General Discussion Triathlon Talk » Last Chance to Save BeginnerTriathlete Rss Feed  
Moderators: k9car363, alicefoeller Reply
2025-09-10 8:09 AM

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Columbus, Ohio
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Subject: Last Chance to Save BeginnerTriathlete
Hello All,

Thanks so much for your continued support and participation over the years.

I wrote a post several months ago indicating that I planned to institute a minimum charge to use the training logs.
As it turns out, implementing that change will cost a lot of programming money and isn't possible due to the cost.

Therefore I'll need to rely on you kind people to voluntarily increase your membership from Free to Bronze, or consider stepping up to the next level if you are already subscribing with a paid membership.

I'm going to give it three months and see if we can build enough paid membership to keep the lights on. If we have to shut it down, you can export your logs for free so you don't lose your training data.

Each month I take my own money and put it into BT to keep the hosting going and to pay for the little software memberships that keep the site running. (For example, there's a plugin called LogInRadius that allows people to sign in with Google or Facebook instead of remembering their password. That costs money. You might think, well, just get rid of that. But then people will email me asking for help resetting their password, which could be connected to a very old email address they can't get to anymore. That takes a lot of time, so that's even worse than paying for the plugin. I also renew the trademark, pay for hosting, email capabilities, etc.) This month it is $750 dollars that I'm injecting into BT. I'm not willing to keep doing that.

At its peak in 2010, BT had 3,200 paid members. Today we have 97, down from 126 a year ago. I know there are good reasons and I'm not trying to guilt anyone into it - just laying out the facts.

Thank you for your continued membership and I'm optimistic I'll see a bunch of new paid memberships come in. If not, we'll announce a date and give everyone time to retrieve their data.



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2025-09-16 7:26 AM
in reply to: alicefoeller

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Subject: RE: Last Chance to Save BeginnerTriathlete

Hi, Alice.  Once again, thanks for keeping the lights on for almost ten more years.  This site has incredible memories and was my main inspiration (other than my wife who did a few ahead of me).  

At this point, it's probably time to call it a day - I don't think my extra $50/year or whatever it is upgrading to Gold is going to put a dent into it if you're personally losing ~$10K/year on it. If you get enough momentum I would definitely reconsider, but given it's been six days since you posted and I'm the first response I'm guessing not.  

What I find interesting is that there are some forum-based sites that I belong to are still booming after close to 30 years, while others like BT have failed.  I'll note that one in particular still kicking (a travel-adjacent site) doesn't allow ANY political posts.  As you can imagine, during COVID that was difficult to manage for them.  Slowtwitch is still really active, too, while having a political forum.  Who knows.  

I really like the integration of training log and blog/comments here - the interface beats the hell out of Training Peaks or Strava or Garmin Connect.  Change is hard.  

Thanks again, Alice, for keeping us going around here.  

 

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