The OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest: everything you need to know

Contest starts in three days!

The Official entry forms for our August 2015 5th Anniversary Contest are now available! Powered by Google Forms, you can view it here. This form is printer friendly. Feel free to print one out to fill out by hand for reference as you go along in the contest. And we have also stated that we will accept legible, handwritten and scanned entry forms emailed to us at the conclusion of the contest. You can also submit your form to us now, and save it for later editing as you go along online! The process for doing so is admittedly not as simple as we would like, but we will outline it below.

Submitting and saving the form online for later editing:

Here are instructions for doing so:
Fill out the three mandatory fields at the top of the entry form (Player name, Your email address, and “Enter the total raw score you are claiming for the month”). You’ll have to just “make up” a raw score the first time. Scroll down to the bottom of the form and hit the Submit button. You should now see this page below on your web browser of choice:

2015example

Next, click on the “Edit your response” link, as shown above. After that, bookmark the page you are taken to! You should now be able to update your entry form from that bookmarked page as you go throughout the month. Be sure to hit Submit at the bottom every time you edit it.

Sponsors/Prizes Page released also.

We have completed the preliminary OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest Sponsors/Prizes page as well, found at https://www.opencaching.us/articles.php?page=2015prizes. Note from that page that our prizes are not finalized yet, and probably won’t be until sometime in August during the contest. That page is the place to look for finalized prize info. Check back often!

The only two links you’ll need:

We’ve had two blog posts releasing info and details about the contest, as well as releasing some via social media outlets, and via the “news” section on the main page of our website. Everything you need or need to know for the contest can now be found on two pages on our website:

Are you playing? Let us know, and let’s talk about it!

The way this contest is set up, we won’t really know exactly how many people are playing until it’s over. We do expect some people to follow the “not as easy as we would like” instructions to fill out their entry forms early, and keep their scores on the fly, but certainly not everyone. So we invite anyone who is playing to tell us about it at a thread we’ve created under the Geocaching sub forum in our forums. We admit that like many old fashioned forums on the internet that ours isn’t very active (they say Facebook is to blame), but hopefully this will be an active thread. Enter the contest, and please consider chiming in over there. Good luck, and we hope to hear from you!

The OpenCaching NA 5th Anniversary contest!

Coming in August! Win prizes!

Open Caching Logo V2BTo celebrate our 5th anniversary (Aug. 18th) and the month of International Geocaching Day (Aug. 15th), we will be running a contest for the entire month of August, which encourages people to find and hide caches on our site.  This contest is inspired by our first “Diversified Cacher Contest” in 2014, two similar “non-official” contests run in the past by one of our admins, NativTxn, as well as a local “alternative to the frog” contest run by Termite Hunter during May and June 2014 at the Greater Charlotte Geocaching Club website. We have prizes to give away! Want to play? Read on.

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Winner announced for the TravelFleas Giveaway!

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We have a winner for our $10 TravelFleas.com Gift Certificate Giveaway! Ian, AKA Bangkok_Ian, a Geocacher from Foxwood, England (A suburb of York, England) was the lucky winner. He is so named because he lived and worked in Bangkok,  Thailand for 10 years.  Sounds very interesting, perhaps we could convince him to be interviewed by this blog in the future.  🙂 Congratulations to him, and thanks to all who entered the contest. Didn’t win? You can always buy your own personalized TravelFleas from TravelFleas.com. They are very reasonably priced, and are a great signature item.

2nd Annual TravelFleas Gift Certificate Holiday Giveaway

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Happy Black Friday, shoppers! Actually, we’re posting this Thanksgiving evening, but Thanksgiving is the new Black Friday. Our November/December 2013 TravelFleas Gift Certificate Holiday Giveaway went pretty well, so we’ve decided to make it an annual thing. So once again, we’re giving away a $10 Gift Certificate to TravelFleas.com, and we want to insure that the winner has plenty of time to get theirs ordered, manufactured, and shipped before the holidays; as TravelFleas make a perfect stocking stuffer for that Geocacher in your life!

The crew at TravelFleas are great friends of this blog and our website via social media. In case you’re not familiar with TravelFleas, they are personalized tags (they can accept up to 20 characters) measuring 1/2″ x 1 1/4″, which can be attached to a Geocaching trackable, or placed in a Geocache as a signature item. They are available in 12 colors, and you can buy them in the TravelFleas Store on their website. Note they have other items for sale, including TravelFleas logbooks, necklace kits, and license plates (a moot point for the blogger, who lives in a 2 plate State). Or you could learn more about them by reading the interview we did on this blog with John from TravelFleas on June 27th, 2013, or the interview The It’s not about the numbers blog did with Mike from TravelFleas in 2012.

To enter The TravelFleas Gift Certificate Holiday Giveaway, fill out the form below with your name (as it says, “Geonick” is fine), and a valid email address. We will never use your email address, and the Google Document storing all the entries will be deleted after the contest.  There are rules, of course, which appear below, in italicized text above the entry form. Don’t forget to check your spam folders, to see if you won!

Rules: To enter, provide your name and email address in the form below. One entry per person, and one entry per email address. There are no Geographical restrictions, contest is open to anyone in the world. The contest begins upon publication of this blog post on Thursday, November 27th, 2014, and ends at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014. One winner will be chosen at random from the entries received. Winner will be notified via email, notification being sent from the email address opencachingnorthamerica at gmail.com (be sure to check your spam folders!), and must respond within 48 hours, or the prize will be forfeited, and another winner will be chosen. Once accepted, the prize will be delivered directly from TravelFleas.com.


Contest ended, entry form removed. Thanks to all who entered!

OpenCachingNA Diversifed Cacher Contest winners announced!

i-dont-always-win-like-charlie-sheen-but-when-i-do-i-win-bigThe winners were drawn for our August 2014 Diversified Cacher Contest on Wednesday, September 17th at 9:00 PM, and we have completed the process of of tabulating them here on our blog. As everyone who has been following along knows, we awarded 3 initial “winners choice” prizes on Sunday September 14th, and this drawing was for the remaining 29 prizes, awarded in order of monetary value. Congratulations to all our winners, many players won multiple prizes. A comment to our post yesterday announcing the winning numbers references trading a prize. That’s an excellent idea, trading would probably occur if these prizes were given away at a Geocaching event. There will be a copy and paste disclaimer at the bottom of every winner’s email saying that they should mention if they’re interested in trading in their reply, and we’ll do our best to “hook you up” with other interested parties. Without further adieu, here are the winners:

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OpenCaching NA Diversified Cacher Contest final drawing details

prizes

The final drawing for prizes for the August 2014 OpenCachingNA Diversified Cacher Contest is at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard time on Wednesday, September 17th. As most players know, we drew the first 3 winning entries on Sunday, September 14th. Those winners (Mrs.HB31, DisneyScout and ShortyKnits) had their choice of any prize on the board, and selected a Munzee Virtual Package, Magellan ExploristGC GPS unit, and a $15 gift certificate to retailer Cache at Night, respectively. As much as we’d like to do that for every player, it’s just not practical, even with a less than expected 22 qualifying players. We’d be here for months, and there’s no guarantee every player will respond. Also, that was never our plan in the first place.

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