Volunteers

This page contains information specific to Geocaching Australia.

Geocaching Australia is run on a volunteer basis with a number of roles and positions filled by volunteers with no payment or compensation.

The roles and positions that currently exist at Geocaching Australia are:

Senator

Major decisions on the direction of the Geocaching Australia website are taken by a group representing each state and territory of Australia and New Zealand. They are known as Senators and are chosen by popular poll on a yearly basis around June or July each calendar year.

Developer

The Geocaching Australia website is developed, enhanced and maintained by your developers. There have been a number of developers currently and in the past. Caughtatwork and CraigRat are the current developers. Previous major contributors include Mind Socket& Ideology Geocaching & Riblit. If you are interested helping out the developer team please contact the current developers. We use a LAMP stack for our production server and each developer has their own development environment (funded by the developer themselves) of either LAMP or WAMP.

dZ administrator

The game of dragonZone is looked after by two administrators who contribute ideas and innovations to the game for the developers to carry out. They can also autonomously create bonus points periods for finds or hides or both and award bonus points based on certain geocache types. They are also responsible for updating the dragonZone news and tips and have the task of updating the Geocaching Australia Facebook Page when new dragonZOne information is released.

Social Media Author

The Social Media Authors are responsible for publishing information to our Social Media Platforms including our very own forum. We use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as our various forms of social media. We have a number of Social Media Authors which include our Facebook administrators.

SBA Administrator

Should Be Archived. A log type that indicates a geocache is in a situation that needs archiving. Every time someone logs a Should Be Archived the geocache is added to the list and on a regular basis our SBA administrators review the list and if necessary archive the geocache listing or post a special note to indicate a review has taken place and no archiving is required. The SBA administrators will also review temporarily disabled geocaches that have been disabled for more than 90 days to see if they should also be archived. Logs made by our SBA Administrators are anonymized to Geocaching Australia. This is not to hide, this is to avoid unfriendly backlash.

User Approve Administrator

Members who join Geocaching Australia are vetted by volunteer administrators to ensure we minimise SPAM account signups. This means we may be only approve a new user within a day. Without our User Approve Administrators and if we allowed automatic approvals, we would allow nearly 100 SPAM signups per day. The small delay in having a new account approved is far outweighed by the lack of SPAM our forums receive.

Global Forum Administrators

Our focums are administered by Global Forum Administrators. Rather than appoint dedicated moderators for each forum our Global Forum Administrators have taken on the role of moderating the entire forum including deleting any SPAM accounts that slip through and can act as Forum Faeries to change your geocaching name as well.

Daily Mailer Administrator

As part of the daily email that comes out highlighting new and changed geocaches we can also have messages inserted into that email. Our Daily Mailer Administrators co-ordinate the various messages and times for these messages to go out. A number of roles have administration into the Daily Mailer and kudos to them for trying to keep everything at a good level of sanity.

Shop Keeper

Your friendly Geocaching Australia Shopkeeper is Caughtatwork who takes your orders, packages them up and takes them to the mailbox for mailing. A life sometimes gets in the way, a delay or a day or two here and there is inevitable and he apologies in advance for any major delays. The Shop Keeper will also order new stock and look for new items to sell through our shop. At the moment the Shop Keeper is also the designer for the majority of the pathtags that are available through the shop. If you have a suggestion and source of items you believe we should be selling through the shop please contact your shop keeper.

Rewards Administrator

Rewards are offered at Geocaching Australia when you reach 100, 500 and then every 1,000 geocache finds. The Rewards Administrator watches the list and occasionally sends our the rewards via mail. This is generally every couple of week or so, so sometimes your reward may be a little later than you want and you just want to die with anticipation. All rewards are eventually shipped but if you would like to followup feel free to contact the Rewards Administrator to make sure nothing has gone astray. The Rewards Administrator also distributes the rewards / prizes for all games run by Geocaching Australia.

Database Administrator

The administration of the Geocaching Database is currently undertaken by the developer team, but if you are a keen DBA, either Caughtatwork and CraigRat would be happy to talk to you about helping us with our data model and database administration.

Support

Any good website, even Geocaching Australia has a support line. We have a support ticket system that you can use to report issues or problems or queries. Our Support staff are always ready and willing to help you out on a volunteer basis.

Importers

There are some who import a few listings and logs every now and then for our statistics. There are a few who import regularly. Then there are the few who import statistical data on a phenomenal basis contributing over 50% of our imported logs and 40% of our imported geocaches. The data is only used for statistical purposes and without those few who take the time to import their data we would not have anywhere near the statistics that we currently offer. The good folks who import data into the Geocaching Australia database for all of your statistical enjoyment are to be applauded.

Geocachers

You may not think so, but as a geocacher who finds and hides geocaches at Geocaching Australia you are also part of our volunteer team and without you we would have no geocaches to list. Kudos and thanks to every volunteer who spends their own money to find a geocache or hide a geocache and use Geocaching Australia.