The Geocaching site copied the NGS data base in about 2001 in order to have a good supply of things for people to find, before a lot of caches were placed.?ÿ Their support for bench mark logging and discussion has been lukewarm since the number of caches mushroomed.?ÿ Now they have announced they are dropping support of bench marks due to maintenance costs and low usage (relative to cachering).
Some people have said the find reports there were useful as an addition to the NGS data sheet recoveries, since most geocachers did not report to NGS.?ÿ And @daved @base9geodesy has at times harvested data from there to update NGS data sheets. So a potentially useful resource is going away.
Doesn't appear to be a very popular decision judging the comments.?ÿ
On the other hand, the comment from admin gives the reasoning for the decision: Most recently in the last 365 days, only ca. 2500 distinct players have logged a benchmark. This represents ca. 0.13% of players who have logged a find during that same period.
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Bill, left you some goodies by way of personal message.?ÿ
Bill, left you some goodies by way of personal message.?ÿ
Thanks!
in the last 365 days, only ca. 2500 distinct players have logged a benchmark. This represents ca. 0.13% of players who have logged a find during that same period.
?ÿIt's a good activity in that it gets a lot of sedentary people out walking, but with about 2 million geocachers, the number of geocaches in populated areas is overwhelming. In many parks there is one every 0.1 mile (the closeness limit set by the site).
At one time I had found nearly all of them within 20 miles of home.?ÿ I haven't looked for one in quite a while, and now there are too many to think about, and I'm tired of finding green match containers in evergreen trees.
I turned in several mark recoveries to NGS about a month ago.?ÿ Some don't show any recovery record for decades.
Nothing has shown up so far.
I remember @j-penry poo-pooing the publishing of benchmarks on a geocaching site.
Some people found that the brass discs were worth money and were removing them, and selling them on eBay...
There was some policing on that end, but thieves were just finding other ways to profit from them.
@dougie I've found a number of destroyed BMs with the concrete post left, but no brass tablet. All of my destruction reports got into the data base within 2 weeks.