TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » Opencaching.com and Reviewers

I’ve been following some interesting posts on Itsnotaboutthenumbers about Opencaching.com and it’s lack of reviewers. The blog owner posted two caches with the same co-ordinates to demonstrate that a site without reviewers would be an oversaturation nightmare. The caches were popped back to “Draft” status by someone, or perhaps the site has a “bot” that checks caches and distance.

The Opencaching.com site has guidelines, but without the reviewers in place like Groundspeak has, how are these guidelines going to be enforced? A distance based one is easy enough, just run a script that checks cache distances and “unapproves” the newest one. That’s easy. The guidelines call for a minimum of 0.1 mile between caches (gee, the Geocaching site offers this information in metric too…..)

Now, we have caches in places like Ontario Parks – who have banned the activity. Let’s say Garmin has all the shapefiles for the Parks and can run a similar script. Same with railways and highway bridges.

Quick, without reviewers, how to you remove a cache that is buried in a cemetery? In a sensitive ecosystem? Without permission?

How do you notify the powers that be that the cache is inappropriate? There is no “Should be archived” log type on Opencaching.com. There’s no reviewer address to email. There is a “check box” that the “Cache needs attention from it’s owner”.

With no obvious method to restrict a cache that just plain old should not exist, one can present the position that regardless of Opencaching’s “Awesome” rating system, Groundspeak’s value add may simply boil down to better quality hides at the end of the day – lamp posts and all.