So the following is posted on Groundspeak's Forum, but is a copy of a Post made to Garmin's Listing Site Forum, and also to other posting locations. The employer of the poster is believed to be Garmin.

  Posted 28 April 2013 - 05:22 AM

The following was posted on the OC.com forums on 4/26/13 but was quickly deleted just a few minutes later.


The truth behind Opencaching.com


Garmin had always had a good relationship with Groundspeak.

After all, I'm willing to argue that most geocachers used

Garmin units. In fact, most cachers probably still do use a

Garmin unit if they aren't using their smartphone. Garmin

always had this grand idea of pre-loading units with

geocaches - similar to the Geomate Jr. But, keep in mind,

that this was well before the Geomate had even been invented.

They had plans for kid friendly units (think neon colored

Etrex) that would have several hundred thousand caches loaded

up and even "adult" versions - the more expensive units -

that would also be pre-loaded with tons of caches.

The powers at Garmin approached the powers at Groundspeak and

they started talking about this idea of pre-loading units.

Groundspeak wanted nothing to do with it and said that they

would never ever open their database to developers or GPS

manufacturers. Just a couple months later, what happened?

Geomate Jr. came along and wanted access to the cache

database so that they could throw some on a small and kid

friendly unit. What did Groundspeak say? "SURE!" (and a few

months after that, the Groundspeak API was introduced).

Naturally, this only made Garmin's people very mad and they

decided to go their own way. Enter Opencaching.com.

Opencaching.com has been billed as a community driven

geocache listing site that is "as free and open as the

outdoors." They want cachers to believe that Garmin is just

trying to improve the activity of geocaching and that

Opencaching.com is driving that change. It's true that

Opencaching has caused Groundspeak to change some aspects of

geocaching.com for the better - but as geocaching.com keeps

getting better Opencaching.com gets further and further

behind. Instead of asking cachers to honestly create caches

on Opencaching.com, the Garmin teams bribes cachers with

units and pathtags. We're about due for another bribing

contest and I can only imagine the unit up for grabs is a new

Oregon.

The whole purpose of Opencaching.com isn't to make

"geocaching free and open to all." It's not to be community

driven or even friendly to use. Ever wonder why the

Opencaching team don't care there are so many cross-listed

caches on the site? It's simply because Garmin wants as many

caches as they can get on Opencaching.com so that they can

throw them on Garmin units when they go out the door. It

doesn't matter if the caches are exclusive to Opencaching.com

or brought over from any other listing site (not just

geocaching.com). Quality also doesn't matter. If you want to

crap in a coffee can, list it as a cache on opencaching.com,

the site, and the muggles that run it, will happily accept it

as a cache - simply because it's one more listing. In fact,

"TrailTech" published several caches for the original

CacheBash that happened last Spring - these caches quickly

became decrepit because they were hidden by folks who had

never been caching: Garmin sales managers, engineers, IT

people. I can't even begin to count how many of these caches

I went after only to find coffee cans filled with rotting and

moldy paper, urine, rusty toys, and trash. I marked many of

them as needing owner maintenance only to be ignored. It was

only when I went back, grabbed these "caches," and emailed

the OC team that these are being thrown away did anyone

actually disable or achive the listings.

Last spring, Garmin held interviews for the Opencaching

Community Coordinator. People who worked at Garmin expected

them to hire from within. After all, there are several

geocachers that work there and would do a great job in the

position. These people were already loyal Garmin users,

understood the Garmin culture, and thoroughly enjoy

geocaching and introducing people to the game. Many Garmin

employees were infuriated when they found out StealthRT was

hired for the job. Sure, he had a couple thousand finds, held

events all the time, and was well-known in the Kansas City

geocaching community. But, he wasn't a Garmin user. He's long

been a Magellan user and had never used a Garmin unit before

getting hired. He only wanted the job because it was a

challenge (and probably so he can get paid to travel to

Groundspeak events).

According to some folks at Garmin, Stealth has said that he

never uses Opencaching.com and will never use the site. Why

not? Because it has nothing to offer him. You see, Stealth is

a numbers hound - which is fine - but Opencaching.com isn't a

place for numbers hounds to up their numbers. Not when so

many other number hounds only count geocaching.com finds in

their statistics. You may be asking yourself why StealthRT

was hired if A) He's not a Garmin user B) has no interest in

using Opencaching.com and C) Doesn't actually do anything

with the community. The truth is, Garmin hired him because

they felt he could get people to cross-list their caches from

Geocaching.com. Remember, Garmin isn't after exclusive cache

listings - they just want volume. This volume can come from

anywhere, just as long as it shows up on Opencaching.com.

Garmin came up with a laughable title of "Opencaching

Ambassador" for the folks who actually care about the site

and want people to create OC exclusive caches - but,

remember, they don't care if the caches are exclusive and

they don't really care about these ambassadors.

We all know that Garmin bribe people with units and pathtags

to lure them into cross-listing caches. But, what about the

people with powertrails? These people don't just hide one or

two or ten caches, they hide thousands. I once contacted the

owners of the ET powertrail about creating a Garmin Adventure

that highlights their trail. This adventure would include

places to eat, get gas, and hotels to stay at. The owners

told me that they would never be interested in listing their

caches anywhere else but Geocaching.com and that all the info

needed for cachers to plan their attack would be on the cache

pages. In other words, they didn't even want me to do

anything with their powertrail as a Garmin Adventure. This

told me that they wanted nothing to do with Garmin. I also

asked them if they would make it easier for people to load

the caches in one shot - as opposed to creating a PQ for the

series. I mentioned that Opencaching.com would make this easy

with the one click downloading of a series. Again, they said

they were already talking about placing a GPX file on their

website that included all the caches of the ET series. A few

months later, the series shows up on Opencaching.com. But,

how? I can only speculate that Stealth either paid them in

units or cash. After all, it had to be a pretty substantial

payment to get the two owners, who were adamantly against

anything but Geocaching.com, to list their caches.

Again, Garmin doesn't care about the community or the quality

of the caches. All they want are caches that they can throw

on units when they're sold. All you people complaining about

the cross-listing of caches, this is EXACTLY what Garmin

wants so don't expect anything to be done about it. All you

who are complaining about StealthRT not doing anything with

the site, that's exactly what Garmin wants. His title is the

Opencaching Community Coordinator but his real title should

be "Garmin's Cross-listing beggar." He gets paid a nice

salary (he drives a Benz convertible, after all) to travel to

Groundspeak hosted events and beg people to put their caches

on Opencaching.com. If you think you're helping the

Geocaching community by placing your caches on

Opencaching.com - think again. You're only helping Garmin

"stick it" to Groundspeak by allowing Garmin to use your

caches on their units. That's the whole "opensource" aspect -

anyone can access their cache database and do what they want

with the data: put it on GPS units, create personal apps,

etc. I wonder what Garmin will say if Magellan or DeLorme

want access to the database. Nah, both of those companies are

too smart to alienate a large percentage of their users.

Instead of everyone complaining about what's not getting

taken care of over here, realize how much better it is

elsewhere. Sure, all sites have their problems, but at least

Geocaching.com doesn't run on unethical principles that hurt

their customers.

I do know that the author has missed out a couple of things, done by Garmin, so making things look one sided. But that is another story.