No more ALR's

It's no secret I haven't been to happy about this no more and you must get rid of all ALR's on all caches on geocaching.com. I've got one that I just don't want to get rid of the ALR. In fact I need to get clarification to even see if it was an ALR. A six stage multi cache with a total of three log book's. You have to sign all three to claim a find. It's not going out of your way to do anything extra. If you are doing the cache as intended you will see all the log book's. You don't have to do the chicken dance or stand on your head while signing.

So to remain in compliance with the guideline's, I made it a "request" instead of required. But after some serious though and thinking how I could change it so what I wanted to do with the extra log book's, I have decided it's time to archive it. I'm leaving it open for the time being to let a few that have express interest some time to finish it.

From what I've gathered it was reviewer's that got the ban in place. Not sure why. But it sound's like they became more of a problem on the coast's and not in our area at all. I don't think there where too many caches with ALR's on them in Iowa anyway's.

I'm starting to feel this is a step in the wrong direction and a kind of limiting what a person can do to make a creative hide. Something extra involved that doesn't have anything to do with geocaching is the given reason for the ban. So how far is that going to trickle down in other cache types. Puzzle's that the puzzle doesn't relate to geocaching?

I'm still surprised the existing one's were not grandfathered over.

Also one had to wonder is this the start of a cache owner losing the ability to police the log's on their caches. If an armchair logger, log's a find will we still be able to delete the bogus log or are they going to take that away from us. I've seen temp ban's and some permanent ban's now for some cache owner's that have deleted log's for no reason other than they didn't like the log. But you have to wonder if they are going to take that ability away here soon.

I wasn't around when virtual's where taken away but they still let the existing one's go or "grandfathered in". As long as the owner was still logging in and policing the log's, then they are left alone. But I can imagine it was a mess for a while with complaint's. I've delt with some of the lackey's and mod's on mine, just cause I didn't' think our volunteer reviewer needed to deal with it. I'm sure he's busy switching cache type for people that are removing the ALR's, and that and taking care of new caches coming out. And I didn't want to add extra work for him.

Just some food for thought, I guess. But as the forum thread's keep growing here, and more thread's are opened. Well, the debate's are no longer debate's, they are getting ugly. I've heard from a few folk's that had a code word hidden in their final cache that was to be e-mail to them by a finder, and they had to drop that as that was an ALR. I guess this should be interesting how it play's out. I would have rather groundspeak leave it into the hand's of the local review's to decide to approve a ALR or not. But I suppose that would lead to lack of consistency due to different opinion's of reviewer's.

On the plus side of thing's we went out today and redid some neat cache's and PJ had a lot of fun with those today.