ILReviewer 15 Year Anniversary Tag 048

Celebrating Geocaching in Illinois and around the world, and my retirement as a reviewer. Please keep it moving!

On May 16 2003, I accepted the nomination to become a local volunteer for the Geocaching.com website. At the time, my login was "ILAdmin" (later changed to "ILReviewer"), and I spent a great deal of time reviewing each and every geocache published in the state of Illinois. For the most part, cachers were understanding and appreciative of the hours I spent volunteering to make sure that caches not only upheld to Groundspeak's guidelines, but also to the guidelines of local land managers. However, I knew from other volunteers that sometimes cachers were problematic in their communication, so I chose a separate account from my main caching account to conduct reviewing activity, complete with a separate email account.

Around late 2006, new cache reviewing was becoming overwhelming for me to keep up and family matters changed, so I took a brief hiatus for a few weeks. In the meantime, other reviewers were recruited to Illinois to pick up the work I had done. On the fourth anniversary of becoming a volunteer, I made the decision that publishing caches was too time consuming of an endeavor for my volunteer work, and stepped back from that portion of the volunteering, with the last cache being published on March 22, 2007. Since then I've published an event, one "regular" publication to mess with people's minds, and 9 caches in New Mexico on April 1, 2012 (a practical joke for reviewers to switch up reviewing territories).

But I continued my volunteer work as the local reviewer monitoring caches disabled for longer-than-usual durations, monitoring "Needs Archived" logs for Illinois, and checking on events that are long passed and haven't been archived (before geocaching.com automated that process. Throughout my career as a volunteer, I posted:

13,124 Reviewer Notes between 2004-03-05 and 2019-10-06
12,559 Archive Logs between 2003-05-18 and 2019-10-15
7,179 Temporarily Disable Logs between 2005-02-05 and 2019-09-26
2,397 Publised Listings between 2005-07-28 and 2012-07-22
414 Unarchived Listings between 2003-10-07 and 2019-05-19
201 Needs Archived Logs between 2003-11-21 and 2015-12-30
151 Notes between 2003-05-17 and 2015-06-27
58 Enabling of Listings between 2005-02-13 and 2019-03-05
34 Updated Coordinates between 2006-04-05 and 2019-08-25
14 Needs Maintenance Logs between 2006-02-01 and 2011-01-11
8 Retractions between 2005-08-14 and 2010-09-01

I also came out of hiding as ILReviewer as the user Markwell in 2015 and posted these logs:
1 Event attended between 2015-05-02 and 2015-05-02
9 Found between 2016-02-08 and 2018-06-05

All of these logs (except for the attended and finds) were in an effort to help the caching community have well-maintained caches available to find when they hit the trails.

In 2014 to commemorate my 10th anniversary, Groundspeak gave me a plaque, T-Shirt, and some nifty "Ten Year Anniversary" coins sat on my desk for far too long. When I came out of hiding in 2015, I released thos ten-year coins into the wild.

On my 15th anniversary in May of 2018, Groundspeak commemorated the occasion by presenting me with 15 large heavy commemorative coins and 100 smaller trackables. This is one of those 100 trackabales that I'm now releasing into the wild as I celebrate my retirement on October 19, 2019 after exactly 6,000 days as a volunteer.