First 3 winners announced in the OpenCaching NA Diversified Cacher Contest!

As threatened, we held the preliminary drawing for the first three prizes in our Diversified Cacher Contest on Sunday, September 14th, at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard time. The players assigned the first three numbers drawn were contacted via email, and given 72 hours to select a prize. It took less than 16 hours for all three to respond, and for the three prizes to be selected! The first number selected, 65, was assigned to Mrs.HB31, and she selected one of the Munzee Virtual packages. The 2nd number drawn, 29, belonged to Disney Scout, and she selected our prize with the highest monetary value, a Magellan Explorist GC unit donated by our featured sponsor, Terracaching.com. The third number drawn was 37, assigned to ShortyKnits, and she selected the $15 gift certificate from the Ontario, Canada based Geocaching vendor Cache at Night. Hey, it just occurred to the blogger as he’s writing this post that we had 3 female winners! Congratulations to the three winners, and thanks so much for responding so quickly.

This means the drawing for the remaining 29 prizes can occur on schedule on Wednesday, September 17th at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We will give further details on that drawing in a blog post tomorrow, and we’ll try to get that up in the afternoon, rather than the evening. We can tell you (and we have in the past), that the remaining prizes will be awarded on a “you get what you get” basis.

clandestine guerrilla video of the actual drawing has appeared on YouTube. It’s only 17 seconds long, and contains no sound, other than a few mouse clicks. This is because a) Mr.Yuck hates the sound of his own voice, especially on video, and b) no one wants to hear him say “uh” or “um” after every other word. This clandestine video is posted below.


Diversifed Cacher Contest entry numbers released and prize drawing info

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We have assigned the 92 entries (earned by 22 qualifying players) for the August 2014 Diversified Cacher Contest, and are officially announcing the date of the drawings. Yes, that’s plural, read on! As we had mentioned on numerous occasions, assignment of the entries was done using the Random Integer Set Generator from Random.org. We requested 1 set of 92 unique integers whose value was 1-92. We have a screen shot of our actual number set at the bottom of this blog post, should you like to see it. The first 17 random numbers were assigned to our entrant with the most points, the second 10 random numbers to the entrant with the second most points, and so on. Below are all the entrants, their number of entries, and the random number(s) assigned to their X number of entries, in table form:

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Diversified Cacher Contest scores released

letteredocnalogoWe have finished compiling the scores for the August 2014 Diversified Cacher Contest! We had a total of 24 qualifying players, 22 of them eligible for prizes. If you will remember, players received 1 entry for every 100 points scored in the contest. So those 22 eligible players earned a total of 92 entries. Our top entrant, Disney Scout from Maryland, earned 17 entries. Our next step is to assign those entries numbers 1-92 using the random number generator services offered by Random.org. Those results will be released tomorrow, along with details on the drawing to be held soon. If you want to know what “soon” means, tune in tomorrow evening, Eastern Standard Time. 🙂 Should anyone dispute their scores as listed below, you have until 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, September 14th to do so by contacting us at octeam at opencaching.us. But we don’t anticipate hearing from anyone, every single player, save one, ended up with as many or more points as they claimed on the entry form. Only one player ended up with 25 less points, probably for claiming 25 points in one of the “beat the admin” challenges, and it did not affect their number of entries. Here are the results:

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OCNA Diversified Cacher Contest: rule clarifications

sign-clarify-mdThere are only 10 days left in the OpenCaching North America Diversified Cacher Contest! There were several rule clarification questions for the OC Team early on, both via email, and in our dedicated contest thread in our forums. We answered them all of course, but we realize not everyone is going to send us an email, or post in our forum thread. This blog post will therefore serve as the go to reference for clarification of  the rules. We have several clarifications below in a Question and Answer type format. Note: this post was edited 8/30/14 to reflect a new clarification on Social Munzees (they do not count as captures).
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OpenCaching NA Diversified Cacher Contest entry forms

Contest starts in two days!

We actually announced this via our Social Media outlets on Monday evening, July 28th, but the Official entry forms for our August 2014 Diversified Cacher Contest are now available! Powered by Google Forms, you can view it at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CJsycLI2jLr914xFvKxQA0p-11TKMi-HQdi1-Hmtriw/viewform?usp=send_form. This form is printer friendly, and should be 6 pages in length. 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(s), 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:

Entry form exampleNext, 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 Diversified Cacher Contest Sponsors/Prizes page as well, found at https://www.opencaching.us/articles.php?page=divprizes. Note from that page that as predicted, 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.

Everything you need for the contest:

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 hope to hear from you!

The OpenCaching NA Diversifed Cacher Contest

Coming in August! Lots of great prizes!

Open Caching Logo V2BTo celebrate our 4th anniversary (Aug. 18) and the month of International Geocaching Day (Aug. 23), we will be running a contest for the entire month of August, which encourages people to use alternative Geocaching websites (Us and the OpenCaching Network, Terracaching.com, GPSgames.org, Geocaching Australia and Navicache.com), as well as the smartphone based GPS games Munzee, Sighter and Monster Cache. This contest is inspired by 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. Prizes include a brand new in the box GPS unit from Terracaching.com, multiple premium memberships and multiple “virtual packages” from Munzee.com, a Sighter T-Shirt, Cache me if you can Geocaching board game, Monster coins from Monster Cache, and much, much more! Need details? Have questions? Read on.

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