20:38.0 CR: Wow. I don’t know if I knew that. When did that happen?

0:20:45.0 NJ: Oh. A while ago.

0:20:45.1 CR: Wow.

0:20:45.0 NJ: Over a year ago.

0:20:45.1 CR: Oh. Okay. Now time is, was there a party or anything or did it just kind of pass by.

0:20:48.8 NJ: It was on my HQ 20 celebration card.

0:20:51.5 CR: Oh yeah. When we put like our favorite geocaching.

0:20:58.4 NJ: Achievement. Yeah.

0:20:58.4 CR: Okay. And so I think we’ve probably done an episode about experimental features in the past, but it’s been a long time ago. So just to kind of refresh people’s memory. How would you describe what experimental features are? How do they get in there? How do they graduate out of experimental features? Just a brief overview of how the whole section, what that’s about?

0:21:20.8 NJ: Yeah, with experimental features. We have a very different process. So some of these are developed kind of very fast, so there’s not as rigorous, what I would say, like control. So they might not be fully fleshed out, they might not be working like 100%, not all the edge cases are covered. And so because of this kind of very fast process, the two platforms are not in the same track. So there’s a little bit of flexibility as well for developers to work on one thing more than another. And so that’s kind of how the two platforms get out of sync. But because we wanna sometimes move fast and put out cool things, but we value having the platforms be in alignment with experimental features. This was kind of the space that we created to put in things in front of premium members before they are ready to get out into the world.

0:22:07.5 NJ: And sometimes they don’t get out into the world. So some features in the experimental features menu might not be used very often or they end up not actually solving a problem. And so we do monitor the data, but once we decide that it is ready to graduate and so the profile, for example, that did start out as an experimental feature when they graduate to the full app, so to say, then we make sure that the platforms are aligned and that everything works and all the edge cases and offline stays and everything is fully functioning.

0:22:41.1 CR: Okay. So you generally want to have, like you were saying, both apps be consistent. And so in order for a feature to move on, it has to be ready to move on in both Android and iOS?

0:22:53.9 NJ: Yeah, so for the most part we want the apps to be in parity. But for example iOS has Siri and Android doesn’t. So if we ever did something with Siri, we would not be able to have the apps in parity.

0:23:03.5 CR: Well, we have listed a lot of things for people to check out and for me to check out. I think I’ve caught myself with at least a handful of different features that I need to. And like I said, I’ll spend the rest of today looking through my friend’s hides, their list of hides via the app. I don’t know. Do you think we covered?

0:23:24.4 NJ: Yeah.

0:23:24.9 CR: We covered a lot, didn’t we?

0:23:27.1 NJ: I would be interested if any of the listeners have favorite features that we didn’t list.

0:23:30.7 CR: Sure. Yeah. Put those in the comments there on the podcast page or when we release this on social media. I feel like I just like to keep talking. We haven’t seen each other in a while. [laughter], anything else you want to cover while we’re here? Okay. Well, in the meantime…

0:23:50.1 NJ: In the meantime.

0:23:50.5 CR: This was great and it’s always fun to hear what the mobile team is up to. I see they’re all meeting together. Most of you I think are together this week here at HQ.

0:24:02.5 NJ: Yeah we’re all in the office.

0:24:02.6 CR: Yeah. And hopefully, I’m sure planning some exciting stuff for the coming months and into 2024. And so it’ll be fun to see what comes out.

0:24:11.9 NJ: Yeah. I’m looking forward to be back and talking about the cool stuff that’s coming.

0:24:16.6 CR: Ooh, the cliffhanger. I love it. She’s shaking her head [laughter], but she already said it. We’re gonna hold her to it. All right. Thank you Nicole.

0:24:25.5 NJ: Thanks Chris.

0:24:25.5 CR: That was Nicole, the product manager for HQ’s mobile team. Open up the official Geocaching app and check out some of the stuff that we talked about. And like Nicole said, if there are features that you especially like tell us about it in the comments section of the podcast page. And if there’s something you would like us to cover on our podcast, send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Until then, from me and Nicole and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

/ Chris

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 62): Where are the missing DNFs?

(link to podcast)

[music]

0:00:11.8 Chris Ronan: What is up, everybody? You have arrived at Inside Geocaching HQ. I hope you’re in the right place, but even if you’re not, even if you landed here by mistake somehow, maybe you thought you pushed play on George Clooney’s podcast or Taylor Swift, somebody like that, I don’t even know if those people have podcast, but even if you’re just hearing about geocaching for the first time, stick around anyway, because on this episode I’m talking with two luminaries of the geocaching Galaxy. One of them is Jon Stanley, AKA Moun10Bike. He is like the George Clooney of geocaching, and he hates it when I say stuff like that. So of course I try to say it as often as I can. It’s all out of love. Moun10Bike is here. And then Jessie Maxwell, jtcoffee, she is here too. Let’s call her the Taylor Swift of geocaching.

0:01:04.6 CR: They are luminaries, both of them. And we posted an article on the geocaching blog not long ago titled “Where Are The Missing DNFs?” where we detailed some findings from HQ’s data team, of which Jon is a member. The TLDR of those findings was that geocachers are not logging all of their DNFs. And as a result, a lot of caches are in rough shape for a lot longer than they need to be before the cache owner or the local reviewer is able to take any intervention. And this is an age old topic, but we at HQ feel that it’s important to keep coming back to it because a healthy geocaching game board is more fun for all of us. So I wanted to dive deeper into the subject than we could do in a blog post. And so Jon and Jessie agreed to join me for a conversation, and now it’s time for you to hear it.

[music]

0:02:03.9 CR: Well, let’s get started by describing what everybody does at HQ. And Jon as the father of the Geocoin, you always get to go first on questions. [laughter] So you just go ahead and get started with what is your job at HQ for people, for the… I don’t even know if there’s anybody that could be listening to this that doesn’t know who you are, but if there is, what does Jon Stanley AKA Mountain Bike do at Geocaching HQ?

0:02:28.4 Jon Stanley: Well, [laughter] thank you for the kind words, but I’m blushing here. The current role I have at HQ and I’ve been kind of a jack of all trades master of none through the years, but I’m currently data scientist and basically that entails doing business intel of various types to help us see how we’re doing, maybe see where we want to go and what things might be in the way that we should address, etcetera, based on quantitative data that we collect from various sources of data that we have, you know, logs and what have you. So in a nutshell, that’s what I’m involved in.

0:03:16.5 CR: And Jessie, how about your job at HQ?

0:03:17.3 Jessie Maxwell: I am Jessie, jtcoffee in the geocaching world, and I am the manager of the community volunteer support team. And we certainly do a lot of community volunteer support on my team, but we do a lot of other things, too. Where we collect a lot of the miscellaneous things at HQ. And one of the things is that we kind of are the keeper of the guidelines of the game and are a resource for a lot of the community.

0:03:47.5 CR: Everybody at Geocaching HQ geocachers, but I’ll mention that you two are especially crazy about it. And Jon is coming off a big moment in your geocaching, right Jon? With you found Potters Pond, which is one the…

0:04:02.4 JS: Yes, yes, I am the last geocacher on Earth to finally find Potters Pond. I got…

0:04:08.5 CR: Well, there has to be one thing that you were the last one to do, right? I mean… [laughter]

0:04:14.1 JS: I think I got more comments about, “You hadn’t found that already?” than I got of “Oh, good job. Or congratulations.” So.

0:04:23.2 CR: Had you already completed your Jasmer grid?

0:04:23.3 JS: I completed my Jasmer, this got me double Jasmer.

0:04:29.3 CR: Oh, okay.

0:04:30.2 JS: And then I only have actually three more finds to get triple or quadruple Jasmer, although I’m not sure how to deal with, like, I hid one of the June ones and I have three of them. Does that count as quad or do I have to find another?

0:04:49.3 CR: It’s kind of a humble brag, isn’t it, Jon throwing in there that he’s…

0:04:52.8 JS: God, can we edit that out? I didn’t want that.

[overlapping conversation]

0:04:53.5 JM: What on earth am I…

0:04:54.8 CR: We are not editing any of this out.

[laughter]

0:04:57.0 JS: Oh, my Lord.

0:04:58.6 CR: This is all staying. And Jessie has gotten her Jasmer. Quad?

0:05:05.3 JM: Yeah. I finished my quad in April this year.

0:05:08.4 CR: So I guess that’s all to say that this is a group… A conversation here among people that have a great value and appreciation for older geocaches. And I think that plays into some degree to the conversation we’re gonna be having because I’m always a little bit surprised by how contentious it can get when people talk about DNFs and there’s a lifespan to a geocache and they aren’t all going to live for 20 or 30 years. Again, this is three of us that really enjoy older caches and so know that going into it. Jon, this conversation, the idea for this conversation was kind of sparked by a recent project from HQ’s data team, which you are a member of. Could you tell us about the project just in general and why the data team decided to look into this topic of cache condition?

0:06:03.6 JS: Yeah, so I’m not sure what the initial spark for it was. It’s kind of lost to time, but one thing that I kept bringing up, my family relocated from Seattle to the other side of the state in Spokane. Suddenly was caching in an area where even though my family is from Spokane and we would come back on holidays, etcetera. It wasn’t… I didn’t cache it out quite like I did Seattle, and I was in Seattle when geocaching started and I was there as it grew up, etcetera. So over time, generally what I was finding were brand new caches. When I moved back to Spokane, I was suddenly struck with the low quality of caches. And I was saying to myself, what’s wrong with my hometown community or what have you? And I really started thinking, oh no, there’s some problem there that needs to be fixed.

0:07:07.1 JS: Looked at it a little more. And that’s when I realized that the average age of the caches I was finding was greater than what I had found over the years in Seattle. I was moving back into a place where I had lots of options. I was going to the old caches as well as the new ones. And as a result, seeing caches that had more… A higher percentage of absence cache owners and just a lower overall quality. That was the first inkling in my mind that, hey, you know, what if… If you’re moving around and you’re suddenly put into a new area, you’re gonna see a much more representative sample of caches than if you’re just caching in your home area all the time. And it started me thinking about issues with, like you said, not all caches are going to be able to survive 20 years or more. I started bringing that up in more and more meetings with the data team. And then a few years ago we did a project.

0:08:11.7 JS: What we ended up doing was taking a look at the average time out of the game of cache owners around various areas. And we found some areas where literally all of the caches were owned by cache owners that were gone for a year or more. And that I think was then the data we got that said, “Hey, we have an issue, at least in some areas, what are we gonna do about it?” CVS helped us a little bit on a test, what we called a heartbeat email that was reaching out to cache owners who had been out of the game for a while and had problematic caches. And just seeing if we emailed them, if we’d get a response, and if not, let’s archive them and see what happens. We didn’t get much data from that because I think we just went way too conservatively.

0:09:09.3 JS: We only looked for cache owners who had been out of the game for over five years, caches that had no fines, I think, and no favorite points during that time and just archived those. Well, I don’t think anyone even noticed it. Plus it was only in a couple areas where we got reviewers who were willing to manually review each one that we suggested and said, yeah, we can archive that one. So it was just way too small of a study to really get meaningful data. And so in the back of our heads, we’ve been brewing on, “Hey, let’s do a larger study on just what the situation is like.” And that led to this quality study that we did earlier this year.

0:09:53.6 CR: And so how did this quality survey work? What were the particulars of it?

0:10:00.9 JS: What we did is we found… First of all was selecting a cohort of people to reach out to. So we went for experienced cachers because the point was to have people who knew what they were doing, who’d been in the game for a long time, knew what caches were like and were very active. And to have them go out and look at the 25 caches closest to their home, whether they had found them or not. And we chose only traditional caches because we wanted it to… We just wanted to set the baseline and have everyone at the same level. So the 25 closest traditional caches to their home that were available, go out, find them or refind them if they had found them before, and then report back not only whether or not they could find them, but the condition of various the elements, the container, the log, the area, etcetera, and then report that, report their findings back to us. And that’s where we got the very interesting data.

0:11:04.3 CR: And if we did commercials, that would be the cliffhanger, but it’s not. [laughter] “Tune in next week when Jon will tell us about the data.” [laughter] No. So, okay. So let’s talk about the data, what did your team take take away from the survey findings?

0:11:20.2 JS: It’s something we suspected, but we didn’t have the data. And what we had suspected is that the situation was maybe a little worse than people were willing to admit. And that up to one in five caches out there are missing or are unfindable in some way. And that is roughly three to five times higher than the DNF logging rates in those same areas. So it’s kind of a combination of problems. One, caches are in overall a worse state, and we reached out to our four largest communities, the most active and populous caching communities. So it was the US, UK, Germany and France, and we found the same results everywhere. So it wasn’t regional. It was probably shifted a little more towards urban than not because we were having people go with the 25 closest to their home. But in the end, we didn’t figure that was an issue because that’s also where most people are making their finds and it’s where most new players make their finds. New players tend to go for caches close to home. And that was a big reason to focus on caches around people’s home coordinates. I know a lot of cachers really enjoy the remote caches, myself included, but those are relatively small in number compared to the urban caches, especially the first caches that people do. And so we wanted to find out like are these new players getting a good experience when we send them out geocaching on their first or second outings?

0:13:10.2 CR: And so as you said, it was worse than maybe you expected, but it wasn’t unexpected, right? I mean, for those of us that cache quite a bit, Jessie, you can chime in here too, I feel like if I go out there and I try to find a cache and it’s either in really bad shape or it’s missing, more often than not, I’m the first one to be noting that or I’ll see a write note or something else that’s being used to in some way, or I’ll see a found it and somebody will say, “I was… I’m sure it must have been here at some point. It’s not here now, but TFTC,” which I’ve never really gotten either. So I’m not surprised by any of that. And I assume Jessie, you weren’t necessarily super shocked by the numbers that Jon’s team returned either.

0:14:04.3 JM: Oh, sure. Yeah, I know that I experience all those things, too. And sometimes you read the logs and it’s a write note and it was, “Well, it’s not that I didn’t find it, but I wasn’t able to locate it.” [laughter] Or perhaps I ran out of patients or ran out of time to really do a thorough search, but I’m not logging a DNF yet. And there’s, you hear even at events, there’s lots of comments like, “Oh, I don’t wanna log a DNF.” And I hear that. It is frustrating and every… You see on your map, all your little yellow happy finds, and then every once in a while there’s a little blue frown and I look at that as I scan my map for what to find and I think, oh, that one time I couldn’t find that one or I don’t know if that one’s there or it can… It’s certainly very frustrating. But I like most cachers, I really like finding caches. And so I like knowing the cache is gonna be there when I get there. But yes, it is common when you sometimes when you get there and you don’t find it, and you’re pretty sure it’s not there anymore for whatever reason, caches go for weather or they just get taken or they just fall into the… And get eaten by the forest or whatever. And sometimes logging a DNF that my DNF is the first one, and that definitely takes… You gotta swallow some pride a little bit of like, it could be right here and I could just be missing it, but I definitely didn’t find it.

0:15:42.4 CR: And Jon, the data team goes and does the survey and presents these results, but it’s not your job to present solutions, right? You can maybe suggest some things, but this is a topic that it’s for people at HQ, it’s for the community, it’s… This is a community game, so all of us play a role in trying to dream up what are some ways that we can make people less, or I guess I should say first try to identify why is it that people aren’t logging their DNFs? And then what can we do to encourage more of it? So that was generally the point of the blog post was to say, “Hey, here’s the statistics and please, please consider them as you are thinking about whether or not to log a DNF after you can’t find a cache or log a needs maintenance,” or I guess it’s now called owner attention requested.

0:16:37.4 JS: That’s gonna take some learning.

0:16:40.0 CR: I know, right?

[laughter]

0:16:41.3 JM: Definitely.

0:16:46.7 CR: But, you know, this is something where, for instance, we do a community poll survey, we call it once a quarter. And one of the questions that we ask is, what would you improve about geocaching? And number one is do something about the maintenance issues that I’m running into when I go geocaching, because it’s not as much fun when the cache is either missing or it’s broken or the log is in terrible shape or what have you. And when I Google geocaching DNFs, I see this litany of blog posts from over the years from HQ where this is an age old thing. This isn’t something that’s new where HQ has encouraged people over the years. So I guess that’s just a very long-winded way of saying, I don’t know what the solution is if there’s a silver bullet here or if we’re going to have the solution here in this conversation. But I think it’s interesting to me at least to talk to the two of you about what your own ideas are or thoughts that you’ve had over the years about this topic, which again, tends to be more contentious than I think it should be in the community. But let’s talk about why that is.

0:18:00.6 JM: I was just thinking about how all the times where I’ve been at an event and someone has said, “Oh, I certainly don’t log my DNFs. No, I did not. I couldn’t.” And then I love finding out why, and there’s lots of different reasons, but there’s also some patterns. I’ve certainly heard, “I don’t like seeing the frowny face,” which that resonates. I don’t love it either. I’m motivated to go out and find it once it, once I DNF it. It’s also kind of a pride thing, right? You don’t want to admit that you couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s especially difficult and you don’t wanna be one of the people that couldn’t find it. You wanna be the person that finds it, or I know I a zillion times have missed a cache that is right there, and I am the first ever DNF or every… Nothing will make it tougher for me to find a cache than if the previous handful of logs are like, “Oh yeah, click find. No problem.” [laughter] It takes me forever to find some of the ones that are easy for others. And it is tough to be like, “Well, clearly this was easy for others, but I missed it today for whatever reason.” And owning up to that can be really difficult that I totally understand it.

0:19:16.7 JS: It must have been a bison in a tree. I can never spot those. They’ll be right in my face and nope.

0:19:24.3 JM: Yeah. You’d think with how often those are hidden in the Pacific Northwest, I would be better at finding those, but no.

[laughter]

0:19:32.9 JS: Well, it’s true that the data team tries not to give prescriptive solutions to things. There are other teams and groups better at that than we are. And it’s our role to provide the data, but we can also say, “Hey, this data is showing a problem. We need to address it.” And that’s, I think, where we are now. And so we have put out some suggestions, but it will be up to other teams to decide if and what we do with regard to that. I think the solution is twofold though. And here I am kind of getting a little semi prescriptive. One is we’ve gotta get rid of that, whatever it is, the resistance that our community has to policing itself. People think, oh, I’m being mean to the cache owner, or I risk… I’ll log this and risk getting the cache disabled and archived.

0:20:26.1 JS: And I’ll say, “Is that really a problem?” If the cache owner is active, they’ll respond and it won’t be a problem. If they don’t respond, then you get rid of a poor quality cache. Yes. Others will have one less cache there to find. Unless you’re in a super cache poor area, it will probably be not that big of an impact on people. In fact, it’ll be a positive impact because you’ll clear up that area. Other people will then have the opportunity to place a cache there or nearby. It won’t happen right away, probably, but overall, it’s like pruning a tree. Yeah. You cut that branch, you’re not necessarily going to see another branch pop out in that spot, but it’ll make the rest of the tree healthy. And that’s what we’re trying to get at with caching maintenance and policing ourselves, I should say. The other thing is, I think there are places where the community just can’t really help and it’s up to the listing service, us, to help.

0:21:35.5 CR: I suppose I could have put a, almost like a warning on this episode and saying, nothing is happening tomorrow or next week, this is all just conversation. Because I think people yet especially very passionate about some of the older caches, and there’s a fear, we were talking about the Jasmer earlier. There’s a fear that, oh, well, what happens to this cache from the year 2000? And to that point, I would say HQ in past years has reached out to the owners of those and given them an opportunity to describe to us what their wishes would be if they were no longer to be owning the cache. So we’ve tried to be respectful of the place that those caches have in the game, but I also feel like at some point, what is the year that you say, “Okay, is there… Is a 2006 cache, what about a 2010 cache?”

0:22:37.0 CR: I mean, I’ve seen people get very concerned about the loss of a 2012 cache because of what it might mean for a Jasmer someday. And so yeah, you see, you kinda laugh, but then you think, okay, well, I mean, I suppose someday that that could be as the game continues to go on, but also as important as the age is and as important as… And as much importance as we assign to that aspect of the game, I still feel personally the most important aspect is finding a geocache. However old it is.

0:23:11.6 JM: Right. Yeah. I laugh because it’s true that, I’ve heard so many times of well, but that has been there for eight years. That’s true and that’s great. And maybe it’s now time that it’s come to its natural end. Either the container isn’t great anymore, the idea was fresh and interesting, and then it’s just tired now. Or it was so clever when the idea was new, but now it’s found everywhere and it’s just kind of lackluster, which is fine. And when a cache gets archived, it does open up a spot for a new player or another person and for the people who live in the same place. It’s nice to have your kind of cache map renewed. I’ve lived in the same place for a while and it’s so nice to have a new cache pop up. Even if it’s in a park that I’ve been in before.

0:24:08.2 JM: Gosh, I get to go back and I get to find something new, even if it’s relatively similar to what I found before. That’s okay. I’m finding a cache, which is what I want to be doing. And I can’t do that if it’s all just the old caches, the old kind of maybe tired, sad caches that have been around and I’ve already found. And I think about the tools that HQ uses, I think of the DNF log as a tool. I am, rather than going and knocking on the doorstep of the CO who has placed that cache, I can log a didn’t find. And that’s just good information for the person who placed it to have. Interesting. Someone didn’t find it. That’s okay. It’s a hard one to find. We’ll see if there’s more. Or gosh, I really expected someone to find that right away.

0:24:56.8 JM: That could be a problem. Maybe it’s not there. You mentioned earlier, Chris, that the names of some of the user logs have changed to owner attention requested and reviewer attention requested. And that was done because we wanted the community to have a better understanding of what happens when you log that type of log. I’ve heard some people say, “Oh, I don’t wanna log a DNF because I don’t want it to get archived.” Well, that’s not the first step. That’s not the next step rather of what happens. A DNF is just a didn’t find it. And an owner attention requested means that the owner is notified that there might be a problem. And a reviewer attention requested means the reviewer is notified that there’s a problem. And ideally that’s an escalation, right? You’d tell the owner first and then the reviewer, there’s certainly exceptions where the reviewer would just need to know right away. But the idea was to create a little more transparency of, yes, something is amiss here and we want to let people know and maybe give a chance to follow up if you’re running into a problem.

0:26:04.8 JM: ‘Cause yeah, like you said, Chris, the whole point is to go out and find caches, and we want people to be able to have caches to find, cachers want to go out and be able to have something nearby that they can go find. I know for folks who are on streaks or who are working on certain challenges or have special little projects, caching projects that they’re working on, oftentimes I hear from people, “Oh, I have to take the scenic route home, which means adding 10 miles onto my commute or something just so that I can get a multi today or so that I can find an event today or attend this other, or get a challenge that I’ve been wanting,” or something like that. And being able to have caches nearby, new ones keep coming up. It’s a great thing.

0:26:56.8 JS: Yeah. And you were talking about owner attention requested, reviewer attention requested. And one thing that frustrates me sometimes is that people get grief for occasionally if they use those log types or if they use DNF because of this misconception that if you log a DNF or, again, if it’s escalated, you log… You see there’s been a series of DNFs and you log a owner attention requested, there’s a misconception among some people out there that if you do that, automatically archival happens or it’s really going to hasten it. And the fact of the matter is there’s, at least the way things are now, a human is going to look at, even if it gets to the point where there’s a reviewer attention requested log posted, and/or if the health score of the cache falls below a certain number, at some point there’s going to be a human person, a community volunteer that looks at that before it gets archived. So I hope if nothing else, what we’re doing here is educating a little bit about how the process works and that simply logging a DNF is not the death. You are not responsible for the death of a geocache because you couldn’t find it. And you shouldn’t shy away from saying, “Hey, I couldn’t find this cache,” and feel comfortable that you’re not the reason the cache is going to potentially get archived someday, regardless of whether you could find it.

0:28:27.2 JM: And it has nothing to do with how good of a geocacher you are. Every one of us DNF’s things. I DNF’d something yesterday. It happens all the time. And it doesn’t mean that you need to turn in your “geocaching license,” or… See the air quotes that I put in there. There’s no actual geocaching license. Or it doesn’t mean that you aren’t good at finding things or that you shouldn’t be a geocacher, that you can’t go geocaching with the people who you think are excellent cashers. It’s just part of the game. Sometimes you find it and sometimes you don’t.

0:29:03.0 CR: Jon, you’ve been around the game longer than either of us has been, I mean, since the beginning, really. And you own a very old cache, you own the first cache in, Idaho. Correct?

0:29:15.7 JS: Yes.

0:29:17.4 CR: You own one of the eight caches, and again, you’re somebody that really values older caches and yet I also see in you the data scientist part who is very interested in the statistics here. And you’ve not just… It’s always been anecdotal, I think, to some degree that I think we all felt like, well, gosh, there must have been three DNFs here at this cache before I got here. None of them logged it, but I’m the first one to do it. But you’ve actually gone out there and quantified this more. And, so as somebody who has this knowledge and respect for the history of the game, but also an appreciation for what the game board looks like, what would you like just people to know… If they know nothing else about your survey and about this conversation, what do you want people to take away from it?

0:30:09.3 JS: That’s a $64,000 question. The first goal of the study was to just quantify what we had a suspicion about. So I guess the first thing I would say to people is like, maybe caches in your area are in great condition and you don’t see a problem. Great. But is that because all of your cache owners are active and responsive to issues? Or could it be that you’re just finding the new things out there? In either case, question what you believe to be the case. And when you really analyze the data, is it maybe that even in your area things could be improved? And that’s really what we were getting at. We wanted to know how bad things were and use that to inform going forward possible things to do to improve the game for everyone. And so as a member of the community, what can you do to improve the game board? That includes logging your DNFs, logging your needs maintenances, maybe if it’s necessary, elevating those to needs archive.

0:31:19.2 JS: I’m sorry. See, I told you it was hard to learn your owner attention requested and reviewer attention requested, OARs and RARs. And wow, I don’t know, I think what I would like people to know is just how important it is to communicate what you’re finding out there and not leave it to the next person to find that that cache is missing or possibly missing. And don’t be embarrassed to log a DNF. Also, just anecdotally, I want… This is a good time to bring up the fact that throw-downs are not helping the game. On this trip to Utah, we didn’t do that much caching. It was just a weekend trip and it was focused on Potters Pond. But we did do some other caching of course, and in a couple cases at least, we found two containers at the cache location.

0:32:04.8 JS: And what it was, was as we look back, it was DNF, DNF, DNF by maybe people who just didn’t look hard enough or didn’t have the time or whatever. And then someone came through and said, “Found it, no problems.” And they were surprisingly the first signature on the new log in the new container. And we found the old one there perfectly fine. They thought they were helping because, oh, those DNFs must mean it was missing. Well, in that case, it’s up to the owner to take care of issues. It’s not up to the seeker. You can help, like replace a logbook or if the container’s cracked, replace that or whatever, but never replace the container unless you have express permission from the cache owner because it leads to problems. Even if the other cache is missing and that’s the only one there, you’re just kicking the problem down the road. It’s only gonna be a matter of time before that container needs maintenance. And it would’ve been better to have the absent owner, their container archived and someone who was willing to maintain it put a new one in that area. Community can do a lot of things to help. And then there are a lot of things to hurt, too. So throw-downs are in the latter category.

0:33:23.4 JM: Yeah, those are a no.

0:33:25.7 CR: And another thing sometimes with those, Jon, is that then the hint doesn’t match anymore or the cache description doesn’t apply anymore. I mean, it’s pretty rare that somebody does a one for one. [laughter]

0:33:39.7 JS: Yeah. Well, and that brings up a good point. Even if you are doing maintenance “with a throw-down” by replacing the container, you don’t have access to the cache listing. And cache ownership involves both, maintaining the listing and maintaining the container. So yeah, you’re only really doing a half job there.

0:34:00.1 JM: That’s a big misconception in the community that I’ve heard that cache maintenance is not just being on site, but it’s keeping the hint up to date. It’s keeping all of the data on the page up to date, the description, that stuff too.

0:34:14.1 CR: And one thing I took away from the survey, Jon, was I’ve seen a little bit of discussion about the survey online and there… Kind of a reflex reaction I’ve seen, or I feel it’s a bit of a reflex where people say, “Well, everything’s okay where I am, I don’t see what the problem is.” And to me, that’s part of the whole point of the survey is that it’s trying to demonstrate that even though things may be okay where you are, and great if they are, this was looking at, as you said, the four most active regions in the world for geocaching and showing consistently across these regions that these are what the issues were. So yes, there may be localized places where everything is hunky-dory and you’re gonna be fine there, but that doesn’t mean that it’s hunky-dory every place.

0:35:04.5 JS: Exactly. Just imagine yourself as a cacher. Say you’ve never experienced this game before and you’re plunked down in a new area, you know, completely untouched playing field. How do you think you would enjoy the game if one in every five caches was missing? And we didn’t even get… The survey didn’t just look at, is the cache unfindable? Like, I couldn’t find it, probably missing, maybe in a lot of those cases people just missed it. But if your experience is that, or we also got data that in addition to one in five being missing, about one in seven or so was in some state of disrepair when found. You add those together and is that really… Is that what you want geocaching to be? Where it becomes a dice roll whether it’s a good experience or not with each cache? That doesn’t mean we should guarantee a find with each cache. Obviously there’ll be harder ones and easier ones, but wouldn’t you agree that finding a good quality container with a nice dry log is a lot better than the alternative?

0:36:14.8 CR: I would be.

0:36:16.8 JM: Definitely.

0:36:17.1 CR: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:36:17.2 JM: I just like, I like finding caches. Those are my favorite kinds. The ones I can find.

[laughter]

0:36:24.1 JS: Yep.

0:36:25.0 CR: You are preaching to the choir, Jon. Well, I didn’t expect there to be huge solutions out of our conversation, but I did know that there would be some interesting knowledge that would come from both of you, and I thought that it would pair nicely with the blog post that we put out there, and it will be a discussion that all of us continue to have in the community. It won’t get solved tomorrow, but I’m sure there will be various ideas that come from both HQ and from community members, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes over time. But it’s been fun to talk to both of you about it.

0:37:02.4 JS: Well, thanks for putting up with my rambling.

0:37:04.1 CR: You’re Welcome, Jon. You’re welcome.

[laughter]

0:37:07.9 CR: I’ve got…

0:37:08.0 JM: Log those DNFs.

[laughter]

0:37:10.0 CR: Got almost nine years of practice with Jon’s rambling, so, yeah. And who knows, none of this may have happened if Jon wouldn’t have moved. So, I guess we should all thank him for that. But yeah, thanks to both of you. And yeah, it’ll be fun to see where this conversation goes as the months and years roll along.

0:37:28.1 JS: Definitely.

0:37:31.2 CR: I enjoyed that conversation a lot. Jon Stanley, AKA Moun10Bike, and Jessie Maxwell, AKA jtcoffee. Thanks to both of them. If you haven’t read the blog post on this topic, just go to the geocaching blog at blog.geocaching.com and search for DNF. Hey, if there’s something you’d like to hear us talk about on the podcast, just send us an email. We read all of them, we love new ideas. The address is podcast@geocaching.com. Thank you for listening. Until next time. From me and Jessie and Jon and all the Lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Episode 59: Geocaching goals

Have you set your geocaching goals for 2023? Need some inspiration? We rounded up HQ Lackeys Mackenzie, Alexis, Colin, and Jessie to chat about their geocaching goals and the tips they use to achieve them.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 59: Geocaching goals
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Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 59): Geocaching goals

(Link to podcast)

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0:00:12.8 Chris Rock Chalk: Hello, everybody. This is Inside geocaching HQ, a podcast from the people who work at geocaching HQ in Seattle. I’m Chris. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the proud HQ lackeys, and for this episode, I rounded up four of my colleagues to discuss geocaching goals. We are not too far into 2023. Maybe your goals for the year are still undefined, maybe you would like some inspiration or some tips on how to plan on pursuing your geocaching goals. This conversation goes into all of that with a group of people that has a wide range of caching experience, and they’re from all over our company, including the mobile team, legal, community engagement, and community volunteer support. I really enjoyed this talk very much. So let’s get to it with Alexis, Jessie, Colin and Mackenzie, talking about geocaching goals.

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0:01:21.0 Chris: Alright, so we’ve got a nice group of lackeys here with a great range of geocaching experience levels, and I think it’s gonna be a fun conversation about goals, but before we get started with that, let’s introduce everybody and ask your geocaching username and what you do at HQ. And then later, we’ll get into what each of your goals are. And so I’ll start with Alexis, and I thought it was funny when I asked Alexis if she would participate in this conversation, I went to her office one day and started explaining what I had in mind, and after a minute or so, she kind of stopped me and said, “Okay, so this isn’t a legal question?” [laughter] Which made me think I wonder if anybody ever just comes to her office and doesn’t ask a legal question. So Alexis, what do you do at HQ? [chuckle]

0:02:08.7 Alexis: I think Chris gave you a bit of a preview. So I’m on the legal team at HQ, which means, right now, I’m pretty much working on figuring out how to handle the recent privacy and consumer protection laws that have been enacted over the last couple of years, and then a whole bunch of other things, so working with API partners, working with people who wanna load license or logos to use for merchandise they wanna make. And then I’m also a proud member of Team Unicorn, which is an addition to the legal team. It’s the HR learning and development and operations and the facilities. And so we kind of are just a broader operations team at HQ. Oh, and then my username is Sixsilla206.

0:03:04.8 Chris: And where did that come from?

0:03:06.7 Alexis: That is my last name backwards plus the Seattle area code.

0:03:12.1 Chris: Alright, very cool. So I’ll just move from where people sit at HQ. So next will be Colin. [laughter]

0:03:20.3 Colin: Yeah, I’m Colin. My username is Gamecoug. I’ve been at HQ for about a little less than a year now. I’m the Senior Android developer, so yeah, I work towards deploying the new features that we’re all hoping will get you, get everybody, excited about the game.

0:03:38.7 Chris: And how did you come up with Gamecoug as your user name?

0:03:42.5 Colin: Gamecoug is sort of one of my online avatar names. It’s a combination of… I went to the University of South Carolina and I went to Washington State, and so it’s a combination of Gamecock and Coug. And so I figured that’s a fairly unique combination, not a lot of people are Gamecougs, so that’s me.

0:03:58.5 Chris: I never would have put that together, until you explained it. That is a really unique combination there, South Carolina and Washington State. So Mackenzie, how about you?

0:04:09.6 Mackenzie: My name is, or user name is Phoenix48, and I’m on the community engagement team. Specifically, I help with customer service, so anybody that writes into the help center, I help troubleshoot or answer any geocaching-related questions, as well as curate content for social media, making TikToks, planning, blogs for Facebook and Twitter and anything in between.

0:04:36.1 Chris: And where does Phoenix48 come from?

0:04:39.0 Mackenzie: I remember caching for the first time back in 2003 or ’04 in Phoenix when I was visiting my grandparents. And 48 is actually my favorite NAlexisCAR driver’s number. I’m a big Jimmy Johnson fan, so yeah, and Phoenix was the first place I went to a NAlexisCAR race, so double meaning for that.

0:05:01.5 Chris: Wow. These some really cool user name origins. [laughter] My comparison is so simple and lame. [laughter] Jessie, how about you?

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0:05:15.8 Jessie: Hi, everyone. My name is Jessie Maxwell. My username is jtcoffee. And at HQ, I’m on the community volunteer support team, and my title is Community Volunteer Support Manager. So what I get to do is support all of the community volunteers, which include reviewers and moderators and translators and mega hosts, even cache owners or even people that come in to visit us here at HQ, and it’s the other half of the community team that Mackenzie’s on and so how I kinda think of it is her team helps draw in a lot of the new players and help them get started, and then once they become deep dives into the community, that’s when our team supports them.

0:06:01.2 Chris: Well, this is great. We’ve got a really nice collection of folks from across the company here, and also a wide range of experiences with geocaching, so I’m really interested to hear how everybody looks at goals for your game play. And I think that’s one of the cool things about geocaching is that you can… When you talk to different people over time, you find that there are so many different ways that people play the game and different motivations for their game play, and sometimes, I’ll hear of something and think, “Oh, I never thought about that before, and that sounds fun to me.” So selfishly, I hope I get some new ideas here. So I’ll start with Jessie, so you’ve been playing geocaching for a number of years. How has your approach to goals changed over time? Can you think back to when you first started and you’ve been playing a long time, so I assume there have been many, many goals along the way.

0:06:56.8 Jessie: There definitely has been. I’m a very goal-oriented person in general, and it has certainly changed over time. I’ve been playing since February 2011. And there are still some things though that call to me now that called to me in the very beginning, which was numbers. I remember I started in February, and then that April, on the 30th, I decided to take my geocaching buddies and find 30 caches on April 30th and I just thought that the symmetry of those two numbers was just the coolest thing. And I made a playlist that was along that theme, and everything we did had to have some sort of 30 related in the day. [laughter] We DNF-ed three of them, which I was okay with because that was near 30 or I it was adjacent to 30. But I remember that day really clearly and how the numbers and things like that have always, always called to me, and so even now when I am working on my challenges for this year, on my little quest, even if it’s not a challenge cache that, I’m working toward, they’re always numbers based. I want a certain number in a certain box to do a certain thing, or I want to increase that number in that box by a certain number or to have them all be a certain number of digits or something like that. So I’m very visually motivated. So on our stats pages, when I can see the results of my efforts, that’s usually what’s deeply motivating for me. [chuckle]

0:08:27.1 Chris: Yeah, it’s funny how sometimes you’ll hear people talk about wanting their calendar grid or their DT grid, whatever, to have a certain shade of color to it. [laughter]

0:08:37.1 Jessie: Oh, yes.

0:08:38.1 Chris: I just think that’s really wild that, that’s something that we… That we kind of grab on to is the shade of… And you’re thinking, there was a time when some designer put together the shade of these things and wasn’t thinking at all about it, [laughter] or at least I really doubt was thinking about how that would someday motivate people in their game play.

0:08:57.7 Jessie: But do all of my squares have a minimum darkness? Absolutely. [laughter]

0:09:05.2 Chris: What about you, Mackenzie? Are you motivated by the shade of different things, or do you have different motivations?

0:09:11.9 Mackenzie: Yeah. I’m not quite at Jessie’s level, to be honest. I haven’t had many geocaching goals until the last two years, once I joined HQ. I tried to do the streak, which I know a ton of people tried to go for, but mentally, for me, it was exhausting and I was not finding joy out of it. So after 30 days, I called it quits, and then decided what made more sense for me was filling my calendar, and just so it has at least a color. It doesn’t have to get to a certain shade yet, but just trying to fill so there’s at least one in every day. And I started that goal last May, and on April 20th, I will have completed it. So I have 24 days left and I’m very proud of myself. So yeah, that is what’s motivating me right now, as well as I have one challenge cache that I have been focusing on for the last year as well. In the Seattle area, there is a challenge cache called Monthly Variety challenge, so I’m getting myself to find specific cache types in that month, and I have one month left. February, I need to get four cache types. So yes, it’s the little things that don’t cause me stress or anxiety, but bring me joy throughout the year, so. [chuckle]

0:10:37.7 Chris: Once you brought up streaks, I realize we could have had a whole episode about streaks and about the psychological impact that they might have on people. I know, for me, when I did my one streak, when I… Fortunately, I thought about it pretty soon after I started caching, so my area had a lot of caches in it, and it wasn’t all that hard to be able to find something every day, or at least find something I could try for every day, but by the end of it, it really did feel like a job, and it wasn’t as much fun. So I’ve never wanted to try to beat that, that one that I had, and then when I hear about people that have gone for years, I just… I guess my hat’s off to them and then I also I’m just like, “Ugh, well.” Again, different strokes for different folks. But Alexis and Colin, have you guys been into the streak stuff as well?

0:11:31.9 Colin: Yeah, when I first started, I did a 45-day streak and I was trying to go for 60 and I got to 45. And I think that Mackenzie and I were overlapped in our streaks. And I was talking about it with her, and she said, yeah, I gave up and I… Probably the next day I was like, You know what? No, this isn’t fun anymore. It’s getting to be work. And so I refocused on some other goals. What about you, Alexis?

0:12:01.0 Alexis: Yeah, I also, I initially tried going. I did a 30-day streak and very similar experience to Mackenzie and Colin, it became more work and just too stressful for me. And so I’ve since also began focusing primarily on filling in my calendar, which didn’t go as well at the beginning, because it was still a little stressful. So I still have some days back in October and November that I have to go back to now. But now I feel like I’ve kind of gotten into the groove and have a bit of a rhythm, and so now, I guess the strategy started to come to together a little bit better. And so now it’s sort of… Because it was so bare in January and then February will be also, I decided, you know what, if I’m already trying to fill in these days, try for a longer streak again because it’s just… I’m gonna have to do it anyway. So I tried to be a lot more strategic about it, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m currently on day 35 of a streak.

0:13:18.6 Chris: Wow.

0:13:19.2 Alexis: But like I said, February is very empty, so if I’m gonna be wanting to fill those in anyway, I might as well try to get the streak accounted for also. So hopefully, people in the area will also be hiding caches that I can use to help me along.

0:13:35.2 Chris: Well, that’s an impressive time to start your streak. ‘Cause in Seattle, in the winter time, it’s sometimes not the greatest time to be out geocaching, so it’s pretty impressive that you picked this time of year to go after that. And as you were talking about, a couple of you were talking about the calendars, it made me think during the pandemic, I got a little bit more into Waymarking, which of course we’re talking mostly about geocaching today, but I’ll mention Waymarking because I also… Which Waymarking, I was trying to fill in the calendar with finding one for each calendar date, and the Waymarking website works different than geocaching and that the… It goes off at UTC time, so if… And in Seattle we’re several hours behind UTC. So I would have calendar reminders to myself, “Okay, today, you need to find a waymark,” and I would find it. But then, maybe forget to log it until evening, 5 or 6 o’clock at night, by which time it’s already the next day, UTC, and you can’t back date it. Anyway, just be glad that you’re not into that yet, but if you ever get into it, know don’t make the same mistake that I’ve made now, multiple times because I’ve got two dates left and I’ve had those two dates for two years because I keep screwing up on those two dates.

0:14:52.3 Chris: So anyway, that was on the side. So let’s talk about how we keep track of these challenges and how you keep track of and how you don’t make the mistake that I did and miss a date or whatever. I have to think, Jessie, that you’ve got some sort of a system that’s just amazing and that we can all learn something from.

0:15:13.1 Jessie: My system ebbs and flows too over time, but I do love a good spreadsheet, and I do love a good piece of graph paper, and I do love a good notebook. And at first, when I started, I really… Again, I really like being visually affirmed for the things that I’m working on. So if I wanted 10 more letter boxes to reach a challenge, I would make that, a little page in a notebook, like 10 little boxes so that I could check them off and then I could remember, have I gotten my… Am I there yet, or am I still… How many more letter boxes do I need? Well, I had it right here in my little notebook and then it was so nice to be able to check them off rather than achieving the 10, I almost achieved one every time, and that snowballed into different pages for different challenges so that I can be really opportunistic. If we have a challenge over here that requires, it’s an older legacy challenge type, certain finds in certain cities and towns through Washington State, and if I am driving around, “Oh, is this one that challenge? I can’t remember,” I can check my notebook and it’s written right there.

0:16:17.9 Jessie: Yes it is in there and it’s a teeny little town that you wouldn’t necessarily even think much existed in there, let alone in geocache, but it was a challenge qualifier. So I had to find something there. And there’s lots of programs that the community has made that help you with these things. And I use my Google calendar when I work on my calendar-related challenges, and I can easily add those things. I have color-coded on the days that I need multis, they’re orange, just like the little icon on the map, so that I can visually look real quick. Okay, a puzzle, a multi, a lab cache, all the different bits and parts and makes it really easy for myself to not miss one of those days because I’ve certainly been there. And the painful thing about calender challenges, is if you miss a day, then that little box just stares at you for an entire year and reminds you of messing with that. That’s how I got started on my streak, as a matter of fact. I was working on my calendar and I needed a bunch of days and I thought, “Oh, man. If I lose a day or if I get turned around, it’s a busy time of year, so I might as well just streak the whole thing. And so I set out to streak 30 days and that turned into three years. [laughter] But once you got the momentum, you can just keep it going.

0:17:37.3 Chris: Wow. Anybody else wanna streak for three years? Colin, you wanna streak for three?

0:17:41.2 Colin: No.

0:17:46.8 Chris: So how do you keep up with the stuff that you’re working on, Colin?

0:17:49.9 Colin: Honestly, I don’t have a very good system. I’m pretty new at geocaching, and for me, my calendar is wide open. If I find a cache tomorrow, that would be the first time I found a cache on January 31st ever in my life, because I have been geocaching for less than a year. Yeah. So I do like the numbers and the symmetry of… The symmetry of numbers sometimes. And I like efficiency. I wanted to get… My goal this summer was to get my 200th find at the geocaching anniversary event. And so I worked towards that, and then I… And actually, I had pause and hold off on some of my, some of the finds to make sure that I got the 200 right on the day. And that was very gratifying to me. I was just thinking that a really fun challenge for this coming year, a nice challenge for this coming year, would be starting on the 1st of March to do 366 days and end on week day. And fill in my whole calendar and also do my full streak. Thinking back on the challenge, on the streak, I don’t know if I’ll stay motivated, but maybe I’ll just make it a sub group challenge to fill in most of my or all of my calendar by League day if it’s not a full streak, so that’s… Yeah, that’s my thought.

0:19:12.0 Chris: Well, as somebody who, like you said, is newer to the game of geocaching, as you’ve been around the community, have there been certain types of goals that have resonated with you as you’ve talked to people, and maybe it’s not stuff that you haven’t pursued necessarily yourself, but kind of sounded interesting to you?

0:19:32.2 Colin: Yes, some of the Fizzy challenges look really interesting as far as many different types of difficulty and terrain rating of a different given type of cache is an interesting challenge to me. And I think that’s something that I’m gonna go for in the future. And right now, I’m just trying to get my foundation. I found that when I was doing my streak, I’d been here for less than two weeks before I started my streak. And then I tried to do it for two months, and I just thought that I felt like my inexperience at geocaching was… I was struggling to get these finds because I was still learning the ropes of game as well, so yeah.

0:20:12.1 Chris: Well, it’s funny you bring up the difficulty terrain grid because I remember when I first started, and I met people in my community who talked about that and they were working on that. And I just thought, “That is so… ” I don’t wanna say ridiculous, but it seems so outlandish, this idea of finding 81 different difficulty terrain squares. And of course, I eventually became hooked on it. I found that to be kind of the case with a number of different types of goals is that I hear somebody else talk about it and I think, “Oh, there’s just no way I’d ever do that.” And then eventually, I’m kinda hooked into it myself. Mackenzie, is that something that you’ve ever found yourself doing that you maybe heard about something and think, “Oh, I would never do that,” and then maybe months later, years later, you’re kind of falling into it, too?

0:21:02.0 Mackenzie: Yeah. Honestly, DT grid, filling that, that will be my next goal. Once I finish my calendar, I’m gonna focus on the last 19 spots I have left on the DT grid, which a lot of them are hard to find. And I’m gonna have to go on a lot more hikes, which I don’t do very often, but I’ve convinced my partner to go on some hikes this summer with me to fill that out. I never really focused on it before at all until I was at HQ, and then talking to everyone. And I want to be on everyone else’s level. I want to understand what they’re talking about when they’re telling me their weekend adventures. [laughter] So yeah, I’d like to join the crowd, I guess.

0:21:50.5 Chris: Well, I’m gonna give you a warning about the difficulty terrain grid because when I finished it, I was with somebody. He helped me find the last one, and then he turned to me and said, “You know, you’re only… ” I forget how many it was, “You’re only six caches away from doing it a second time.” And that is a vicious cycle to go down, I can assure you. Be forewarned. [laughter]

0:22:15.2 Mackenzie: Okay. Maybe I’ll find the last one by myself.

0:22:21.7 Chris: For you, Alexis, is the difficulty terrain something that you’ve gotten hooked into yet?

0:22:27.5 Alexis: Well, it definitely got me motivated to get out and try. We have the deer closet at work and we have some inflatable kayaks. And I’ve been tempted to do it, but I’ve never done it before. So just the scene, those T5’s on my grid just sitting there sad and empty made me motivated to get out there. And I absolutely loved it, and so I got a kayak for Christmas and so I’m already eyeing where I wanna go if the weather starts to warm up, hoping to get in some paddle caches this year.

0:23:11.3 Chris: Well, that’s another great thing about the game and about goals is that maybe you end up doing something that you haven’t done before, or something that has, I don’t know, just maybe seemed outside your comfort level. I just know that’s happened for me. And Jessie, I think you were always kind of an outdoorsy person before you got into geocaching, but are there things that you’ve done since you started playing the game that maybe you wouldn’t have because you were pursuing some sort of a goal?

0:23:43.3 Jessie: Definitely. I was an outside person, grew up playing a lot outside, so doing things like going hiking or paddling were certainly things we did as a family. So it was certainly within my comfort level. And when I learned I could do those things and go geocaching at the same time, and geocaching was an add-on to those already fun things, then that made it really easy. And it was pretty accessible for me to do. I think, just this weekend, I was talking about how something I have not done is dove, done any sort of scuba or diving for a geocache. And I had someone in our community pointed that out to me and offered to help me and make sure that I could check that little box on my list. So that’s certainly something that geocaching will lead me towards, and I would not have done. I think I had never used gear, done a technical climb up a tree before. Certainly just on my own power climbing up a tree, but never with actual gear and ropes and line and everything, and that’s an opportunity that geocaching has given me, for sure.

0:24:53.1 Chris: Oh, yeah. I’m kind of the… I have only done one technical climb and it was geocaching related. Alexis, when you were talking about getting your inflatable kayak, it made me think of years ago when I was driving back home, before I was a lackey, driving back home from an event. And it was a drive through several states, and as I was driving back I was passing through an area and saw all of these T5 caches. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh! Look at all these T5’s.” I was looking at a list, and then I opened up the map and there were all these lakes and streams that had geocaches on them. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh! That looks amazing.” I didn’t own a kayak or anything, but a month later, I did and made plans to come back the next year to try to snag some of those, which I eventually did. But again, I never was a kayaker. I never did any of that stuff. And thanks to geocaching, I’ve got one that I take around every so often, so another good thing about the game.

0:25:52.3 Chris: We haven’t talked yet about the program that we have within HQ, which is a program that encourages lackeys to get more involved with geocaching and sets certain goals for lackeys to try to meet as they’re out caching. I’m curious how that program has affected those of us here in this conversation. For you, Colin, when you came into HQ, is that something that helped to motivate you or helped to kind of direct your attention as you kind of got your feet wet with the game?

0:26:30.1 Colin: Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah, so I came into HQ with three finds to my name, I think. I had tried it out when I started interviewing and just… And so then yeah, the fact that the company is very openly really wants us all to be geocachers. And it helps me in my normal… My normal life is Android developer, so bug hunts that affect certain people. I found bugs while I was out geocaching that then I wound end up fixing. Then it’s like, “Well, this affects me, it must affect other people, too,” or, “Oh, I have more information about it because I reproduced the issue.” So that’s been great. And yeah, on the 200 day, on the day of the anniversary event, getting 200 finds also leveled me up on the internal. Again, that was a big motivator for me, so for sure.

0:27:23.3 Chris: That’s cool. How about you, Alexis?

0:27:26.1 Alexis: Yeah, absolutely. And I think actually it’s even when my husband learned that it was tied to being able to travel to Megas, he, I think, became more motivated than I was. And so he now is the one who’s actually scouring my statistics and saying, “Okay, you need to get this DT combination over the weekend and then that can combine… Oh, then that’ll be another letter box that you can get.” So he has actually become my primary strategist, and then I’m just the boots on the ground who’s actually actually getting it done, so he’s been extremely helpful in that respect.

0:28:06.3 Chris: Wow, I wish I had one of those. That’s a nice tool to have. [laughter] Mackenzie, how about you? Has the internal program helped you with your geocaching?

0:28:20.1 Mackenzie: It points out things that I wouldn’t necessarily go for. I’ll look and see what it is, and sometimes it’s finding micro-caches. And I don’t typically pick out cache sizes, unless they’re larges. Those ones are fun to find, but I don’t typically look for micros. And so once I get close to something like four more micros or five more smalls, then I will pay more attention to the map and go for those ones first. So that’s pretty fun to change up my style of caching or what I’m looking for, especially since I’m just focusing on filling my calendar. It gets me to look for something specific that day, but then also going out with other lackeys or friends and seeing what they need to complete and helping them, ’cause I know eventually, will help benefit me, too.

0:29:11.8 Colin: I was just gonna say that, yeah, piggy-backing on what Mackenzie said, it helps you with variety. You can get stuck in a rut if you’re just, “Oh, I’ll just go find geocaches. We’ll just keep going after lamppost caches everywhere.” And they’re easy, it fills in my days, let’s finish up my streak. But yeah, we were just talking at lunch today about there’s a gang of caches up in some ravine up north that they’re all weird DT ratings. And it’s like, “Wow, that would be really cool to go up there, and very challenging, and a lot of fun to go with the group.” But everybody’s motivated to do it because that fills it in an odd spot in your DT grid that we all all wanna fill in. Yeah, it helps get you out of your rut and looking for other things. I would’ve never tried an earth cache if not for the internal of the game just because I didn’t know what they’re about and they seemed like lots of work. And I was just in a mood of, “Oh, let’s just go find something else,” but now that I’ve done them, I enjoy them and it’s an interesting learning experience.

0:30:14.3 Chris: Well, I get the sense that we all have maybe a varying degree of how we go about planning, how much work we put into that, how efficient or inefficient it might be. There are a lot of tools out there that people can use besides Jessie I think mentioned spreadsheets and graphs and stuff like that, but GSAK being an authorized developer and Project-GC, I’m sure there are many others, but is there anything… Maybe start with you, Jessie. Are there any tools that you recommend to people that you use, in particularly, that are maybe geocache-specific?

0:30:51.9 Jessie: Yeah, like you said, Project-GC is such a gift of… It even has a link when you look at the needed found dates, so if you’re trying to fill in a certain flavor of your calendar, and then it’ll show you, on a grid, the dates that you need. There’s a button underneath it that automatically links it to your calendar of choice, and so it just makes it so easy if you want to really deep dive and if you want to do that as quickly as possible, or if you’re… Then it’ll show right up like that. For planning trips, I really love Cachetur because it will allow you to add a lot of caches, it will give you some of the information underneath it. Under the list, there will be a map, there’ll be an average DT score, there’s a list of counties that you’ll be finding a list of types of caches, the star ratings for them. All of that kind of stuff that could possibly be a challenge qualifier, if you happen to be building something like that, Cachetur will also tell you how long your trip will be.

0:31:55.0 Jessie: And I know, the folks at my house, absolutely want to know when I will be back from my early morning departure, and something like Cachetur gives you a pretty accurate mapping and therefore a pretty accurate ETA. [laughter] As someone who often is making those texts of, “Well, it looks like I’ll be a little bit later than I said,” it’s nice to at least be accurate when you say when you’ll be home and Cachetur will do that for you.

0:32:28.1 Chris: Well, that’s great. Is there anything else that anyone else uses or things that Jessie already mentioned?

0:32:35.1 Alexis: I primarily just take advantage of the list feature. And then when I go… If I know I have a trip coming up, I’ll then look at what maybe things I wanna target in that area, and then I’ll just add that to my list. And then it’s really helpful knowing that I can download the list and then not worry about the issues with coordinates at the time, so that has been really, at this point, the only tool that I really think advantage of.

0:33:08.7 Chris: I guess that’s a selfish question, for me, because I always hear things that maybe I was aware of a tool before and just didn’t pursue it, and then somebody starts talking about it, like Jessie was here a second ago. And I’m kind of taking notes to remind myself to go check back on something because maybe I tried it once and it didn’t resonate with me right then, but as somebody starts talking about how they’ve used it and had more of a mastery of it, and I realize it could be pretty beneficial to me with my geocaching. Well, we’re starting to run low on time here, so I just wanna go around and ask everybody what’s the immediate, for you, with your goals and or maybe if there’s something down the road that we haven’t talked about yet that is kind of on your mind, and maybe we’ll have some accountability to each other here after we’ve done that. So I’ll start with you, Jessie.

0:34:03.5 Jessie: Yeah, I was thinking about how there’s a balance of when you set a goal of finding a goal that’s really motivating for you, whatever that is. And it doesn’t have to be something that is the most difficult that somebody is doing, or it doesn’t have to be something that nobody’s ever done. But if it gets you outside and gets you excited, and motivates you to go and do some exciting things, then that’s a perfect goal. And also being able to let go of a goal is something that I’ve really worked on as a goal. But sometimes, certainly a few years ago in beginning of 2020, I set out for a lot of different goals that ended up having to be pushed off for a few years or edited to make sense for the time that we had. And it’s okay if you don’t meet a goal, just adjust the amount of time that you wanna do it, or that you wanna have it done in. Or make it so that is a nice balance of fun and challenge for yourself, and that’s how I found the most successful goal-setting for me.

0:35:13.5 Chris: Yeah, that’s some good advice. Mackenzie, how about yourself?

0:35:16.9 Mackenzie: I love everything Jessie just said, and it resignates with me, especially since I started streaks and was finding no joy in it. And so knowing that it’s okay to stop and to do something that brings you joy is really important. I don’t know. I’m just looking forward to getting outside more and doing caches that are outside of the city because I’m strictly a city-cacher, especially since I just moved and now I have a whole new playground in my area. Going to do more hikes and finding… Oh, yeah, I would like to find more Wherigos and virtuals ’cause I don’t do many of those, so I think those would be fun to trigger on my map.

0:36:04.5 Chris: Yeah. Alexis?

0:36:07.1 Alexis: Yeah, so I have two more days to complete my January calendar, so that’s the very immediate goal, and I’m excited. I saw a new cache was posted on my commute route home. Today is taken care of hopefully. Yeah, so then, like I said, I still have way out, November 27th is just going to taunt me for the rest of the year for the full calendar goal. But then kind of what I’ve liked working on this goal is that it then also sort of secondarily helps me to fill in or make more progress unintentionally on potentially other goals. And so I keep hearing about this variety challenge, and so it had been too intimidating for me to try when my find counts were so low in some of the areas. And so I figured once I have a few… Well, a better base, I’ll start looking at challenges like that. And so I think that will be a goal to start looking for, for some of those that feel like a good next level.

0:37:15.1 Chris: Sure. Colin, how about yourself?

0:37:18.9 Colin: Yeah, I’d say my goals are pretty simple at this point. I think that, yeah, filling in as much in my own calendar as possible. I really like the idea of starting on March 1st and doing it, putting in 66-day streak. On the other hand, it just occurs to me that that means that, well, it doesn’t start for another month, so what am I gonna do for the next month? The other thing is that yeah, Washington’s sort of my adopted home, and I think there are something around 10 webcams in Washington State, and I’d like to go get as many of those as as I can. It give you also an excuse to go to areas of the state that you wouldn’t necessarily go otherwise, so that would be really interesting.

0:38:02.3 Chris: Oh, yeah. And I’m a plus one for you going after the whole March 1st to February 29th thing, so I strongly encourage that even though I won’t personally be doing it. But I love the symmetry. You’ve sold me on it. And maybe you’ll sell some of the people who’ve been listening, too. Well, this has been a lot of fun and I’ve gotten some new ideas and some new tools I wanna go look up, and some spreadsheets I need to start. Thanks everybody. This was fun, and really appreciate you all taking part in the conversation.

0:38:33.3 Alexis: Thank you.

0:38:34.3 Colin: Thanks for having us.

0:38:36.3 Jessie: Thank you.

[music]

0:38:40.1 Chris: Thanks again to Mackenzie, Colin, Jessie, and Alexis for joining me to talk about goals. I have even more ideas to work on now as if I didn’t have arguably too many as it was. Hey, if you have an idea for the HQ Podcast, you can email podcast@geocaching.com. We always love hearing from you. And until next time, from all of us at geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Episode 55: Difficulty and terrain ratings

One of the most oft-discussed topics in the geocaching community is difficulty and terrain ratings. For this episode, we rounded up several HQ Lackeys to share their own thoughts on the subject as players and cache owners. Plus, one is also a reviewer!

During the conversation, we referenced two articles: Ratings for difficulty and terrain in the Geocaching Help Center and Geocaching for all: Is your geocache accessible? from the Geocaching Blog.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

InsideGeocachingHQ_Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 55: Difficulty and terrain ratings
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