Groundspeak celebrates 25 years of #Geocaching… with their own, edited, commercialised whitewashed history.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040129232636/http://geocaching.gpsgames.org/history/ lists some parts of history they’d like to forget or which they may even censor people for. (At least they got the #GPS Blue Switch Day right.)

Unfortunately, #Navicache and #GPSgames are now defunct and I never managed to find @radioscout ’s GE caches. Even the #Opencaching network, while historically strong, never was able to get into users’ minds especially after Groundspeak made it into a mainstream-ish hobby (to get more money), let alone #Terracaching. They did try again to subsume the much older #Letterboxing but it also persists independently. The #xkcd #GeoHashing activity levels are also rather low these days, unfortunately. See wp.inc (or wp.pm) for quite the list of known #waypoint-like præficēs (contributions welcome) and what became of them… although almost nobody laments the loss of opencaching.com (which was even less open than the CC-BY-NC-SA Opencaching Network). I did have quite some fun with #GeoDashing and #GeoVexilla while it lasted, though never managed #Shutterspot nor even looked at #GeoGolf.

Meanwhile, Groundspeak has not only hidden their brands of #Hitchhikers (#Travelbug and #Geocoin) on the ISS but also a cache, which obviously cannot be true as it’s not even geostationary. At least #GeoKrety got a revival recently.

Groundspeak’s own (or maybe bought then EEE’d?) #Wherigo almost didn’t survive the end of the PocketPC era and, like their lab caches (now styled "adventure labs" in groups, with quite the lack of useful APIs), is dominated by people reverse-engineering them to get their found count into the ten-thousands. Their #Waymarking seems to be forgotten as well but I noticed dozens of new ones around ::1 in a granularity fine enough to compete with virtual munzees, so I guess some people still do use it. Many things are now hidden behind commercial smartphone äpps instead of being hackable (or at least scrapable; I remember getting #Expedia maps with #MOBAC for #CacheWolf; none of the other GPS Stash Hunt software I’ve seen has such a great database of waypoints as CW had…) and always requiring more mobile internet than is sensible (especially #Munzee is).

Have I forgotten anything other than the country-specific sites (like GA) I cannot comment on?

Ah. #BesserCacher ("better cacher"), a list of supposedly good caches. They changed their URL scheme from their own WPs to Groundspeak’s and completely lost entries. I think they’re gone. And #Extremcaching (similar but for really extreme expensive exhausting caches) which probably is still going but not really what I’m looking for in a hobby I use to balance all my computer-using (and the other balance hobby, music, singing and playing some instruments).

Anyway, contributions welcome! (And please boost to larger instances.)

I had an email today that a #GeoCoin I had go missing in 2011 had been discovered. So excited, it was one of my first, started in 2008.

Once I translated the German post I realized that they had merely discovered it online. It was nice to think it was still moving around somewhere.

#Geocaching #LongAgo

Ich habe ein #Geschenk voll mit #GeoCache Dosen zum Verstecken erhalte! 🤩

#OpenCaching #GeoCaching #oconly #GeoCoin @geocaching_de