Are virtual caches set to return in the near future?
It’s been discussed over and over again by many many people and the majority of folks who talk about it, favour the idea that Virtual caches should be brought back into geocaching. Virtuals were discontinued several years ago but left within the caching community to log finds, but no new listings were permitted. Instead, users were directed to another Groundspeak project called Waymarking which was a place they thought was better suited for what virtuals were intended to be.
Since then, there has been a growing movement among cachers to have the listing of virtual caches re-enabled with new guidelines that would prevent the issues of the past from resurfacing. For specifics, check out this article on retired cache types. This movement can be seen most notably by the constant posts on the official geocaching forums where almost every month, there’s a new thread about virtuals.
There was also a new Facebook group created called “Bring Virtual Geocaches Back” which serves as yet another place where people can “rally” to try and bring them back. This group was started by a man named Keith Solbrig who very recently posted a message on the wall of the group regarding the future of virtuals. The message read as follows:
Hey guys. I just got a reply from Jeremy Irish (one of the top dogs at geocaching.com) and it said..” We’re actively looking into bringing them back in some way that doesn’t cause the problems they did in the past. Stay tuned…”
Now Jeremy is actually the guy who started geocaching.com and runs Grounspeak so if this in fact did come from him, it is promising that something might actually happen. There’s no way to know whether or not this is just a stock reply he gives people who ask the question, but it would seem to imply that the idea of bringing virtuals back is on the table.
There have been some hints given by Jeremy and other bigwigs at GSP that some new stuff is in the pipe. I’ve seen it mentioned in several interviews and other posts around the net so perhaps this is something we’ll see soon.
It’ll be nice to see a more stable version of the virtual’s come back. allows us that are new and never had the chance to develop any on our own and it would help in the preservation of current virtual’s where the owner has moved on from the game.
so what exactly are all of those ‘past issues’ that everyone is talking about?
Well, it’s hard to be brief about it, but ultimately, virtuals were supposed to be placed in interesting places like historic monuments, and other places where a physical container could not be hidden, but people wanted others to visit/see. First posts, cool plaques and other monuments, interesting buildings, and all kinds of very cool virtuals were created and those are the ones that still exist today.
The problem that came up was that people were placing virtuals in places with no real significance such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc. Just placing a virtual anywhere for the sake of placing a virtual. This led to a lot of armchair logging and plenty of “lame” hides. GSP decided to disable virtual listings and move them to Waymarking which could be used to list anything. If you look in many cities for waymarks, there’s a ton of very ordinary and unimaginative locations along with some good places.
GSP didn’t want a sea of “crap” virtuals infesting the world of caching so they pulled the plug on it because there was no GOOD way to verify that the new virtuals were in places of significance.
I assume if they restore them, there will be a new set of guidelines to help alleviate this issue.
It’d be nice to see them come back, as long as the rules don’t make it overly difficult to place one. For example, I would have loved to place an earth cache or two when I was in Ukraine. But with the newer rules, you have to get permission from the land owner or authority to place an earth cache, even if it’s in a public place. Well, that pretty much ruined my chance to plant one since even if I spoke the language well and could figure out what government department to ask, it’s hard to say whether they’d believe it was just for fun and be willing to give permission for free. And I imagine there are lots of countries where it’d be even harder to get official government permission. I can understand the issue that likely arose if people were placing earth caches on private property or in sensitive areas, but if you can show where you want to “place” an earth cache is in an open public use area, I’d think that should be sufficient. Maybe when I return to Kyiv I’ll contact GS to see if something can be worked out.