Geocaching.com Alternatives

Surprisingly (or not), there are many other geocaching sites besides the main geocaching.com. These other sites have their own rules about placement, different rating and logging features, etc.

* NaviCache: one of the first alternatives to develop, based around looser restrictions

* TerraCaching: Developed with the desire of placing higher quality caches

* Opencaching (.us): A site promoting free use for all users, with no premium (paid) content.

* Opencaching.com: GPS manufacturer Garmin's geocaching website

I have a Terracaching account from a long time ago, when I was more active in geocaching. However, I never found or placed a terracache; there were none near me and I wasn't sure one of my caches would qualify as "high quality". Plus, I wanted people to actually find it. Terracaching isn't popular enough around here.

I do like Garmin's opencaching.com site layout. At first glance, I find it to be simple and intuitive. I think I still prefer geocaching.com, at least now that I'm familiar with how to navigate around the site (when I first started caching, that might be another thing...).

I also like the idea of Opencaching (opencaching.us), providing free caching without any special paid content. I generally like anything that's "open" for everyone to participate (open source software, wikis, etc.). The site is also fairly straight forward to use. I think I like its look a little more than opencaching.com.

There is confusion about opencaching.com and opencaching.us. At least, it seems potentially confusing. The .com is owned by Garmin. It's free, but I'm not sure what other features it has. It doesn't seem very clear to me what the goal or purpose of it is. On the other hand, the .us site has a more clearly defined aspect: keep it free. I understand why it exists as an alternative to geocaching.com. One convenient thing about it is the ability to cross-list caches, based on the few cache listing I've seen there. It makes it easy to say "Also listed on: Geocaching.com", with a link directly to that cache page.

One of the most common features that these alternative sites offer is rating caches. Geocaching.com, from what I understand, is against the idea of having ratings, per se. They did introduce a feature that allows premium members to mark their favorite 10% of cache finds. That's probably as close to rating as it'll get.

I don't know how I feel about rating. I love getting feedback from my caches - what I did good, what I need to work on, and so forth. The major downside I can see is different caching styles people have. That makes it difficult to compare user ratings equally, given that everyone will have different criteria. I guess most people view the good outweighing this for it to be a feature on many, if not most, of the alternatives.