Acronyms get used a lot in Geocaching for writing logs. This page is dedicated to tracking various Geocaching acronyms and what they represent.
Acronym List
- CO - Cache Owner
- DNF - Did Not Find
- FTF - First to Find
- GZ - Ground Zero - refers to the cache's hiding spot
- LN - Left Nothing
- OP - Original Poster - used primarily on the forums to reference the person who started a post
- SL - Signed Log
- TB - Travel Bug
- TFTC - Thanks For The Cache
- TN - Took Nothing
TNLNSL
These three acronyms often get combined together to indicate that a Geocacher signed the log, neither dropping or grabbing anything from the cache.
TFTC
This acronym is one that often finds its way into debates. The debate centers around situations where a geocacher logs a find and says nothing in their log beyond TFTC. One side of the debate finds this rude, particularly with geocaches that require more work to find. The idea is that if a geocachers spent time putting together a cache, the hiders can take a few minutes to say more than TFTC.
The other side of the debate is that some geocachers use TFTC because they are logging a find from their phone, with the intention of updating the log at home on a computer. With the ease at which geocachers can now log finds using geocaching apps on their phones, there has been an increase of TFTC logs. Since cache owners receive Log Notifications only from the initial log, and not any subsequent edits, they might overlook updates to that log in such a situation.
A third argument that is often mentioned is that if a geocacher finds a geocache that they were unimpressed with, they may have logged it with nothing more than TFTC as a way to avoid saying anything else.