LonelyCache

its been quite a few months since i logged on to lonely cache. if i remember right the last time i logged in to lonely cache was october of last year. i just wondered if someone could tell me what is new to lonely cache since october of last year. i logged in to my profile and was aware of several new things i dont't get. first thing. i remember that last september i had points for all my caches even if they were not found yet. now when i log in it says i only have points for 54 of 58 of my hides. how come???!!! why did you change it to points of the cache without out any finds don't get awarded to the owner of that cache???!!! anything else that has changed since i was last on lonely cache???!!!

Hi Chris, welcome back. Hope you've been able to enjoy the spring weather to get out to find and hide some lonely caches!

You can get a complete list of changes to LonelyCache by browsing the Announcements. There have been a lot of changes that have improved the usability and functionality of the site, so have a look and check it out.

Specifically to answer your question about Hider Points, that particular feature (cache owners are not awarded points until after FTF) has always been a part of LonelyCache's design and is one of the few mathematical distinctions between it and DGP. This was discussed at great length when this site first got started to improve the quality of the game by discouraging "needle-in-a-haystack" and "unsolvable puzzle" kinds of hides. For a particularly good post on this topic, see this from January 2012. As far as I know, there have been no changes how points or leaderboards are calculated since the site went live, except to correct errors (e.g. rounding errors, where people could have found the same caches but been ranked differently on a list because of the limited precision nature of computer calculation).

The change to the site since you've last visited is that the Geocacher Page now points this out to you, when a cache owner has hides that are unfound, that is no points are award to the hider until someone other than the hider logs a Found It log. I also have a two of those, both snowbound up in the mountains and inaccessible for another 2 months at least. I see you have several haystack caches there on the west side of SL Valley -- next time I have a meeting at ATK/Bacchus (Hercules), I may have to bring a change of clothes, and my GPSr and go caching after work!

Yes - that's correct. What we didn't want to do is encourage bad behaviors that 'game the system'. Yes, it's always going to be possible, but now we've made it a little less attractive.

The general idea is that a cache isn't adding value to the community unless someone in the community has actually been able to experience it. So if you drop a cache in the middle of a lake and it gets hopelessly buried in the bottom never to be seen again, I'd say you've littered versus provided an achievable challenge to your fellow cachers. The less scrupulous people out there could just create 100 "hides" where they don't actually place a container. Those would then be unfindable with the side effect of raising your LCP score. Those examples and others are why we intentionally decided to not reward caches with no finds.

--Redfist