What’s In A Name? The Story of Geocaching Names

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

On the way home from camping this past weekend, I realized that one topic of conversation that has not been discussed on here is the origin of many of our geocaching names. Since most people use an alias for their name, I thought it would be interesting to write a little bit about how we all decided upon the name we chose for geocaching. Here’s my own story.

It actually goes back to the late 1980s in the day of 300 baud modems and Commodore 64 computers. I’d been a computer “geek” since I was 7 years old so even back then I was playing with them. A friend of mine in junior high school had convinced me to get a modem for my computer so we could talk “online”. At the time, this was relatively unheard of so I got one and sure enough, we both thought it was uber-cool. Turns out, he found some phone numbers of computers that we could connect to. This was pre-internet so some of you may not be familiar with what a BBS was. It was basically a dial-in message board where you could leave forum type messages, chat with the SysOP (owner of the BBS) and sometimes play very basic games. In order to sign up you had to pick an “Alias”. At first, I actually went with Wizard but it turned out that someone else in the area was using that name and hadn’t registered on the BBS I was on with that name. So, I had to figure out what to use.

In the 80s, I was a huge fan or Robotech. When it came time for me to decide on a name, I actually opted for something from that world. Zor. It was unique and no one around was using it so I stuck with it. The biggest problem I had was on many BBS systems, Zor was too short. So for those systems, I used ^Zor^.

In my college days (90’s), I actually started using Zor as my name on IRC. This was shortly after the web was picking up speed by IM had not been invented yet (as we know it anyway). I spent a considerable amount of time on an IRC chat channel called #Moncton and always went by the name Zor.

When it came time for me to start geocaching, it just seemed natural to keep with the same name. However, when I registered, the name Zor had been taken so I used the ^Zor^ alias instead. A few years ago I sent an email to Groundspeak and was able to get my name changed to Zor since the other Zor had only ever logged on once and never returned.

It’s a name that has been with me for a very long time so it was only natural to bring it into geocaching. So how about you? Where did you get your geocaching name from?