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Being new to geocaching i just spent ages on the geocaching website searching for walks by name. I used the “starts with” option. Took me a while to realise why some would not come up, yet it was so simple. What I realised was if a walk has say 10 boxes and they are preceeded by the walk name all is great, but if they start with the number then they won’t.
This leads me to ask has anyone else come across such simple frustrations until it clicked? (might help me later 🙂
I agree totally with what you are saying. I have many caches entered in spreadsheets and when you sort them you expect all the caches in one series to come together. If the numbers come first they all get mixed up together and sorting them out is impossible. Nobody used to number caches in a series like this and I can’t understand why it is happening now.
Another frustration is the habit of entering cache names in quotes. Why do this? Again when they are sorted it brings all these caches together and they can no longer be sorted alphabetically.
It’s to do with the numerical bit of alphanumerical challenges, Dave. The ultimate being GC4ABP3 which has the requirement for each number to come from separate series.
I don’t think I accept that explanation Jaughan, as it applies to a very small percentage of challenge caches and there are so many caches already beginning with 0 to 9 without needing any more. Interesting to see that this type of challenge cache does NOT accept caches beginning with “.
Maybe we should ask dartymoor, as all his series have had the numbers before the names?
We’ve put numbers on our series to indicate that they are just that – in a series and in what order they should be done either numerically going up or down depending which way people want to walk. If you didn’t give them a number they would all have to have different names and it may be more easy to miss one on a route maybe? We used to put the number at the end and then put it at the beginning after reading somewhere several comments about it being easier to find the next cache to do when walking a route if the name starts with the number rather than it being at the end. This was because if the name is long and the number is at the end it isn’t visible immediately on some GPS screens. This may be why more people name them that way now. It was the reason we did anyway!
I agree that numbered caches in a series are much better than named caches and I have always done this, but I much prefer my numbers at the end so that the series is kept together.
On my Skir Hill Trail I wanted to encourage cachers to do it in either direction so please do either ascending odd numbers or ascending even numbers, but not 1, 2, 3, 4, etc 👿 !
There are obviously benefits/downfalls to cachers either way, depending on where, how and why the caches are being searched for!
We are really looking forward to doing Skir Hill – haven’t had the time available yet! Soon as we do we’ll be there!
I was on the opencaching.com site last week, archiving some caches after Amberel had passed through (not much point maintaining them with 2 visitors in 18 months) – and one thing that I did notice on their cache pages is a setting for “Is part of a series” and the ability to name a series to add them to.
That looks a great bit of functionality for identifying a series.
Shame groundspeak would rather spend their dev time doing bonkers things that nobody wants. But they may follow suit because Garmin have done it now, and they don’t like being one-upped by them.
“Maybe we should ask dartymoor, as all his series have had the numbers before the names? ”
For the reason Dartmoor Strider gives – numbers up front are much easier to read on a GPS when you’re looking for the next one.
My first series was post-numbered, but I quickly changed that after reading some comments and realising that my own Oregon 450 had the same issues.
Not a problem if you have a short series. I hope to be doing a series tomorrow that has titles such as “LCT 123” “LCT 124” – can read that on most devices easily enough.
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