so I try to translate Olivers idea as good as I can:
Hello everybody,
there are caches, which are not intended for the public (but nethertheless legal),
e.g. extravagant multi-caches, which should not be destroyed by masses of geocachers walking through.
Or geocaches with high T5-rating, which should only be handled by climbing-experts only.
On geocaching.com site these geocaches are either listed as member-only caches or they are communicated
privately or in closed forums.
The idea: We allow the owner to publish his cache only to a closed user group. Every user group has it´s own rules
of how to handle a membership in this group (but of course without fees or money involved). The group admins could
invite users to entry their group or remove user from their group.
Example: Real T5 (climbing) caches. Prerequisite should be, that the user has an official climbing certificate.
This prevents people from bringing themselves in danger and have to be rescued by police (this had happened
many times before). The amount of users who are searching stays quite small, so this is a benefit for nature too.
We should define a general ruleset, e.g. local laws need to be observed and all group members have to obey their
own rules (no depotism) Everything else has to be controlled by the group themselve. Regarding the mentioned
climbing caches no one could make accousations against DWJ (that is the official sponsor of opencaching.de) and
telling that they just want to sell some climbing courses.
What are the benefits for opencaching?
Soon these groups will act like a small community, and they will be responsible for their own caches, so these
caches are maintained and have a much better quality. The community is more involved to their caches.
The amount of incidents which produce bad press articles will be reduced.
I rethought the whole ides of "private cache sets" and couldn´t find any negative point.
Only the oc-network-synchronization will be much more difficult - but these special caches sets maybe don´t need
any synchronizing at all.
Is this idea good enough for beeing realized? überdenken
Best wishes, Oliver
