Looks like it. I was just about to post this.

Not sure where you are seeing the total count, but good catch! You've built quite the place for us triathletes, Slowman. Thanks!

Haha, nope it's you.

Been here 10 years, I remember back then it was a little more "rough and tumble". Some people say that it's a bit more discourteous around here now.

In a relative sense I find it much more polite and respectful currently.

Happy 5 million slowtwitch!

Maurice

P*** off... Want a bouquet or something?
(Sorry I couldn't resist!!) lol

Where did you find this info???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

The crowd is definetly nicer to people whose first language is not English.

1.) Yes, we're over 5 million posts in this forum. Something like 12 million across all of our forums. Thank you to all for your contributions.

2.) I think we're certainly more civil than we used to be, in part because we've been slightly more active on asking people to be more polite in their interactions. That's probably cost us a couple contributors over the years, but I'd rather have people feel like they can take a chance on posting something without someone immediately yelling at them that "this is a topic that has already been posted about, use the search bar." There used to be trial by fire to be a long-term member around here.

Anyways. Thank you all. Eric, Dan, Jordan, myself, and the rest of the ST team appreciates it.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I think it’s more civil now than it used to be. Unfortunately, we lost a lot of really smart people who used to post but don’t anymore. There used to be a wealth of information on here but now it seems you really have to look for it. There’s still some smart people that post here but it’s inconsistent and only on certain topics. I can also understand that they don’t want to give out information for free.

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Any stats on the number of posts per year or per month over the years ?

There was a forum I used to belong to - long dead now - which had a dashboard where you could see which threads had the most posts (as we do) but also which threads had the most members posting in them

You could also see how many posts a member had (as we do) but also which threads they posted in most often

Not like we'd need that here; just more data points to snoop on LOL

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

I use a very unscientific metric : how long it takes a thread to scroll off page 1.

A "long" number of days means post volume is low. These days, it's about 4 days.

Congratulations.

I would love to see how long between each milestone. I am guessing it took less time to get from 6 million to 7 million than it took to get from 11 million to 12 million. It seems things remain on the first page of the forum longer than they used to. Care to share?

HTFU......😁

The first post I could find was Dan's welcome post on December 18, 2002. I joined December 22, 2002.

https://forum.slowtwitch.com/...C;page=unread#unread

For people wondering, you can find the total thread / post count by forum at the directory page - https://forum.slowtwitch.com/forum/

I could pull some numbers on frequency and such if we can come up with a basic list.

The thing that the forum always makes me appreciate is "old tech."

The underlying forum software is essentially unchanged in 20 years. It was written back when you couldn't make a lot of assumptions about bandwidth or memory. And code had to be performant. Perl is a very good language. The forum is extremely fast, especially on modern hardware.

Really the biggest change we made was to the CSS - to make it adaptive so it works a lot better on mobile. But that's front end. Nothing really in the server architecture has changed.

There are some "niceties" that I'd like to add in the next couple of years, but mostly I just appreciate how lightweight and fast the architecture is. It's VERY good.

I've had some people approach us about "modernizing" the forum's tech stack. I'm generally like, "thanks but no thanks..."

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

Who has the most posts can be found here
https://forum.slowtwitch.com/...b=user_posts;so=DESC

It would be nice to be able to filter that in different ways.
On a very quick look at appears that Dev will take the top spot in the next few months, but windywave has nearly twice the posting rate so given a few more years could topple him.

Less information with less depth per topic on the whole, at least imo. I have my forum page set to 90 posts per page. In the way back past it often took a post <24 hours to roll to page 2. Now it takes 4-5d. If you wanted to stay up to date on some of the threads you had to check in multiple times per day in order to not have to read 8-15+ posts. Now you can check in once every 24-48h and stay up to date.




Dang, tell people for a few years to use the search engine because they asked if they should ride a disc and you never live it down! The search thing isn't that hard to use if you know what you're looking for imo.

Some of the smartest people in the world in their academic /athletic fields got booted off for being fiery and/or snarky in their replies while some of the best posters left/got driven off by people who wanted to argue from a position of ignorant bliss. Remember the guy who told Chris Boardman he didn't know anything about time trialing or professional bike racing?

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

The LR shouldn’t count

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I wonder how much of this is an ST thing, vs general disinterest in triathlon. There was a time when you could not even get into local races on race week, now most Ironmans you can get in on race week vs the 364 day ahead sellout. The price of gear has put a lot of the sport out of reach to 20 somethings.

In terms of page length it also depends how many posts you have the page set to. I have it set to 100.

It appears there are around 15 people on that list that over the years have created 10% of the content on this forum (but hard to tell if most of the posts were directed to the 5M on the tri forum as I rarely go to the other forums, so just assuming we are contruting to the 5M....if not, we can say roughly 15 people contributed to 4-5% of the lifetime content).

In terms of posting, it is just like training. I have a general interest in doing this sport and socializing in the sport context. Literally in my day to day life I would have few endurance athletes in my immediate mix, but now having my own company several of my key team do sports of various kinds x: swimming, power lifting, running, tri, XC skiing, soccer....I think I end up attracting people like that to join in, so maybe I post a bit less about tri now, since I can talk about it with people I work with these day without them thinking I am an oddball.

The search engine and also searching through google site works plenty fine - have to have even fewer brain cells than me if you can't figure it out and that is from some bogan red neck aussie levels.

No stat for this, but I may contend for the 'most lurking without posting' title (have been here since the beginning of the forum)

I've been in this situation for years. Right now, there is really only one other tri person that I can have training discussions with, and this person is, just by chance, a woman. We have 30-45 min discussions whenever we are at the pool at same time. So, the ST Tri Forum provides a great way to discuss training stuff with other motivated athletes. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

In my company we do many sports too. Road cycling, MTB, Gravel, Tri, adventure racing (only if there is a bike leg)
Helps that there are just two of us.
And my job is to talk to people about bikes (I really am a very simple character). I can understand why this has been your outlet for 21years!

Does this count the 27 posts that aren’t about Lionel?

It’s a self-inflicted wound a lot of the time too re: cost of participation. Folks with moderate experience will tell a newbie they NEED the $5k bike, $600 wetsuit, 5 pairs of shoes, etc. Everyone ignores entry level/alloy road and tri bikes, or the used market.

Just yesterday in my tri club, a woman was asking how she can connect to Zwift with her current trainer (an old school Cyclops fluid). A bunch of people jumped in telling her she needed to buy a Kickr, smart trainer, or power pedals. I finally jumped in to remind everyone that you can just use a $60 Bluetooth speed sensor and your phone if you’re just looking to get started.

So yeah - we do it to ourselves.

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___________________________________
MS: Exercise Science
Your speed matters a lot, sometimes you need to be very fast, where sometimes you need to breakdown your speed.

You were two months earlier than me on signup but I've several hundred less posts :)

I'd like to think of myself more of a sponge than a lurker - trying to soak up all the knowledge on here, which, I agree with some of the other posts, it seemed to be more prevalent in the early years.

fat tail distribution like that is super common, especially on the web. Wikipedia, for example, has what they term "super editors" - https://www.vice.com/...diversity-foundation

As far as volume, Slowtwitch is - in general - a fairly good barometer for the industry as a whole. The volume of posts correlates pretty strongly with overall participation. High water mark for triathlon was 2010 - 2012ish. Likewise for forum "volume." At the time, I think the forum had some pretty astonishing amounts of content in it. I think it was roughly equivalent to the Old Testament every 24H.

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

So, if we use the 5 million figure, Dev has 1% of all the triathlon forum posts. That's amazing.

Yes, i figured it is a good barometer for general overall buzz in the sport and participation and engagement but it is hard for an outside like me to know as I don't see the stats other than races selling out or not, new races being launched or not, races going out of biz or not. I am just generally always engaged in some way in sport (racing, training, volunteering, mentoring, coaching youth etc). If I look at my local community there are sport lifers who have been part of all of this through their lives, the key is to recruit, onboard, and retain the next round of lifetime enthusiasts. It is pretty cool that at the dawn of the internet connecting people from around the world, Dan had the vision of creating this global connecting place of interests and information exchange and people gathering over the internet, which has stood the test for 2 decades in an activity itself that is pretty niche.

I in a similar situation

There are approx 10 people in the neighborhood who do triathlons

9 of them show up at the neighborhood pool 2 weeks before a race. 1 does 2 or 3 days of training a week

Beside that they don’t do much training nor talk about triathlons or training

As a quick PS, remember that this is also the second version of the forum. The first version was comparatively short lived, but still worth remembering there was a forum before this forum. As you - and only a few others (NOT me!) - will remember.

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

Wasn't that one when slowman did Triathlonlive.com before slowtwitch.com. From what I recall, it was about reporting the news and events/races, whereas he started ST to be a place to talk about endurance lifestyle (along the lines of your recent article of going computer/display less....if you recall when Lothar Leder did the first sub 8 at Roth he did it with no bike computer, no heart rate monitor, no watch, just feel and only was told with a few km to spare that he was on sub 8 pace....that was in 1996)

 

I'm guessing 10 years for the 6 million mark?

Ron

No, this was regular slowtwitch. Perhaps it predates even you. Khai Lee had the very first post on the new forum. Meaning this forum. Khai, gerard, and a few others were on the old one. Dan will have to tell us about the migration.

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

Anyways. Thank you all. Eric, Dan, Jordan, myself, and the rest of the ST team appreciates it.


Thank you back!

Those early years were fun - a form of Social Media before we even knew what it was!

FWIW - I have always tried to be civil! :-)

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Hello All,

With new software additions each of us can see our total posts ... and pony up $! for each post we made to Slowtwitch .... $5 million ...

Scary thought!

PEARL is a higher level programming language, which allows comfortable, secure and almost processor independent programming of multitasking and real time solutions. It has been standardized since 1977 at various stages of its development.

Maybe Elon will buy Slowtwitch and make some changes ..... NOT!

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Cheers, Neal

+1 mph Faster