So for most of you, you’re probably unaware that within the geocaching community, there are associations that spring up which tend to group cachers from a specific geographical area together. They are usually province or state bound but in the case of this end of Canada, it actually consists of multi-province associations.
See, I’ve only been caching for a few years so I wasn’t here when it all started, but you can read some of the history in this link I started on one of the local forums.
Basically, it goes like this. It started with the MGA: Maritime Geocaching Association. But somehow it ended up that people were annoyed by the fact that Newfoundland was excluded from that so a second regional group was created called the ACGA: Atlantic Canada Geocaching Association.
As a general rule of thumb, the ACGA tends to get most of it’s traffic from people in Nova Scotia, while the MGA gets it’s traffic from people here in New Brunswick. The ACGA is a bit more formal as it is a registered association and has affiliations with municipalities, whereas the MGA is really just a group of cachers.
Well, what’s been happening is that the MGA website is OUTDATED. The stuff on there is so old that no one goes to it anymore. The only active part is the forum and even it seems to be slowing down a lot. Seems the MGA is dying.
So one of the local cachers posed the question as to whether or not the MGA should be taken over by someone else who could revitalize the website and bring new stuff into the mix. This is something I had thought about doing on my own but never mentioned it to anyone. When it got mentioned on the MGA forum, I jumped at the chance.
The biggest issue is apparently the guy who owns the domains and website. I have never met the man but have heard through various folks that he’s kind of difficult and has been somewhat the cause of this ACGA vs MGA problem but I don’t know the specifics. So if that is the case, odds are he would be unwilling to walk away but we need to find out.
I get the impression that most folks would want to preserve what was of the old site, but if the old admin doesn’t want to give it up, then we’d have to start all over again. Not exactly what I’d like to see.
So as it stands now, we’re working on trying to put an event together that would get anyone interested in the future of the MGA to come out. I’m working with another cacher to get this meeting going and we’ll see what happens. Regardless of the outcome, it feels kind of nice to be brought into the loop on something like this. Should be interesting to see how it all unfolds.
