or, "That non-issue thing again."

Just to let everyone know, there's no rule or mind-set that we
shouldn't take missing letterboxes off the LbNA website. In fact, we
do it all the time. I admit that we're not as quick on the trigger as
some folks would like. We move at a more elegant, stately,
Dartmoorian pace.

Most folks with their own websites try pretty hard to keep their
clues up to date. Now, with the new site, everyone can do so: feel
free to post "last found on ___" "reported missing by ___" stuff as
often as you want. It's instant: clicking send uploads faster than my
own personal website.

The reasons to be careful about pulling orphaned boxes have been well
discussed: the obvious is that many (most?) "it's missing" posts
would be more accurately put as "not found." The more fundamental
reason has to do with underlying principles here: we believe those
are YOUR letterboxes, not ours. We don't preapprove or edit clues.
It's kind of an intellectual property/copyright thing. It's a dot-
org, not dot-com philosophy.

Still, if it's pretty obvious that orphaned boxes really are missing,
they do get unlisted.

For the several Oregon boxes that are a current topic, this
California transplant has learned something from Connecticut yankees:
those treasured historic boxes would long ago have been adopted,
recarved, replaced. Might be better than yanking them.

Perhaps one of the problems with the "system" is that we wait for a
groundswelling of voices concurring on the missing status of a box, a
growing consensus that finally gets a bit exasperated with our
glacial pace. It's surprising how much emotion gets generated by
letterboxing. Finding a box is a genuine thrill, exhilarating! Not
finding a box is often felt just as strongly, only not as
disappointment but rather often as outright affrontery, and expressed
with frustration and even anger.

Here's an old, old post once recieved that perhaps illustrates things:
>>Now, for the unsoliticited criticism. My family and I just spent a
week up at ---, and we tried to find three of your letterboxes with
absolutely no luck. This is supposed to be a fun sport, not a
tortuous one. We weren't sure we'd figured out the answers to your
clues correctly and so sought the advice of many skilled and smart
friends. My husband and I are no dummies and have found lots of
other boxes and I particularly enjoy puzzles, but your clues to ---, -
--, and --- were simply too difficult and ambiguous. Among the
perhaps 20 adults working on your clues, we still weren't sure we had
the right answers. We then did the hikes and were unsuccessful at
all three. We didn't even try --- knowing that other people before
us had been unsuccessful. I can't tell you how frustrated -- and
angry -- we were, and my two children, ages 8 and 11, are ready to
quit letterboxing permanently. If you can't provide decent, clear
clues, please don't do them at all.
<<

Jay, just returned from checking (for the third time), a letterbox
erroneously reported as missing that ain't. Did have to replace the
full logbook, though.