Hiking Melbourne

Here we go again. Some time ago I wrote a two blog posts about statistics and numbers of geocachers: •  It's going downhill  - Is geocaching declining? •  Quo Vadis Horreum Terrae? - Why is geocaching declining? Since then a year has passed - oh man time flies when you're having fun - and I thought it would be worth revisiting these numbers. Actually I was tracking them for a while now and it's fair to say the game took a nosedive. However lets look at total numbers of 2015 and 2016 first since these years are truly gone by and whoever wanted to log a find would have done that by now. Active Players = 1 find or more that year / Very Active Players = 100 finds or more that year   Remarkably in both years the very active players make up 4.7% of the active players. This roughly 5% seems to be a reoccurring number as shown in previous posts. However there's a clear decline of 7% from 2015 to 2016 which was only 1% from 2014 to 2015. Let's move o...

an opinion by Philipp about the development of Geocaching First of all: I'm not saying the good old times were better. I can think of annoying things which disappeared over the years but aren't covered here like crappy user interfaces. Fifteen years ago geocaching was substantially different to the game we play today but that doesn't mean today's game isn't fun anymore. But let's start at the beginning. It is fair to say that I am one of the old-school cachers. Having started in 2003 I have seen a lot of changes like the introduction of LED torches, the launch of Google Maps in 2005 or the release of the iPhone and the substantial introduction of the geocaching app in 2007. 12 years ago finding a cache was completely different process. First you had to figure out how to get there. Where the hell is that box? Seriously: There wasn't a map function on  geocaching.com ! You had to take the coordinates to mapquest and figure out how to drive there yours...