Monday, July 27, 2009

Submitting caches in advance for an event

Here's a recent question that has been asked of me at different times by different geocachers.
Ken,
Just a question regarding our upcoming event. For last years event,
you allowed us to submit caches "pre-approval" before the event and then
published them a few days after the event. We are already scoping out
places for this year's event and were hoping to do the same thing. A few
of the containers we make for a specific spot. How much extra work
is it for you to pre-approve these caches and then sit on them? Do you have a separate database of caches that have been approved
but are not yet published? As always, thanks for your time.


So that more geocachers can understand how I like to handle these situations, here's my answer. In general it's fine to submit caches for pre-approval that you don't want published until a specific date. I'll look them over and let you know if they appear to comply with all the guidelines, including the 528ft. proximity guideline. Rather than me setting some type of timer on them for publication on a specific date (a feature which is not available to me but which would be nice to have), I'll disable them and wait for you to re-enable them when you're ready for publication. That way they will to reappear in my review queue.

It's fine to submit caches several weeks in advance. Even a couple of months is OK if you're planning to submit a large number of them. However, it wouldn't be fair to other geocachers to let you submit geocaches more than a few months in advance, because that would be abusing the privilege of "reserving" geocaching locations.