Hey Big Wave Dave,

I'm a geocacher in Victoria (not a very accomplished one, though, I'll admit) and I wanted to reach out about the Dallas Road webcam.

If you're familiar with geocaching, you can skip this paragraph! Geocaching is a hobby where people hide containers in the wild and list their GPS coordinates online for others to find. There is a type of geocache called "webcam" where you would capture yourself on a webcam and post a screenshot as proof that you visited the location, instead of signing your name in a physical logbook.

The Dallas Road webcam is used as one of these webcam geocaches: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCP ... ook-geocam

There are only 4 active webcam caches in Canada: the BWD Dallas Road cam, 2 in Ontario, and 1 in Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, webcam caches are no longer supported, so it's impossible to create new ones. The BWD geocache is in danger of being archived. Here is the note from admin:

It has come to my attention that there may be an issue with this webcam. Looking at the listing I see two problems.

The webcam is currently not functioning.
The more significant problem is that cachers are logging "Webcam photo taken" and posting selfies or other pictures not take with the webcam.
Here is a quote from the guidelines:

"A Webcam Cache can only be logged with an image taken directly from the associated webcam feed."

Here are some more quotes from the Help Center article on Webcam caches:

"If the webcam is not in service you cannot claim your “find” online."

"Only logs with a screenshot from the webcam feed are acceptable."

If the webcam is down or you cannot get it to work DO NOT log this cache. If you have previously claimed a find without taking a webcam photo delete your log or edit it to a note.

I'm going to temporarily disable this listing to give the cache owner a chance to respond and address the issues. As long as the cache owner provides regular updates and deletes any bogus "selfie" logs I will be happy to give them as much time as necessary to resolve the webcam problem. However, if there is no response from the cache owner or the bogus selfie logging continues the cache may be immediately archived.

My question is: is there anything the geocaching community can do to help get the webcam back online? Is it something that could be fixed with donations and if so, is there a monetary goal I could share with others? I see some visitors from Washington have already asked on the cache page if they're able to assist, and I think a lot of people would be happy to contribute to keep this running.

I've just sent an e-transfer your way. I hope it helps. Thanks for doing what you do!

If everything goes well, hopefully it will be back in 2-3 weeks. Thank you for the website donation.
Dave

bwd wrote: ↑Sat Aug 06, 2022 12:54 pm If everything goes well, hopefully it will be back in 2-3 weeks. Thank you for the website donation.
Dave

Thanks Dave, I'll pass that along. Cheers!