I was recently looking through my old finds, and came across my first and only webcam cache find. This is a grandfathered cache type, meaning it is no longer possible to publish a webcam cache but the ones that existed before the grandfathering are allowed to continue operating and collecting finds.

The cache is BigWave Dave’s Dallas at Cook GeoCam

This one caught my notice because I found it disabled. Which concerned me as this had been one of the most reliable webcams – on or off geocaching.com – that I had ever used.

But what dismayed me further was that after Write Note logs started appearing to advise cachers that the webcam was down, and even after a reviewer stepped in to disable the cache, cachers continued logging finds on this one. Sometimes posting random selfies (a minority from the webcam’s location), sometimes images from other webcams nowhere near this one, a few times with a picture of the house the cacher thought the webcam was located in, and a few with no image at all.

THESE IMAGES DON’T COUNT.

Guidelines are very clear on this: For webcam caches, images posted as proof of find MUST be taken by the webcam in question. Otherwise the find was not made.

The reviewer asked the cache owner – who does not have control of the webcam – to start deleting the false logs, or he would have to archive the only Webcam cache in Victoria! But this hasn’t happened yet.

I hope that someone who has posted a false “Webcam Photo Taken” log will read this and return to the cache to do the right thing: Delete your log. You DNF’d this, don’t lie to yourself. Most of the false logs came from cachers with many thousands of finds under their belts. Cachers who OUGHT TO KNOW BETTER.

Integrity is everything in this game! Let’s all keep that in mind every time we go out and every time we come home to log our finds, shall we?