(link to podcast)

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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.

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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.