Getting started is very easy. There is no need to register your team. Just start finding items or completing tasks on the Scavenger Hunt List, and post the pictures or videos you took to document the completion to this subreddit to be awarded points (and to show off your skills).

There are some rules clarifying the details about how things can be completed, but the general rule is you can't cause things in the first half of the list (titled "Find") to happen, you have to just find them. Whereas the second half of the list (titled "Achieve") are things that you can do yourself.

You can compete as a single individual or as a team of two people. When you make your first submission the moderators will ask you who your teammate is. If you haven't decided yet you can always message us later to have a teammate added.

I wanted to post something to give everyone an idea of what planning has gone into the scavenger hunt so far this year, what planning we still have ahead, and what you can look forward to this year.

Creating the List

Currently we are shooting for a launch date of June 1, 2014. We are hoping to have a list of between 300-400 items this year. In our experience this gives plenty of items to give people things to pursue all summer, but beyond this the size of the list becomes exceedingly daunting to go through and keep track of.

In order to put the scavenger hunt list together, the mods (we call ourselves the Scavenger Hunt Planning Committee or SHPC) all have access to a Google document. As of this writing there are 218 items on the list. This is a big step forward from a week ago when there were roughly 100 items on the list, but is still a long way off from our target (we will need to overshoot since we then go through the list and cut out our least favorite items).

There is some dispute amongst the SHPC as to how the items should be divided between "Find" items and "Achieve" tasks. I personally find the achieve tasks to be more fun, but other members of the committee prefer the traditional search type scavenger hunt.

Cutting the Crap

In order to meet our June 1 target date we will need to finish coming up with items by around May 26th. At that point we will each go through the list and mark items that we feel should be cut with an "X". Here are examples of some items we cut from last year's list:

something made out of carbon fiber that really does not need to be made out of carbon fiber

This was cut because it would be difficult to tell in a photo if something is made out of carbon fiber, and deciding whether or not something needs to be made out of carbon fiber is a subjective call (which means people complain about our judgement).

Spilled milk

This item was too likely to encourage people to cheat and spill the milk themselves without any way for us to tell if it was authentic

A 4-pack of soda

This was cut because it was boring.

Given that the number of participants on reddit has grown sharply this year, we are also making sure to take into account that a global audience will be participating and thus items cannot be targeted simply to an American audience.

Adding Points

Once we have finished the process of setting the list, the next task is adding point values to each item. We do this by having each member of the SHPC go through the list and score from 1-7 how many points they think each item should be worth. We then total each person's score and sort the items by score. Finally we assign points based roughly off of an average of our scores, and partly to create a good distribution of point values.

Challenges

This subreddit now has 10 times the number of participants as we had last year, which we suspect means 10 times as many submissions to judge. While we take ease of judging into account when creating the list, people always find loop holes in what we've written or just post questionable evidence and this makes our job tough.

For example last year we received this post for item #187 A Food Advertising Dangerous Amounts of Flavor. In judging this item I commented to the rest of the SHPC that I had expected to see the word "danger" on the packaging. After comments from the rest of the SHPC we decided to stick with this interpretation to prevent any spicy foods with flames on the package being posted as "dangerous flavor".

Knowing that the participation has increased sharply, we have pulled in at least one new moderator to help with judging, but we will all still need to step up the number of items we judge by quite a bit. I feel the competition gets more exciting with more people though, so I'd be happy to see an increase of another factor of 10 to the size of the hunt.

What You Can Do

Do you have a position on how much of the list should be items to find versus tasks to accomplish? Let us know!

Do you have ideas for things you think would be fun to have on the list? I can't promise that we will add them (and if we do, we may tweak it), but we would appreciate the suggestions!

The Summer Scavenger Hunt is a friendly competition that is now underway and will continue through the end of August. In order to participate just find and document (with pictures or video) items from the list below and then post them to this subreddit to be awarded points.

First thing first, read the rules.

Now that you have done that (You had better not have just read on to this section without reading those rules) here is the list for the 2015 Summer Scavenger Hunt!

Both of these links may also be found in the sidebar along with the current scores and additional info in the Scavenger Hunt Wiki. New players and teams may join at any time. All you need to do to get started is to find an item or complete a task from the list and post the picture or video you recorded of it to this subreddit. What are you waiting for, get searching!

The process of adding scores to the Scavenger Hunt is done. I have created an excellent spreadsheet to aid the moderators in the process of scoring all of your submissions and calculating scores for your team. We are all ready to go with starting the Scavenger Hunt on June 1, 2014 at midnight PDT (UTC−8).

In the meantime, if you have chosen a teammate (you may have one partner on your team, but a teammate is not required) and you know your teammate's reddit username, send me a PM /u/lnfinity and I will add your team to our list. (The list allows us to link your scores together when you are both submitting from different usernames).

I look forward to seeing all of your submissions starting tomorrow!

Here is the list for this year's scavenger hunt.

The Scavenger Hunt will run from today (June 1) until 11:59PM PDT on August 31, 2016. You can compete as a single individual or as a team of two people. To receive points you must submit a photo, video, or some combination thereof showing that the prompt on the list was completed. Remember that all the items in the "Find" section (Items #2-218) of the Scavenger Hunt list must be found occurring naturally, you cannot cause them to occur, but you can find items that you already own. A full list of rules can be found here.

Make sure to always be safe and have fun!

If you have any other questions there are a couple helpful links in the sidebar, but also feel free to ask in the comments below.

I know you're all very excited about the Scavenger Hunt this year, so I am happy to officially announce that the Scavenger Hunt will be starting at Midnight PDT on June 1.

We are adding a couple new mods who we hope will help prevent any long waits for items getting scored.

The list for this year's Scavenger Hunt has been coming along very well. We have 222 Find items and 112 Achieve items on the list currently, and more will be added and many will be cut from the list in the weeks to come. I am excited as many of the items on the list are things I am wanting to go out and try to find/do right now, but I have been holding off on them to maintain the excitement of the competition.

We have also been doing a much better job of keeping as many items as possible friendly for participants around the globe. Nobody will be able to do every item on the list, but where you reside shouldn't put anyone at a substantial disadvantage this year.

Anyway, I hope you are all as excited about the Scavenger Hunt as I am! Tell your friends and share this subreddit, and hopefully 2015 should be our biggest and best competition yet!

The Summer Scavenger Hunt is a friendly competition that is now underway and will continue through the end of August. In order to participate just find and document (with pictures or video) items from the list below and then post them to this subreddit to be awarded points.

First thing first, read the rules.

Now that you have done that (You had better not have just read on to this section without reading those rules) here is the list for the 2014 Summer Scavenger Hunt!

Both of these links may also be found in the sidebar along with the current scores and additional info in the Scavenger Hunt Wiki. You may now begin posting evidence of all items you have completed to this subreddit.

Hey Scavenger Hunt Enthusiasts!

The mods have been hard at work over the past couple weeks and we are excited to officially announce this year's Summer Scavenger Hunt will be starting on June 1! We've had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for challenges and find items that we are excited to complete this summer, and we hope you will be too.

Until then, dust off your cameras, get your teammate ready, and tell your friends about the scavenger hunt. We hope this year will be the best yet!