Suppressing Forum Topics

[cvcalhoun]

@jrenaut 132201 wrote:

vBulletin has a forum where you can provide feedback – if you make your case over there, maybe they’ll add it, although this site is version 4.x and they’re on 5.x now. There’s also a community forum where people write plugins. Maybe someone has already created the functionality you want. Or you could learn PHP (if you don’t already know it) and create your own plugin.

Unfortunately, both forums require that you be a licensed vBulletin user to post. So Tim may be able to use them, but the rest of us can’t, even if we know or are willing to learn PHP.

[jrenaut]

@cvcalhoun 132236 wrote:

Unfortunately, both forums require that you be a licensed vBulletin user to post. So Tim may be able to use them, but the rest of us can’t, even if we know or are willing to learn PHP.

That’s not an insurmountable problem if someone is willing to do the work.

[rcannon100]

@Amalitza 132226 wrote:

We are legitimately overrunning the forum w/ freezing saddles posts at the moment,

If you put all the people who live under dark clouds on your IGNORE LIST – that will cut down your visible forum traffic by half! Problem solved and yore mood will improve by 117% guaranteed.

[IMG]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/11/05/1415199305873_Image_galleryImage_hear_no_jpg.JPG[/IMG]

[peterw_diy]

One viable technical option: make private subforums and only make them accessible to registered, logged in users who have requested and been granted access. vBulletin will hide activity from anonymous lurkers and users who don’t have access.

That said, I think it’s best for teams to huddle on Strava and only use this site to taunt their competition.

[Vicegrip]

1. Click “new posts”

2. Run eye down list.

3. Click on interesting thread.

4. Repeat until boring con call is over.

[Steve O]

@Amalitza 132226 wrote:

But the moment might not pass. There are twice as many people participating in FS this year as last year, so even if we start with assuming that last year’s “plateau” level of FS posting was not too disruptive (and I don’t even know if that is true?), that doesn’t mean this year’s won’t be. We are legitimately overrunning the forum w/ freezing saddles posts at the moment, and it is not at all obvious (to me at least) if or when (prior to late March anyway) that will stop. Trying to figure out a solution seems like a good idea.

Agreed. I think there is a need to think longer term about this forum. What if participation in forum discussion doubles or triples or more just in general–not just in January? It is our goal, after all, to expand bicycling, and getting more people to discuss issues related to that is good good good.
If there were 15-20 topics a day of interest to a community of thousands of cyclists in the DC area, how would an on-line resource work to satisfy that need? That is the question that needs addressing.
I don’t know the answer to that question, but there is already a group of techies who meet regularly on “hack nights,” hosted by the Mobility Lab. Perhaps they could take on this question.

[dkel]

@Steve O 132267 wrote:

What if participation in forum discussion doubles or triples or more just in general–not just in January?

Have you met us? This is a self-limiting bunch by character. :p

[rcannon100]

@peterw_diy 132251 wrote:

One viable technical option: make private subforums and only make them accessible to registered, logged in users who have requested and been granted access. vBulletin will hide activity from anonymous lurkers and users who don’t have access.

That said, I think it’s best for teams to huddle on Strava and only use this site to taunt their competition.

No no. This thread is for taunting the non FS participants who are annoyed by all the people having fun.

[jabberwocky]

@rcannon100 132272 wrote:

No no. This thread is for taunting the non FS participants who are annoyed by all the people having fun.

Right, because a big artificial strava competition is the only way to have fun on a bike. Obviously.

[cvcalhoun]

@peterw_diy 132251 wrote:

That said, I think it’s best for teams to huddle on Strava and only use this site to taunt their competition.

A whole lot of people never read Strava discussions. Getting to them requires two clicks off of your main Strava field (one to the club, the second to the discussion tab). And there is no indication on your main feed when there is a new discussion in a Strava club. So Strava clubs may not be the best option for discussions.

That being said, my team in each of the past two years has had its own Facebook group. The only problem with that is that one of our members isn’t on Facebook, and one hasn’t joined our Facebook group. However, the first one also gave us the wrong forum name, and has not responded to e-mailed inquiries as to the right one. The second one is not riding and is not communicating in any other medium (forum, Strava, e-mail), so moving to the forum wouldn’t really help. And the Facebook group is quite active.

[Raymo853]

@Rootchopper 131845 wrote:

For those of us who do not participate in Freezing Saddles the “New Posts” selection on the menu is useless. Is there some way to suppress all the Freezing Saddles posts? No offense to the Frezzing Saddles crowd. Thx

The real fix is to start non-BAFS threads that are interesting, fun, thought provoking, and/or gather a lot of attention.

Maybe I could start one: I’ll post a thread about how even after I move away, I plan to flag segments in DC.

[mstone]

@Raymo853 132282 wrote:

The real fix is to start non-BAFS threads that are interesting, fun, thought provoking, and/or gather a lot of attention.

That doesn’t actually fix anything. To be clear, since there seems to be some confusion: for many people, the best way to keep up with activity on the forum is to use the “new posts” feature. That lists all of the threads which have been updated since the last visit. Recently (as in previous years) that function has become difficult to use because there are so many FS threads that it’s difficult to pick more generally interesting threads out of the list. Even if there is an extremely interesting, fun, thought provoking, and popular thread, it’s easy to miss if it’s #11 in a list of 15 threads, 13 of which you’re skipping over. No, this isn’t the end of the world, but it’s also not some kind of horrible atrocity to ask whether there is a technical solution which would make things better.

[jabberwocky]

@mstone 132283 wrote:

That doesn’t actually fix anything. To be clear, since there seems to be some confusion: for many people, the best way to keep up with activity on the forum is to use the “new posts” feature. That lists all of the threads which have been updated since the last visit. Recently (as in previous years) that function has become difficult to use because there are so many FS threads that it’s difficult to pick more generally interesting threads out of the list. Even if there is an extremely interesting, fun, thought provoking, and popular thread, it’s easy to miss if it’s #11 in a list of 15 threads, 13 of which you’re skipping over. No, this isn’t the end of the world, but it’s also not some kind of horrible atrocity to ask whether there is a technical solution which would make things better.

This. Honestly, I’m just pointing out the way FS is being handled on the forum at the moment is degrading the experience for those who don’t care about it (since there are like two dozen threads). Is it a huge deal? No, but it probably does mean that people who spend a limited time browsing the forums (like me) are overlooking threads, and asking if there is something on the tech side we can do to clean it up a bit seems perfectly reasonable.

The response in this thread from some of the FS people makes me really glad I’m not participating though.

[jrenaut]

To be clear, I was responding not with my FS hat on but with my software developer hat on. I apologize that I was a bit snippy, but the point I meant to make is that it’s not as simple as clicking a button on an admin screen and hiding the FS posts. Someone would have to go find or write a vBulletin plugin and help the administrators install and configure it. It’s a non-trivial amount of work, and it’s in PHP. I’m not sure if my seething disdain for PHP came through, but please know that it’s there.

Let me explain PHP to the non-developers. Imagine you are a carpenter, and you have to use PHP. A close analogy would be if, every third nail, your hammer suddenly but temporarily turned into a banana. Every 15th nail, another nail you thought you were finished with spontaneously caught fire.

I’m no fan of vBulletin. Like other forum software, the only innovation we’ve seen in the space in the last 10 years is “Hey, let’s implement this feature from Facebook”. It is well past time for someone to reinvent the forum. But compared to other solutions out there, it’s not a bad one, and Bike Arlington does a really good job maintaining this space for us, which I really appreciate.

Anyone want to go for a bike ride?

[dkel]

I’ve been a little snarky on this thread, but I was also serious when I said that I find the current situation a little irritating, even as someone participating in BAFS. But realistically, all it means is I have to look a little more closely or scroll a little farther down than in the “off season.” A forum interface that could filter such things would be great, but until then, I have bigger problems than this in my life! I’m grateful the topic was brought up, but it doesn’t seem like something to get worked up over.

It also occurs to me that even if the BAFS threads were filtered out, it’s possible there are enough people focused on it that there would be very little else going on, and the remaining threads would be far less active anyway.

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