Requesting checkers anonymously

I don't know where else to post this question but I just wondering if there was a way to request checkers anonymously or hide them from "being public". Another cacher and I were having a discussion about whether there was any way to keep challenges a secret until the caches are published on GC.com. We've seen cachers out there who scope out new challenges before they are published by either looking through all the checker requests here or even pre-scouting the next physical location(s) in my series in my case (I've started a power trail of challenges). So I just thought I'd ask if there was a way to, at least, mask who/where the checker requestor is. Really, it's a minor thing because obviously everyone will find out about the challenge once it gets published anyways but it would be nice to keep it a secret for as long as possible and stop those people from pre-signing/logging the cache even before it's published. I've also seen one of my challenges 'leveraged' from the forums here before mine was published.

Is this an issue for anyone else out there too?

Thanks.

If you know somebody with checker tagging rights you can ask them nicely, this is pretty common in my area due to people being uncomfortable with English so they rather ask somebody that speaks the same language as them.

Otherwise I guess you could team up with friends and "switch challenges" so that you sometimes ask in the forums for yourself, sometimes you ask in the forums for you and sometimes somebody else ask in the forums for you, or have one person always ask for your friend group.

I think it's pretty common to lurk in the forums and start working on challenges that you see are requested by your locals, I know there are multiple people in my area that does that. I would hope the pre-signing part is more uncommon but I would suspect this is not the first case. I find it sad that people do that, it's so much cooler to get the FTF if you all actually start the race at the same time. :)

Thanks for replying, Pleu. As far as I know, I don't know anyone with 'tagging' rights but of course I don't even know what that means either. :-/

The local challenge cache "scene" here is limited right now (but growing) so some of your other suggestions aren't viable at this time but they may be in the future. I guess I'll have to be on the lookout for building some sort of secret local challenge alliance now. :-)

At one point, I considered setting up a dummy or ghost GC account to use for requesting checkers here but a) I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to figure it out eventually and b) I assume it wouldn't be able to request challenges that it wouldn't qualify for anyways.

My ideal scenario probably would have the forums masking who the original checker requestors are by using, say, some sort of randomly generated number/id for each request instead of our GC aliases. Otherwise, I was hoping someone might know of an easy (self-managed) workaround for the problem. Or possibly if there was enough people having the same concern, we could ask PGC to make changes to the forums somehow.

No worries though; like I said, it's really a minor issue. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing now to mitigate the issue as best as I can from my end.

Thanks for your help.

As far as who has tagging rights, two approaches you could use:
1. Look at who has responded in the forum to other requests.
2. Look through some other challenges and see who is listed as "Tagged by". As long as it's not a cloned checker (which will be "tagged by" the CO, but will also have a comment including "Cloned from tag ....."), the tagger will have tagging rights.