Today I kept saving geocaches around Karlovy Vary, where there are several PowerTrails, but the best one is probably GeoWest. That would be the main reason to go there, because it is terribly far away (8h+ by train). And what really annoys me is solving caches I don’t understand at all, which is probably 99% of mysteries.
So I write to the owners, and fewer than 20% reply. I write everything down in a document and then send it all at once (so that someone who owns several caches doesn’t get 5 or more identical or similar messages), and the more caches I list, the less likely they are to reply. I’ve really had enough. Take a look at the map around Ceska Lipa, for example, ideally a bit to the south and then to the west.
Nothing but mysteries everywhere, multis and traditionals together make up about 10%. That’s why today I wrote a very simple program where you enter a number and it calculates its digit sum. That was just a small first step towards solving caches, and besides, there are plenty of online and offline programs that can do this.
Still, I keep solving more caches and it’s always the same. Either a clear assignment but no clue how to tackle it, or just a “clever” note like “surely you’ll figure out where the final coordinates are“. So I wanted to extend my digit sum program with batch conversion and add more algorithms for solving ciphers, so you could click together all the steps to be done in sequence and it would then print what it did in each step and the final result.
But then I remembered the site finalni kesky.cz, which I had morally resisted for a long time (for years). I thought that I would either solve a cache myself, or with some help, or not find it at all, but that I would never stoop so low as to collect some credits (whether for submitting other verified coordinates, which then have to be checked to see whether the cache is really there, or for money) just to get the final coordinates of caches, which someone might have entered there either by mistake or deliberately wrong.
I also thought about building my own similar website, or a site for verifying coordinates. It would be a quick job, and the possibilities with the data I would get access to are huge.
Above all, I’d like it to be easy and fast for everyone who can’t solve mysteries, just like me. But what is easier and, more importantly, more effective: solving the cipher with available algorithms and trying evince or geocheck if the owner bothered to add it, or rather going the finalni kesky.cz way? For now I’m more in favor of solving, even though programming it will be more laborious.
When I entered 1 set of coordinates into finalnikesky.cz, it told me “The coordinates have been saved, but since we are seeing them for the first time, other users have to verify them. Once that happens, you’ll get three credits and we’ll send you an email :-)”
Unfortunately, they were the wrong coordinates, and on top of that the cache has been archived for a long time and nobody can find it, so I won’t see those 3 points =D. Then I sent another set of coordinates, correct ones, and they gave me 1 point, probably because someone had already entered these coordinates before me. So I looked at the final coordinates This link is deader than Flash Player. and this is what I saw: 
The coordinates match, I have them right straight from the owner, and 10 verifications right away?
Even if it were only how many times people entered the same coordinates, that’s quite a lot; the cache has been logged as found it on geocaching.com by 193 users. The website finalky.cz works on a similar principle, just with smaller deviations. There may be more of them, but off the top of my head I only know these 2; I didn’t use Google.
So I don’t know. I don’t want to stay at home anymore, because my back hurts like crazy from the chair I sit on, so I have little time for programming, and then I end up walking more than I find out in the field..