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@Tania 135619 wrote:

There’s something about being in a car that makes some people do stupid things.

The reality is that a lot of people are just really stupid, and society happily gives them drivers licenses anyway. :p

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From the pic, its a narrow road with no shoulder. Unless they were in the gravel, they were “taking the lane” because they would have to be in the normal travel lane. Probably toward the right of it, but still, there wouldn’t be room for a car to pass with oncoming traffic no matter what.

I’ve had situations where people attempted to pass where they absolutely shouldn’t (blind corner, rise in the road, whatever) and had to swerve back because of an oncoming car. I think a lot of people attempt the pass with almost zero thought, and then find themselves in a situation where they have to swerve back into the cyclist they are trying to pass or risk a head on collision. A surprising number actually risk the head on collision, actually.

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Ban large dogs! Toy poodles for all!

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I did return a wallet once. It was in the street. I checked the address and it was the house it was in front of. I assumed the dude dropped it out of his pocket after a night of drinking, because he was barely able to answer his door at 8am on a weekday to get his wallet back.

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@Drewdane 132724 wrote:

A Park fold-up hex wrench set in the middle of the street downtown. Someone must have left their seatpost bag hanging open.

I actually left my seat bag open once riding to work and my topeak multitool fell out before I noticed. I found it on the way home, on the shoulder of fairfax county parkway near my house. It was right on the white line that separates the lane from the shoulder. I’m amazed no car hit it during the 10+ hours it sat there.

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I found a nice (though beat up) Estwing hammer in the middle of the road a while back. Probably fell off a work truck. A few other (very beat up, rusty) tools over the years. Screwdrivers and crescent wrenches and such. I only kept the hammer, because you can always find a use for a hammer.

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Bikearlington is fine, as a site. The only change I would make is that 20 subforums is far too many (if I were forum god, I’d reduce that to 5 or so). That would make the “new posts” less functionally necessary to keep track of whats happening. But aside from that its clean and simple and does the job. Forums don’t need to be flashy, they just need to work and make finding info and participating as easy as possible.

The FS thing has been getting worse year by year though. The vast majority of the problem is that each team for whatever reason needs their own thread. As the contest has grown, so has the number of threads. In early years it was much less a problem because it was almost entirely contained in a few threads (rather than the current 30 or whatever). Last year was bordering on problematic and this year is getting silly. As much as people want to make it sound like “hurr durr I don’t like scrolling”, website interface is rather important. Almost all the recent activity being FS social stuff would be very off putting if I came here as a new person looking for commuting or advocacy info and discussion.

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@chris_s 132334 wrote:

Five pages of discussion on “people having fun is making me scroll more”?

Right, that’s exactly what people are saying. :rolleyes:

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@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.

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@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.

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@Tim Kelley 132192 wrote:

Yeah, what’s the fix?

De-index the FS subforum from the new posts list? Roll the entire thing off into its own event page (it seems like its getting big enough)? Evaluate whether 30 individual threads are truly necessary?

@rcannon100 132193 wrote:

Whine and complain a whole bunch about a free service????

…or be a dickhead? :rolleyes:

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@PotomacCyclist 132182 wrote:

(I don’t use the new forum post list that much anyway. It’s easy for me to scan the main forum index and see which sub-forums are highlighted in bold type.)

I find the BA forum mostly unusable without the “new posts” button (in fact, my bookmark for the site goes straight to it rather than the forum index). Way too many subforums for the level of traffic this site gets. But thats another discussion.

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@PotomacCyclist 132172 wrote:

Only one of the top 8 new forum posts is BAFS-related right now, not counting this thread.

I tend to check in once or twice a day. Currently, of the 29 threads that have updated in the past 24 hours, 50 percent or so are FS threads. Some days its been even worse (75% plus). Its great and all, no offense to the FS crowd, but its cluttering the shit out of the forum for those of us who aren’t involved. If there was some way to just check “I’m not doing that event” somewhere and hide those threads I would be quite happy.

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I kinda feel like Freezing Saddles needs its own website or something. This forum is bordering on unusable with all the threads. Its drowning out normal discussion and I find myself not even trying to pick through to find the non-FS topics anymore.

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Hah. My office moved at the beginning of 2015, and my commute is so lightly used by bikes that I can see a noticeable difference between the two solely because of it. My 2014 route dropped in use significantly and my 2015 picked up a lot.

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