Among the
German geocachers, the current big topic being heavily discussed is the existence
of a list which holds final coordinates for more than 12,000 caches, mostly Mysteries,
but also of Multi-caches plus answers for Earthcaches. Mainly located in
Germany.
But let’s
start from the beginning:
On Jan 29th,
there was a blog post released (links can be found at the end of this article),
talking about a “secret” German Facebook group, where the only topic was
exchanging solutions and final coordinates for caches. The name of the group is
“Geocaching Mystery Spoiler – Koords bitte !”, which translates to “Geocaching
Mystery Spoiler – the coords, please!”.
Shortly
after it became public that, in addition to the Facebook group, a spread-sheet exists which holds the name, cache id, state / region plus final
coordinates of approx. 12,000 caches. As mentioned above, not only Mysteries,
but Multis and Earthcaches as well.
And sometime
yesterday, Jan 30th, it was confirmed that the (pretty popular)
geochecker webpage "geocheck.org" was intruded, which means that the solutions
for more than 20,000 geocaches were stolen.
So let’s
walk through these three points:
Basically, talking
about final cords is probably as old as geocaching (or, to be more precise, the
existence of Mystery caches). Everybody who ever visited a local geocaching event
catched a talk about this or probably even initiated one. And there’s nothing
wrong with that, especially as in most cases, there’s only a clear hint given
towards the path to choose to solve a mystery, not the final cords. Plus, and
that is the main difference to the mentioned Facebook group, you talk local, probably
about caches within a radius of 20 km or so around. Living in e.g. Munich, you
hardly would discuss a mystery somewhere up north, e.g. in Hamburg or so.
However,
the Facebook group was nation-wide; cords for the whole country of Germany were
exchanged. By the way: I only saw extracts from the full list, so I‘m not 100% sure
that the caches are really all placed in Germany. But at least the vast
majority is in Germany.
But, coming
to the second point, there was an additional list which came to light, which
held the above mentioned data for the caches in a spread-sheet, so it is easy
to search for a specific cache name, cache id or filter by state (one column of
the spread-sheet mentioned the state of Germany, in which the cache is placed).
For the
moment, it is not clear if the intrusion into the geocheck.org database is
related to the list. It is indeed true the vast majority of caches in the
mentioned spread-sheet uses geocheck.org as a geochecker, but there are also
caches which use a different (or no) geochecker.
As said,
all of this was German-centered. Well, actually of course nobody knows if not
cachers from other countries participated, too, but for the moment, it has to
be assumed it is mainly German geocachers.
Which leads
to the question: why the hell geocachers do something like this? Are German
geocachers are really that heavily focused on having as many “found it” as they
can get? Looking at the above, the answer may be: yes, they are. Well, the
number of geocachers which acted in this Facebook group and helped to complete
the spread-sheet is definitely only a small fraction of the overall number of active
German geocachers. But this small fraction is the one which gives geocaching as
a game, which is supposed to be nothing but fun, a tremendous shift to the
negative side.
For me,
being a German geocacher as well, it is impossible to understand why somebody
can be that heavily focused on the find count. What for? Ego boost? Showing up
with the personal stats? The latter only works in case the other, “normal” geocachers,
are open for that. And on the former: well, of course geocaching can work for
that, no doubt. Probably every geocacher is proud (of himself) when finishing a
cache with a high T-ranking or solves a difficult Mystery. But if somebody
takes it that far heavily exchanging final cords of caches and even breaking
into a geochecker server – which is a criminal and illegal act – there something
wrong with this person for sure.
However,
the impression left is: German geocachers take the game too seriously. Which is
not true for the majority of geocachers, but, as mentioned above, is a small
fraction of morons which create this impression, not the (silent) majority of
german cachers. Which is a real pity!
Reportedly,
the case is in the focus of Groundspeak already. Well, I guess Groundspeak has
to act, as, as far as I know, Germany is the second biggest geocaching
community after the US, so Groundspeak should have an interest to get things
straight again.
And,
finally: How does the whole issue affect the “daily geocaching” in Germany?
Well, you got the full range. Some cache owners removed their Mysteries
immediately and put them to the archive while others say: “Ok, let’s see what
happens next and how the whole thing develops.”
From my
side, having approx. 60 mysteries out in the field, it seems like a bit less
than half of them are on this list. And most of them are the easier one. The tougher
ones are not listed. Anyway, for the moment, I will leave all caches active. In
case we I rushed with logs, I will probably re-think what to do. But I doubt
that the number of logs will increase drastically.
But, again,
the whole story is nothing but sad…
And here
are the four links on the blog posts, which brought the whole thing to light.
These are all German posts:
- http://hilftdirweiter.de/bye-bye-raetselcaches-die-zerstoerung-durch-punktgeile-facebook-user
- http://hilftdirweiter.de/update-zur-mystery-datenbank/
- http://hilftdirweiter.de/der-morgen-danach-ein-weiteres-update-zur-mystery-datenbank/
- http://hilftdirweiter.de/wenn-steine-ins-rollen-kommen/
