Groundspeak Volunteer Geocoins

Each year for the past couple of years, Groundspeak has sent the reviewers a little Christmas present in the mail. It is nice that they show appreciation for the volunteer services we provide to the geocaching.com site and to the geocachers around the globe.

Just before Christmas this year a box showed up on my doorstep. They told us that something was coming but wanted us to be quiet so the surprise would not be spoiled for others. I opened my box up and much to my surprise I saw a whole bunch of new geocoins! The folks at Groundspeak had created a Volunteer Appreciation Geocoin.


I was speechless.

They look so good and as hot as geocoins are I knew that they would be in high demand. Geocoins are like beanie babies right now. People pay insane prices to get coins that are hard to find. I figured once we got these that emails would start to come in trying to get one, and they did. I did not get as many as I thought I might, but a few did come in from people I had never heard of before. It is going to be hard to decide where I am going to send them all. I have given some of them to cachers already. We take ownership of the coin by activating it ourselves, which adds it to our "owned" profile. From there cachers can log it if they see the coin. I will not be allowing any "virtual logs". "Virtual logs" are where a cacher emails the person who has the coin to ask for the secret number used to log the coin (removed in the photo above and replaced by my nickname). They never actually see the coin, but the coin icon appears on their stats page. I think it is amazing that people are somewhat shallow and want the icon but don't care enough to actually see the coin. It is a practice that is frowned upon by Groundspeak, and I agree with Groundspeak regarding the practice.

So, we will see how the Volunteer Geocoin goes.
I am so honored that Groundspeak did this for us.