Not sure this helps much at all, but...I'm a member of a number of Facebook groups related to geocaching. There is one called Geocachers For Fair Play. The description states "Sunshine is the best disinfectant. This group is to bring into the light of day the rampant cheating that is overtaking the geocaching gave that so many of us love to play. Unfair play by a handful of cheaters is ruining the game, and the cheaters need to be brought out into the open. This group is not intended to be critical of Groundspeak in any way."

So with that said, after being a member for a while and reading post after post about geocheating, I decided to say something:

"One solution to avoiding the numbers crowd and cheaters. Use Terracaching.com instead. As it currently stands (and has been the case for a while now), there are no player there only in it for the numbers. As the slogan goes, they're in it "For the love of the hunt". The dearth of caches on that site keeps the numbers crowd away. The caches are great, there's just less of them to find. Just saying."

I though there might be some interest here to see some of the responses:

"Sorry, mate.a site that is slow to load, asks for a bunch of information without a privacy policy disclosure, and offers ZERO description of how it works WITHOUT FIRST SIGNING ON with personal information is a definite FAIL in my book."

"I played it for a while, then lost interest because the site was so slow. I recently went back and looked at the new site and was very disappointed. They force you to look at all the listings that have ever been out there unless you are a premium member. So when I look at the map, I see archived caches and caches that I have already found (without any way to tell that short of reading all the logs), mixed in with the few I have not already found. Unless they fix that, it is not really a viable option in my opinion."

"Yep and it is too bad. Geocaching could use some competition"

There were of course a few other comments about the smaller numbers, but that is a problem with the players and not with the site. But some of the above comments are valid concerns. I know the catch 22 - no money to fix the site = site problems = fewer players = less money to fix the site... It may be time to consider volunteers to do some of the code work. Although that is a challenge in itself. The opencaching network run that way, the code is on github and a number of volunteers make it work (same for c:geo). For clarity, the database of caches is not on github, just the code that makes the site function.