This New Site (Page 3)

Sorry I've been working all day.
My response could be idential to TJ and Whizz's. I've been around since 2005 and have forged many lifelong friendships through BT. Mostly through inspires, messages and meeting folks face to face. More than one of them I'd call "great" friends - and they rarely post on the forums-  the forums are a fairly poor way of evaluating user engagement IMO. If you look at the people who are "most inspired" or "most active" in the training blogs, they are rarely your heavy forum posters. That says a lot.

If you take away the ease and ability to engage via inspire/message/training blog, you take away a huge part of BT - even if you don't use it personally. I'm just not sure how you can argue with that, but not surprisingly you've found a way.

Obviously you haven't read my responses because I made it pretty clear how I come to my position.....not surprising you haven't read any of it.  

I'll say it again.....the comparitively very few people you personally keep in contact with is not the reason a board like this is successful....and it's not a "huge part" of any of the traffic.  A board like this relies on constant new membership to be profitable/successful. 

I would assume the profitability comes from advertising and memberships.  The find out for sure, it would be interesting to see who is paying for memberships - the new members or the long standing members.

As for advertising dollars, are they marketing the transient population or the long term members?  Both?  What causes them to want to advertise?  Repeat users or the trollers?

What actually makes a website profitable and successful is the advertising dollar and what makes them want to pay to be on the site - not if there is a sense of community or if it's all transient.

I certainly have read your posts - it's just that I don't agree with all of it.

I'll say it again, too. I believe a "huge part" of the traffic and success of this web site is from the community/inspire/message/logging functions. I believe if this was purely a message forum without the other community stuff, a "huge part" of the members would not stick around. Including me.

Okay chiming in. The main reason for joining was to find a good resource for helping with training.

The added fall out from that has been the mentoring groups.

Then from there - some friendships.  Like minded people - there are some where I've met them, some where I have trained or raced with them, and there are some that I consider real friends in a virtual world and I truly hope I meet these people one day.

But they are not the reason for the Board's success.  The training resources are fundamental.  The other stuff is great but if I was getting no training benefits from it I'm sure I would move away.  I would keep the friendships as there are other ways to communicate outside of BT.

So I think we all get different things out of BT but what brought us all here was to learn more about triathlon.

Totally agree!

For the record, I still think he was nuts.

I'm all for the new design (ok, mostly) and have no problem with change but there was so much that was reported by the beta testers that could have been fixed ahead of time had they waited a little longer that I think it was a mistake.

For all those that are bashing the bashers of the the people bashing the original bashers of the beshed web site?

Get a life - there are bigger bashers to bash...  #realworldproblembashing....

^ This.. to those who say people need to deal with change.. not all change is good.

I too have found the forums to be more difficult to use and it has reduced my time here.

I realize there are still bugs to work out but I have posted several threads in the bugs forums and have not received any feedback.  That makes me reluctant to continue to post the bugs I find.

I'm all for change.  As long as the change is for the better.  Right now I'm on the fence.  Hopefully it gets fixed as time passes.

I'd venture a very uneducated guess most people never get actively involved with the site or it's members...  I was an admin on another active forum. I know from those login statistics that about 90% of the people who visit a forum, come only for information and never generate a post. 10% posted.. and about 5% become involved on a regular basis. The numbers here on BT might be a bit higher because of the training/race log features.