Is BT Dead? Another Spam Forum and Time To Move On?

I think forums in general are dying, and have been for years (the spam and lack of monitoring certainly doesn't help).

What I've noticed is that traditional social media groups (thinking Facebook and Strava specifically) are SO much more active, especially local and race-specific groups. And that fills a big gap that BT is missing. With Facebook, it's so much more "real time" - I'll get a notification when there is something I want to engage with - and I can access/engage immediately from my mobile device, on the fly, in a matter of seconds. On Strava, I can scroll through my friends' training through my "following" feed, easily engage, and there is no rabbit hole of clicking and clicking like there is here. For BT, I have to manually come to the web site and sift through forums and list of friends, filter through the spam, click incessantly, etc. to engage. It's not BT's fault, it's just the way forums are designed - old school I suppose.

I still come here to log my workouts and blog (12 years worth of thoughts and training data still holds value to me), and am active in a mentoring group here (all though again, I'm much more engaged with those same people on Facebook and Strava), but the general forums lost their appeal for me a long time ago.

slowtwitch is still booming, i wouldn't blame facebook.

Hello, you had an outage this morning and it struck me that being offline for a period of time would be bad for business, no matter what online business you are in. I noticed that there were Windows updates that may have been the culprit. Our simple solution at our place of business is to not run updates into production boxes without thoroughly testing them. Admittedly, we have run short of thorough testing at times. But those times have increased our understanding of the importance of testing. I'm not sure if you have a stage or test environment, nor your reliance on cloud based computing, but all of those things might be in the back of your minds as you continue to improve the end user experience.

And yes, I too am quite appreciative of all you folks are doing to keep this whole thing up and running as well as possible. I know it can be a challenge at times. So thank you all.

At the risk of turning this into an I.T. thread, which isn't my intent - While having a test environment is an excellent approach in a theoretical sense, it isn't always a practical approach in the real world of a non-enterprise level I.T. environment.  Back when I was a full-time I.T. Consultant, I had 62 small/medium business clients at one point.  Of those 62 clients, ONE could afford to have a test environment in addition to the production environment.  Ironically, the one that had the test environment experienced a higher downtime percentage than any of those that didn't have the test environment - simply because of the increased complexity.  At the enterprise level, there is high motivation to reduce or eliminate downtime as downtime costs can be measured in tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars per minute.  At the small/med business level, spending thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars for a test environment to mitigate something that might only happen once a year simply doesn't make economic sense.  The alternative then is to have reliable and frequent site backups so the site can be restored quickly - which is precisely what happened this morning.  Maybe the better discussion is why Microsoft continues to release updates that break things - but alas, that's a discussion for another venue.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, the bolded part struck me as short sighted. I am not a content curation expert, but I don't think it would be difficult to generate some lively discussion topics for the site - even if they don't necessarily apply to you personally (or whoever posts the topic). Surely you remember what it was like to be a beginner - I do and it's been more than 10 years for me - start discussions with some of those questions/insecurities/anticipation in mind. 

Some mildly random ideas:

- Reach out to specific members and ask them to become content influencers (and incentivize them)
- Bring in some pro triathletes or sponsors for feature threads (ask me anything, a conversation with..., all things {product} with {sponsor}, etc.)
- Create more digestible chunks of content (three things you need to know about XYZ) - current articles are really long - immediately drives away folks who just want a quick read.
- Make sure your authors are checking their articles for questions in the comments. One random article I clicked on has an unanswered question, which will make people not want to engage if no one is going to engage back.
- Create a more consistent cadence for articles. Looking at what is posted now, all five of the newest were posted on the same day - maybe spread them out?

Not trying to argue, but there are still spam posts in Cup of Joe from July 1 (12 days ago) and July 5 (8 days ago).

The most recent posts in two forums (Challenge Me and Cup of Joe), which show up on the main Forums page are still spam from yesterday. Now that's only been a day and a half, but still. This is why people perceive that it's "days" before it gets cleaned up. They were up when I visited yesterday, and they're still up today...

I've cleaned these up.  I check the forums twice a day.  My main focus is on Triathlon Talk and the Mentor Groups so admittedly I'm not checking every single forum every single day.  If you come across SPAM I invite you to PM me and I will take care of it.

Thank you Dale.  I too appreciate the kind words.  It's nice when people notice.

I think though, more than an individual contributor or group of contributors, its about participation.  An on-line discussion forum, almost by definition, it "by the people for the people."  If a contributor writes the most knowledgeable, eloquently written post ever seen and nobody clicks 'Reply' then the forum appears "dead."  I thoroughly enjoy engaging in the forums, but I'm with Marc, it's not so much fun when you submit a post and there's nothing - that isn't content or lack of content, that's lack of participation. 

I mentor one of the mentor groups.  Every year when things start-up in December/January, it's all I can do to keep up with the group.  It's nothing in January to check the group in the morning, then go back in the afternoon and have the thought, "Are you kidding me?" as I look at thirty new threads.  By the way, that isn't a complaint, I love the interaction.  Come summer-time however, the level of participation has dramatically declined.  In January, I can't wait to have the opportunity to check the group.  Come summer, it's a chore because nobody's home.  That's lack of participation.

It was suggested earlier that perhaps some of the content is too long because often people are here looking "for a quick read."  I'd submit that people who are here for a quick read aren't here to participate so much as they're here to be "entertained."  When did it become incumbent upon Alice or the moderators or any particular group of individuals to become "the" contributors to drive the site?  I'd argue that duty if you will falls to all of us.

To that end I challenge everyone to click "New Thread" and start a thread; or click "Reply" and participate in a thread.

Just my humble two-cents.

My suggestion to reach out to content contributors was driven by watching other successful accounts on social media. I think there is a lot of value to securing "influencers" to drive engagement and conversation - particularly on a "beginner" site.

Successful best practices I have been watching do a few things really well to drive engagement online:

• Enlist contributors to do "takeovers" for a week at a time. Contributors would have planned content they space out to keep the audience engaged, asking questions, driving conversations, and yes, entertaining a bit. Nothing wrong with inserting a few light-hearted topics or laughs. This is easier with a vehicle like Instagram Stories, but could be modified for a forum like BT.
• Owners and moderators, yes, are responsible for starting conversations. It's part of the gig. They also encourage others to chime in, you are right that it has to be a two-way street, but the onus of starting conversations is often on the channel owner(s).
• Strategically partner with relevant professionals and sponsors. This is a win-win for both the site, the partners and the members/participants. The site gains a reputation for being a leader in the space, the partners/sponsors get exposure and the members/participants gain from the knowledge. This could look like an "ask me anything" thread, a contest/giveaway, an educational article where you feature the sponsor, any number of things. Make it clear that you are partnering together and endorsing one another.

There's a whole science to content curation and influencers... like I said I'm not an expert but I know what works for me personally.