5th Annual GOWT Gathering

Normally I might say that this picture says it all, but...

GOWT is having its 5th Annual Gathering on February 21, and they may want to take this opportunity to figure out why they even bother existing as a group.

They decided a couple of months ago to stop charging membership dues, saying that they had collected enough money to fund them for a while. Since their only real expense involves paying an annual fee for the website domain, one might consider this a reasonable course of action. However, the truth of the matter is that they (the leadership committee) realized that they were incapable of providing a service that was worth even a small yearly membership fee.

Over the past year, the quality of the newsletter has deteriorated both in content as well as the language skills of the editor. Having someone actually proofread the newsletter before it goes online would help immensely. The most recent editor of the newsletter was Titansfan and judging by the quality of the writing on his blog, he doesn't bother to proofread his own work.

My advice to GOWT: Get a real editor.

One of the benefits to being a paid member was the ability to see a list of members and their find counts, which is neat if you like comparing your find/hide numbers to those of your peers. Of course, that requires somebody to keep the list up to date. This list was updated once in late June 2008 and most recently on October 8, 2008. Oh, well...at least there is another website where that information is freely available.

My advice to GOWT: Remove this page.

They have what they call a Database of Geocaches, which apparently was designed with the intent that members submit geocache reviews that can help people figure out what caches are interesting to hunt. This database was created in November 2007 and last updated in February of 2008. Only three different people posted reviews.

My advice to GOWT: Solicit more entries from the Advisory Committee (at the very least). It would give them a purpose.

The discussion forums have basically become a place where 4 or 5 regulars chat about their caching adventures. Yawn.

On the rare occasion that someone might post useful information specific to a particular region on GOWT, they tend to post it under "General" with a vague thread title. They should try using the regional sections of the forums. That is why they were created.

Example:
Instead of starting a thread under "General" entitled "LBL Closed", create a thread in the Northeast GOWT regional section and title it "Sections of LBL temporarily closed due to ice storm".

My advice to GOWT: Find yourselves a moderator with actual moderating experience. Moderators do more than just ban members for inappropriate content.

As the picture above shows, the GOWT website crashes on occasion. In this case, it was a problem with the "news" section. This shouldn't crash, since there is rarely any news posted.

My advice to GOWT: Get a REAL webmaster. Also, when you post "news" about upcoming events (usually cut and pasted straight from the cache page), put in an appropriate HYPERLINK !!!