This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.
As a cacher who has over 100 active hides within our province, I get a fair amount of log emails on a regular basis. I usually expect to see at least a few logs roll in every day. I enjoy reading the various logs of people’s adventures finding my caches. I know that for my larger series a lot of them are copy & paste logs but I am fine with that knowing that there are so many different caches and it being hard to distinguish between each of them.
Most of the logs I see come in are short logs with quick tales of finding a cache or thanking me for the hide, etc. Some logs are fairly long winded telling me a good story about finding a particular cache. I have however begun to see a very distinct pattern emerging from cache find logs recently.
In the last few months, I have been seeing a considerable amount of logs that consist of no more than 10 characters. A great deal of them “TFTC!” and nothing else. I’ve had a pile of logs that were nothing more than a smiley or some other emoticon. Personally, I find these types of logs very annoying. I know that a lot of people go out and cache and may snag a lot of different ones in a day. I also know I have been guilty of short written logs. But really, is TFTC or 🙂 the only thing you can come up with when you log a find on a cache? Is it really THAT much of a hassle to write even a little one liner about what you experienced?
Isn’t that the whole point of a log? To share the experience of finding the cache with the owner and other finders? Have cachers become so obsessed with numbers that log entries are now reduced to nothing but a couple of characters, all in the name of trying to get the logging “out of the way”. I would rather have 100 copy and paste logs that at least tell me about your day out caching, then 100 “TFTC” logs. The sad thing is, I am seeing this more and more. I see a lot of new or unknown names on caches of mine and many of the logs are very short and it seems to be a growing trend.
Is anyone else seeing the same thing on their caches?
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