How are we doing? ART Forum Feedback

--amadeus--

Well we've been combined for a while now, any feedback on the new structure? Anything thats particularly good? Anything you'd change? Anything you hate?

All comments welcome

Woddle

As far as I'm concerned it's great and seems to be working well and the tri/duathlon threads seem to be doing quite well also. So good job to all

uglyjohn

cant think of anything negative to say, not ever constructive criticism. good lively forum. seems to attract a decent ammount of beginners and people who "have been following this thread for ages, first post"

good job amadeus :cool:

donothoponpop

I think the transition has gone very smoothly, and I can't think of anything to fault. A minor quibble is that the promised comprehensive race calendar hasn't yet materialized.

The general forum is more interesting than before, a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. And (against intuition) the Tri element seems to fit in better than before. One big happy family:)

jlang

I was sceptical before the change mostly for if-it-ain't-broke reasons but now think it was a very sensible idea that has worked very well. The good community feeling here has continued and things are less confusing for new arrivals.

I'm reading the reports of top-level races/meets/athletes I would have skipped before etc and must have picked up something - I was able to answer a table quiz question last week (answer: Cullen + O'Rourke) based on information I picked up here.

kennyb3

im only a recent user so only know the forum in one form but i have to say i enjoy reading the different threads/logs of the tri people and seeing how they train etc. i doubt id of kept going to a seperate forum. i ll also consider doing one sometime in the future too as a result

ike

I hadn't been posting for a few weeks and when I came back it had changed and I didn't notice it to be particularly messy or anything.

I like the mix of topics that are here now and a lot of the events are related in terms of training techniques etc. Always like to follow athletics and Tingle and others keep me uptodate without having to hop from one forum to another.

I don't think anything is getting 'lost' as a result of being merged in fact I'd say the contrary each discipline is getting more coverage and the forum as a whole is probably much more active. In fact nearly everytime I go to boards home page I nearly always see an entry in the ART forum

Rineanna

I too was of the 'If it ain't broke..." school of thought, (and to be honest still am) and was worried the T&F stuff was going to be be swallowed up in the seemingly millions of different road race/marathon/tri threads, as well as the other training and advice threads.

Obviously it's going to happen the periods before, after and in between the indoor and outdoor seasons, I guess it's no major biggie to go back a page or two to find the T&Fs thread that appear during those times. The Euro Indoors thread was always on the first page during March, so I don't really have much to complain about!

Once the Summer season starts, there'll be a plethora of news on the T&F front, so it'll be grand. Plus, the increased activity on the athletics front from posters who wouldn't have had much exposure to athletics previously is always welcome..

Pherekydes

I never understood the need for separate fora in the first place. Marathon is part of Athletics, after all. Triathlon is a first cousin, so to speak, and is always welcome in the house. Sure there's lots of running threads in comparison to T&F threads, but then there's many times more runners than T&F athletes.

This is speaking from the standpoint of an Athletics fan, i.e. the whole spectrum of Athletics events, not just T&F.

Racing Flat

Working well.

Only complaint - I hope this new ART or A/R/T malarky doesn't catch on!

ZiggyStardust

Haven't been logged on in a good while, but since I have come back, it seems to me there is a lot more traffic in this forum now which is excellent.
I think you also read about stuff, you might not otherwise have read.
Good work,
Dave

geld

I think it's much better than before.

One small point which the Mods might be interested in changing. Before the change when you accessed the Sports Forum Athletics / Running / Triathlon; athletics was one of the first forums there. Now it's half-way down the page. As it's called the Athletics / Running / Triathlon it should be put back up in alpabetical order. This will make it easier for newbies to find.

--amadeus--

donothoponpop wrote: »

A minor quibble is that the promised comprehensive race calendar hasn't yet materialized.

Really hard to do but we're working on it. There is a Race Fixtures thread and Tingle is going to keep it up to date with T&F stuff. All race announcements will go in there (or be moved in there) and we'll try and keep a listing of road races on there. I'll try and keep it orderly once I work out how...

So that covers T&F and road races. Do you want to take on the challenge of rounding up IMRA races? You seem well connected and interested

Racing Flat wrote: »

Working well.

Only complaint - I hope this new ART or A/R/T malarky doesn't catch on!

Well we have lots of ARTists on here, of various types...

geld wrote: »

I think it's much better than before.

One small point which the Mods might be interested in changing. Before the change when you accessed the Sports Forum Athletics / Running / Triathlon; athletics was one of the first forums there. Now it's half-way down the page. As it's called the Athletics / Running / Triathlon it should be put back up in alpabetical order. This will make it easier for newbies to find.

It's listed as 5th from the top of teh Sports category (alphabeticaly listed) for me - anyone else not seeing it at the top?

And thanks for the congrats and stuff, but (as I'm sure the other mods will agree) we actually do very little, it's you lot that make the forum!

geld

--amadeus-- wrote: »

It's listed as 5th from the top of teh Sports category (alphabeticaly listed) for me - anyone else not seeing it at the top?

Amadeus, you are looking at the drop down list from the banner at the top of the screen and yes it is fifth there. However when you click into "Sports" the forum is way down in twenty-frst after Horse Racing and Mixed Martial Arts [MMA]. It appears to have taken the place of the old Marathon/Tri forum as opposeed to the Athletics forum.

Anyway it's just a small point..........

--amadeus--

Gotcha.

I don't think we can do anything about that, tbh. When CuLT / Ross merged the forums he put Athletics into Marathon / Tri and changed the name so that's why we live down there. I'll put a post in development and see if anything can be done.

Thanks

thirtyfoot

We have created a Meet and Race thread (the old Boards AC thread) as a thread so that posters can discuss the various upcoming road races. There is also now a Fixtures/Race Announcement thread.

I moved the new threads about two new races into the Fixtures thread this morning but some people want to have all separate races with their own thread. My thinking is that the Meet and Race can accomodate the discussions on the less popular and more frequent races. Meet and race can be recycled and cleared out every month or so to ensure it isn't too bulky if needs be.

My fear is that the forum may become primarily a noticeboard for road races and seeing as there are the the old Athletics forum folk in here too that may not interest them too much and swamp much of the other non-road race discussion like training etc. When track and field gets busy we will have more threads and it will get busy so I was thinking it might be usefull to get used to a protocol and keeping the forum tidy and more concentrated. When outdoor track kicks off we will probably keep in concentrated threads like done for the indoors to keep stuff on the front page.

What do people think or do people have suggestions for streamlining stuff better or do they feel it needs to be streamlined at all?

Woddle

I for one like what you've done and obviously the bigger races will still have their own specific thread, maybe it's a case of posters not knowing (maybe the thread title doesn't do it justice) but it's only a matter of time before everyone figures it out,

--amadeus--

I'm very much with Tingle on this - we're getting lots of 3 and 4 post threads on local races which are really just clutter. There will be more traffic and comment if it's all centralised a bit more, IMO. maybe we could use this to track events?

We also kicked around teh idea of a combined gear thread as we get fairly frequent "what watch / trainers / whatever" threads. I like teh idea, myself...

MarieC

I agree with previous posters to this thread that they are now reading topics that otherwise wouldnt have been aware of. Nobody and no topic seems to have been lost in the transition so that's great.

With regards the fixtures listing. Having it as a thread whereby people are commenting on different races etc. is causing clutter there in my opinion and it becomes too hard to find any actual fixture info. Some sort of interactive calendar perhaps somewhat like what runireland.com has may be an idea? Could set up a few calendars specific to whether it is IMRA/triathlon/road etc.

Only other quibble is, maybe its just me but I always find it hard to find the BAC clubhouse thread that gets updated with important club info. As we are in the development stage of the club, and there is a good few bits happening at the moment, might it be possible to create this as a sticky or something to keep it on the main page?

--amadeus--

MarieC wrote: »

Only other quibble is, maybe its just me but I always find it hard to find the BAC clubhouse thread that gets updated with important club info. As we are in the development stage of the club, and there is a good few bits happening at the moment, might it be possible to create this as a sticky or something to keep it on the main page?

It's been suggested - Woddle has set up a blogsite so we will link out to it from a stickie (if I understand the plan correctly?).

Woddle

--amadeus-- wrote: »

It's been suggested - Woddle has set up a blogsite so we will link out to it from a stickie (if I understand the plan correctly?).

Yep I mentioned the sticky at last weeks board meeting and we will send amadeus one very soon, just covering the what we are about, how to contact us kind of stuff

--amadeus--

World a race specific sub-forum work?

Stupid_Private

--amadeus-- wrote: »

World a race specific sub-forum work?

My two cents worth here. No sub forums please. That'd almost be like reverting back to the way things were having to check numerous places for new threads. There's finally becoming enough traffic to make it worthwhile to check in here more than twice a day - by creating sub forums so soon would lessen the amount being posted in my opinion - I could be totally wrong about that though.

I get the idea of the wanting to keep things tidy and so on but I can't see it working. It's a forum that's getting more popular, trying to make rules as to where people must post will become a nightmare for the admins and personally I don't think I'd bother following a lot of dedicated threads - ie race thread, gear thread, advise thread...

The fixture announcement thread is a good idea but all that it will become is a place where races get added in no particular order making it easy to miss races coming up. If you look at the Dunboyne race thread from the last weekend, it had 2 pages of chat about it. The new system of one thread to discuss races would prevent this. With multiple races around the country going on at the same time you can't talk about them all in the one thread.

The meet and race thread, while also a good idea, is just a constant updated list of people's names that are attending races and not somewhere where races tend to be discussed.

With no places on the web that contain a list of all upcoming races I'd feel it a bit stupid that boards, a public forum, would be concerned that too many races are being listed here for people to talk about. A lot of people come here to find out about races, talk about races, etc. Trying to impose rules on how/where to talk about them will mean we'll just end up with more threads of lists and less discussion.

thirtyfoot

Stupid_Private wrote: »

My two cents worth here. No sub forums please. That'd almost be like reverting back to the way things were having to check numerous places for new threads. There's finally becoming enough traffic to make it worthwhile to check in here more than twice a day - by creating sub forums so soon would lessen the amount being posted in my opinion - I could be totally wrong about that though.

I get the idea of the wanting to keep things tidy and so on but I can't see it working. It's a forum that's getting more popular, trying to make rules as to where people must post will become a nightmare for the admins and personally I don't think I'd bother following a lot of dedicated threads - ie race thread, gear thread, advise thread...

The fixture announcement thread is a good idea but all that it will become is a place where races get added in no particular order making it easy to miss races coming up. If you look at the Dunboyne race thread from the last weekend, it had 2 pages of chat about it. The new system of one thread to discuss races would prevent this. With multiple races around the country going on at the same time you can't talk about them all in the one thread.

The meet and race thread, while also a good idea, is just a constant updated list of people's names that are attending races and not somewhere where races tend to be discussed.

With no places on the web that contain a list of all upcoming races I'd feel it a bit stupid that boards, a public forum, would be concerned that too many races are being listed here for people to talk about. A lot of people come here to find out about races, talk about races, etc. Trying to impose rules on how/where to talk about them will mean we'll just end up with more threads of lists and less discussion.

Thats sounds fair enough. What do people think of leaving it as is then?

Would that not make the Meet and Race/Discussion on Upcoming Races redundant? Should this be made the Boards AC stickie and continue as was before I changed it?

There is something in the charter regarding posting new events etc by race organisers, see below. We can follow this more closely to ensure the place doesn't become a dumping ground for race organsiers who see it as a free advertising site. I suppose the last thing we want to do is stifle discussion on races but we don't want race spam (for want of a better word).

The mods would appreciate it if you could let us know before posting about your event on here. Boards is a privately owned website that is ad revenue driven. As such we cannot do "free advertising" so please give us a heads up before posting.

What do people think? I would be happy to go back to as was having thought about it.

donothoponpop

Tingle wrote: »

Thats sounds fair enough. What do people think of leaving it as is then?


What do people think? I would be happy to go back to as was having thought about it.

I would agree with everything Stupid Private said, the merged forum was looking great, no problem with having a different thread for each race: they will live or die by their popularity.

The forum was all about athletics during the recent indoors, there will be more athletics again during the summer season, which gives interested distance runners (like me) a new appreciation.

"Tidying up" race threads in sub-fora hides threads worse than having them on page 2 or 3 does.

Racing Flat

Upcoming races
Dear all,

Front page still seems to be cluttered with road races. About 10 threads on there now in relation to a variety of races. I'm not sure if 'Meet and Race' sticky is working. Perhaps an 'Upcoming Races' sticky might do the trick. I see this working along the lines of the 1000mile challenge thread, e.g.

Date Race Venue Info
5th April BHAA 4 mile Raheny post#39
6th April BUPA 10k Phoen. Pk post#2
10th May Clonliffe 2 Glasnevin post#56
x July Streets Gal. Galway post#8
x Oct Dub Mara Dublin post#1

Clonliffe 2 Info:
Oldest race in the world, fast course, prizes for x,y,z, presentation in Gravediggers, blah, blah, blah


So that this would always be in chronological order, but anyone could come in at any time to add a race, by simply quoting the previous persons post and then removing the quote tags like in the 1000mile thread. They could put their race in bold, unbolding any others so cruisers could instantly see which race has been added. Beneath the fixture list, the poster could put info about their race, if desired and deleting that from teh quoted post, so that there is always a list of all upcoming races, but just info on the race of that particular post), so that down the line, someone cruising the fixture list could see that that particular race info is on post 56 and so they could just go to that post. If it was easy to do, by the poster or a mod, perhaps even rather than having 'post#39' the name of the race could be a hyperlink to the info post or perhaps even to the race website.

I'm not sure if a second sticky 'Upcoming Races Chat' would work where people could just come in for all races for general chat, e.g.:


post#323 by Woddle
BUPA 10k
I think I'll do 45.56

post#323 by shels4ever
Dublin marathon
Anyone know a good place to park for this?


and so on. Essentially I think the popular things stay on page 1 because it's what people want to talk about and so they deserve to be there, but at the same time, right now as I said earlier, there are a number of threads all about the same thing, e.g. pre-race nerve, race predictions, race logistics, just about different races. If this is what the masses want well and good, but I think it's a pity if it's at the expense of some threads where people might learn a bit about training, where to start a 600m, our top athletes etc. etc.

RoyMcC

I liked your original idea best Stupid Private. Leave as is. Even though the amount of new threads mean that they are disappearing off page 1 within hours when the replies stop coming. A cheap price to pay for leaving alone imo.

Racing Flat

Stupid_Private wrote: »

I get the idea of the wanting to keep things tidy and so on but I can't see it working. It's a forum that's getting more popular,

Personally I'm finding in the last few weeks, that I scan the first page and there's not too much I want to read, as so many are related to specific races. Before I'd read most threads, but I'm probably finding it less interesting now.

--amadeus--

I agree 100% - one of the things I liked about the old marathon / tri forum was that it was mainly about training. By it's nature you won't run a race a week. But since the merge we have had a huge rise in traffic (which is great) and lots of races being talked about. Much as I agree with the "best threads will float" idea it's getting harder to see the interesting threads because of the threads on local races.

But I don't see a combined thread working (though RFs idea is the best to date) and because there are so many race threads they are obviously popular. So we seem to have a split between those who want more discussion and less "noticeboard" and those who like the banter and camaraderie of the local race threads. I know sub forums got a big thumbs down before but I really can't see any other way of keeeing both camps happy.

shels4ever

--amadeus-- wrote: »

I agree 100% - one of the things I liked about the old marathon / tri forum was that it was mainly about training. By it's nature you won't run a race a week. But since the merge we have had a huge rise in traffic (which is great) and lots of races being talked about. Much as I agree with the "best threads will float" idea it's getting harder to see the interesting threads because of the threads on local races.

But I don't see a combined thread working (though RFs idea is the best to date) and because there are so many race threads they are obviously popular. So we seem to have a split between those who want more discussion and less "noticeboard" and those who like the banter and camaraderie of the local race threads. I know sub forums got a big thumbs down before but I really can't see any other way of keeeing both camps happy.

I dont see the problem with a races sub-forum with specific race chat, would clear up a lot, I know i started one myself , you will end up with a thread for each race/marathon on the main forum, and lose the info that people want to read, In the old structure i used to check Athletics maybe ever second day and found all the info very quick, now you need to go through 3/4 pages.

Stupid_Private

Racing Flat wrote: »

Personally I'm finding in the last few weeks, that I scan the first page and there's not too much I want to read, as so many are related to specific races. Before I'd read most threads, but I'm probably finding it less interesting now.

Me too - I thought I was just getting busier in work and that's why I was only scanning titles but you're right there is less that I'm bothered to read. A lot of threads seem to be just lists these days.

The idea for fixing up the up coming fixtures thread is spot on. My gripe with it was that at the moment its just an unordered dumping ground. Your idea would tidy that up no end. Just add that instruction at the start of the thread and it should work. Once races have finished they can be removed by the next poster. The mods can just delete any race announcements that appear as solo threads and tell the posters where the new home is. All in favour?!

spaceylou

Stupid_Private wrote: »

The idea for fixing up the up coming fixtures thread is spot on. My gripe with it was that at the moment its just an unordered dumping ground. Your idea would tidy that up no end. Just add that instruction at the start of the thread and it should work. Once races have finished they can be removed by the next poster. The mods can just delete any race announcements that appear as solo threads and tell the posters where the new home is. All in favour?!

sounds reasonable to me

donothoponpop

Racing Flat wrote: »

Upcoming races
Dear all,

Front page still seems to be cluttered with road races. About 10 threads on there now in relation to a variety of races. I'm not sure if 'Meet and Race' sticky is working. Perhaps an 'Upcoming Races' sticky might do the trick.

...

I guess the whole point of merging the forums in the first place was to eliminate double posting/increase exposure of relevant topics. If interesting threads are being bumped off the page because of the proliferation of road race threads, then I suppose its small sacrifice that they get bundled together in some form. Any misgivings I have are that this would be the first step to splitting the forums as they were before. The overall forum is so much better now, that I hope we're only tweaking things, rather than something bigger.

90% of imra races are discussed in the one thread, which only hits the front page before and after each race, so thats potentially twenty or thirty races a year that are "bundled". Maybe there could be a BHAA thread, a 10k thread, an XC thread, a Marathon thread, and a Misc Road Race thread that could surface when relevant? Larger participation events would still have their own threads.

Failing that I suppose I can see the need for a "Road Race" sticky, or sub-forum if it needs to come to that.