Last Chance to Save BeginnerTriathlete
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Moderators: k9car363, alicefoeller | Reply |
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Master ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Coaching member | ![]() 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. (Cursor_and_Huntington_National_Bank.jpg) Attachments ---------------- Cursor_and_Huntington_National_Bank.jpg (35KB - 26 downloads) |
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Expert ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() | ![]() 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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Extreme Veteran ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() | ![]() Thanks for your transparency on the state of BT. I am not surprised to see those details on the lack of memberships and the financial losses. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this site over the years. It truly was a valuable resource in its prime, and the work that went into building and maintaining it is deeply appreciated. I'm with the one other commenter, however, in that I don't see the value of continuing to pay anymore. It's been a long time since we've seen meaningful updates or improvements, and in today's landscape, there are many alternatives that offer more functionality and support. Asking the community to fund the site without offering anything new (or really even keeping up) feels like an unfair ask. Other than because folks are used to logging here out of habit, there's no real incentive to stay. Perhaps it's time to honor what this site once was and consider letting it gracefully retire, rather than asking for more contributions (that likely won't meet the need) to stay afloat. I am grateful for my 15+ years here, and will always remember the BT of old fondly. Thanks for the memories! |