why has this place become so quite

Maybe your avatar is scaring folks off.

I have no frame of reference beyond the last two years. Has the activity really dropped that much?

That hasn't seemed to slow down ST ?  That's primarily long course also.

I mentioned in the other thread in COJ about this, BT site is too broken up with sub forums.  Between that and the mentor groups it's so segregated that the little chat that goes on here now seems like crickets. 

I posted this last November when the topic came up...

Traffic to this site is probably about 1/10th what it was prior to the site upgrade and redesign from a few years ago.  Look at the Iron Distance Race Group forums.  Remember when the yearly IMAZ and IMFL threads had thousands of posts?  IMFL is tomorrow and this year's thread has 78 posts, yep... 78!

BT has a traffic problem, not so much a forum aesthetics problem.  People left during the upgrade/redesign and never came back.  It's just that simple.  Not sure why that happened but it did.  I think it was a perfect storm.  a) The site was down a lot longer than planned so people moved on to other things.  b) The rise of social media sites like FB, Twitter, and Strava.  c) The moderation here was just ridiculous at times and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The heavy handed moderation did not allow for an even discussion and debate.  BT became a sanctuary for either new, bad, or unqualified coaches or individuals to dispense what was often times just terrible advice.  When called out on it there was often some moderator who would chime in and threaten to ban or suspend people for arguing.  I could understand if things got nasty or name calling ensued but that rarely ever happened here.  I understand BT was the antithesis of the perceived blunt snarkiness of Slowtwitch but that "everyone's a winner" and kumbaya attitude was almost as off-putting as the heavy handed moderation.  d) The number of tri participants (especially new triathletes) has been on a steady decline the last few years and this site is called Beginner Triathlete.  Less beginner triathletes means less people going to a site called Beginner Triathlete.  e) The use of smart phones to access the internet.  BT's full site just doesn't play well with mobile phones and the mobile site just stinks.

I think the rise of Facebook, Strava, and Twitter use for athletes hit BT much harder than Slowtwitch because ST caters more to the hardcore and I think the social media sites siphon off more of the casual triathlete/user, which is more of BT's user base than ST's.

Over the top moderation of the forums.  Like it or not, part of the reason people like forums is to put on their boxing gloves and show how smart they are.  Of course there are lines you shouldn't cross, but when you moderate too much people get turned off.  Also, highly confrontational threads draw the most traffic and views just because of human nature...not threads that have very good information in it where everyone agrees.  

I've been a member since November 2004!  - so pushing on for 12 years on here......yes, one of the old-timers on this site.

I often wonder what the distribution of membership for active BT'ers looks like. Can't be many of us dinosaurs left that are still logging after such a time? But it would also be interesting to know the number who join and then drop away (and of course to know why) -  I'm sure Ron would have some great long term data on members 'lifetime' and churn rates, etc. There can't be too many (small) websites that are still running after so many years?

I had another Australian colleague on BT who joined just before I did and was a very dedicated logger and blogger for over 10 years but then dropped out of sight for a while. I made contact and she had gone off to explore Strava and came back for a while to BT and then the logging became more sporadic and then stopped. I know she didn't drop out of the sport but has moved off to Strava permanently. I never got a clear sense from her about what features made it more attractive than BT. I had a look at Strava but it never really did it for me so I stayed here and have been happy to do so. Can't say that I am looking around either. I think I'll be rusted on here for the foreseeable future (perhaps until either I or BT die! ).

I agree with some of the commentary above about the quietness of the forums - in the early years they were pumping and the observation around the loss of vibrancy of the IM race posts is correct. Now those things seem to have slowed a bit ( a lot). I was never one to comment a lot in forums but did use to weigh in on discussions in the Injury forum (used to have quite a few!). So I am one of those users who just logs data daily and files race reports but this activity is never seen (counted) by forum activity alone. Can't comment on the move to FB as the platform for the forum discussions.

Of course, when you have >11 years worth of daily data on this site it does cross my mind that one day I may not be able to log in anymore - the website folds with no notice and that's it! However, I do export the data regularly but imagine the painfulness of uploading that to somewhere else with different and / or nonexistent data fields to populate and then extract reports...

If Ron or one of the moderators reads this then my advice would be to dig into the data and see if there is a significant (and accelerating) siphoning of people off to other forums and chase down some reasons so adaptations / feature additions can be made to this site if necessary. Probably stating the obvious and you are monitoring trends already.... but that's the two cents worth from a long-timer!

That's the real issue I've had with BT in the past was not being able to call out people when they post ridiculous stuff or dispense downright horrible advice.  People get crucified on ST for doing that and rightfully so most of the time.  BT was at its most popular when tri was on its most recent swell and that happened to coincide with USAT handing out Level 1 Certifications to anyone who had a pulse.  So a lot of people armed with their shiny new USAT certs, and that had no right coaching anyone, came to newb heavy BT and posted a tremendous amount of crappy advice.  I can't tell you how many times I saw "coaches" advising people they should do a bunch of 20+ mile or 4+ hour runs in IM training because "they need to know what it feels like and train to be out there that long."  That stuff always made me cringe.  But some of us were bullies for calling them out... and a BT calling out was about a tenth as critical as it would have been on ST.

Thankfully, USAT actually made their certifications hard to get and hard to get into.  90% of the people that had USAT certs prior to the more rigorous standards would never have even got into the new Level 1 class.

The moderation and kumbaya attitude here has certainly decreased over the last few years but it's too little too late.  This site has more than one foot in the grave.

Ouch, but this is 100% truth. 

I've been visiting BT for ten years, mostly in this forum. I've been a gold member, I've been a bronze member. I've posted advice, I've received advice. As others have said, social media and Facebook race groups have hurt this forum and many other similar sites. They all experience "Facebook drain"

Then there is just the overload of everything else. I have to check my personal email, my work email, text messages, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, SlowTwitch, Beginner Triathlete, on and on ... only so much time.

As others said, some of the other races like mud runs and color runs drain people away from triathlon in general. And then the rise of CrossFit has turned some of those OCD "must train every day" type people away from triathlon and into the Crossfit world.

But there are some BT specific things that I think caused some people to stop reading & posting. 

There was a time when my BT posting and reading went way down because I was sick and tired of some self-described coach coming into every discussion spouting "I Am A Coach!  Hear Me Roar!" 

There was a much-discussed site redesign that made "inspires" and other social-media-ish things much harder.  Mentoring groups also drained traffic off the common Triathlon Talk board.  Less traffic, less connection.

There was a blowup that I missed where apparently long time posters were banned for doing what GMAN is describing.  There was some kind of fight, harsh words, the ban hammer got swung on perhaps the wrong people, and others left in a huff.

Not sure I agree with the premise that the mentor groups have anything to do with it.  The mentor groups are down just as much, if not more, than the main forum.  A couple years ago, it was a full time task to keep up with the posts in the group I Co-Mentor, now we go days without a post.

I think the roots of the slowdown are in the site re-design and the lack of a decent mobile offering.  I'm an IT guy in my day job and now days, if you aren't addressing the mobile users you are losing a very large number of potential users.

I just looked and Ron has Google Analytics running on the site.  He has knows where the traffic is coming in from and where it's going once it's on the site.  He also probably has a pretty good idea what visitor volume is now versus a few years ago.

Just taking myself as a case-in-point...

I had to go look at my profile to see when I registered... January of 2006. Ten years and change. I've seen a couple site redesigns here, and the huge dip in traffic seems to have coincided with the last redesign. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, though, so I won't say that it was the cause.

I've also been on ST since well before I ever pulled BT up on a screen. There was also Tri-Newbies online, but that one blew up yeas ago. Anyway, with the last redesign of ST, I think I've clicked over there maybe 10 times since. I just don't care for the format now.

I haven't done a tri in a couple years, and I may pop into one on a relay later this year. My training now is pretty much all cycling, but I still log it all here.

I still drop through the forums about once a day (but not on weekends), offer up what I feel might be relevant, but my posting numbers are well below what they were a few years ago.