How a cache gets published

The step nobody sees

You place a container, write a listing, submit it, and then nothing happens for a few days.

What is happening is that a volunteer somewhere is reading your submission against a set of published guidelines and deciding whether it can go on the map. They are not staff, they are not paid, and they did not write the rules they are applying. On the major services they cover a region, which is why the same name appears on every cache published near you.

This step is invisible to finders and it shapes the entire hobby. Every cache you have ever found passed through it.

What they are actually checking

Permission. Has the landowner agreed? This is the one that holds up the most submissions, and the reviewer cannot simply take a shrug for an answer. The whole point of the requirement is that somebody with authority over the land knows the cache is there.

Proximity. Is it too close to another physical cache? This is the most surprising rejection, because the thing you are near may be an intermediate stage of somebody else’s multi-cache, invisible on the public map. You have not done anything wrong; you simply could not have known.

Whether it is a cache. The guidelines exclude a range of things: caches that require a purchase, that promote something commercial, that are buried, that depend on defacing property, or that ask finders to do something unsafe.

The listing itself. Does the description contain what it needs? Are the difficulty and terrain ratings plausible? Is anything hazardous declared?

Why it feels slow

Because it is one person, doing this in their own time, for a region that may contain thousands of cachers.

The most useful thing a submitter can do is make the review quick: state the permission plainly, list the coordinates of every stage rather than making the reviewer ask, declare anything hazardous, and answer the first message the same day. A submission that answers the obvious questions before they are asked is often published in a single pass.

The least useful thing is to resubmit repeatedly, or to treat the exchange as adversarial.

What this says about the listing services

The review process is one of the genuine differences between services, and it is philosophical rather than technical.

A strict, consistent review produces a map you can trust: caches that are permitted, safe, spaced out and described honestly. It also means slower publication, more rejections, and a set of rules that somebody else decides.

A lighter process publishes faster and lets in cache types and placements the stricter service would decline. It also means more variability in what you find.

Several of the alternative services in this section exist partly because their founders thought the balance had been struck in the wrong place. When people argue about which listing service is better, this (rather than the software) is usually what they are actually arguing about.

For finders

Two things worth knowing.

The needs-maintenance and needs-archived flags on a listing are how the process continues after publication. A reviewer acts on credible reports, and a cache that has been missing for a year with nobody flagging it will simply stay on the map, wasting everybody’s afternoon.

And when a cache you liked is archived, it is usually not censorship or a dispute. It is an owner who moved away, a landowner who withdrew permission, or a container that could not be maintained any longer.

The commonest reasons a submission comes back

Most listings that are held up are held for a small number of recurring reasons, and none of them is a judgement about whether the cache is interesting.

Proximity. Caches have to sit a minimum distance apart, and the check is mechanical. A perfectly good hide can fail because something exists nearby that you cannot see on the public map, an unpublished submission, or a stage of a multi-cache whose intermediate points are invisible to everybody except the reviewer.

Permission. Placements on land with an identifiable owner, on protected sites, or on infrastructure will be queried. The question is not whether you were careful; it is whether somebody with authority over that ground said yes.

Buried, or apparently buried. Anything requiring digging is refused, and so is anything on ground where permission has not actually been given. So is anything a reviewer cannot distinguish from digging based on your description, which is a different problem and is solved by describing the hide more clearly.

Commercial content. A listing that promotes a business, however gently, will be sent back.

How to make the process short

The submissions that publish quickly share one characteristic: the reviewer did not have to ask anything.

Use the reviewer note field (the private box on the submission that finders never see) and answer the questions before they are put. Say who gave permission and in what capacity. Explain the container and how it is attached if the hide is unusual. If there is a stage close to something else, say so and give the distance.

This costs five minutes and routinely converts a fortnight of correspondence into a same-week publication. It is the single most useful thing a new cache owner can learn, and almost nobody is told it.