Bike fit manager - I personally wouldn't use it but that is because I have my fit data recorded in an excel sheet for my road and TT bike. I could see it as helpfull for users asking about their fit... the first action asked of them would be to measure and record their fit data into the bike fit manager.

The user profile would be a logical place to have the "saved threads/posts" feature, I guess bookmarks would be the more accurate term for this. I might also be neat to be able to share your bookmarks or be able to sort/group them. There is so so so much knowledge on the forum and no real way to access it easily or logically.

Don't particularly care about like buttons, but I LOVE your idea for the mobile browsing. I too have become addicted to tabbed browsing and it's the biggest reason that I almost never visit ST on my phone or tablet. I also can't stand the tap, read for a bit, back up, repeat dance.

But, in order from what I've seen so far:

1. Improved search
2. Better mobile experience like described (and PLEASE don't make the page non-zoom/non-pannable above all else)
3. Better limiting of super sized image widths
4. The first few lines of text of a thread from the main index (by hovering, I guess)
5. Better way to see on the thread listing which threads have new/unread posts in them, I still can't figure out what the little icons are supposed to mean.

But overall, I mostly like the forums they way they are.

I third this proposal. A trip reports category would definitely be interesting and usfeul as well.

How much can we collectively pay you to not change a thing?

Im not sure what you advertising strategy is but if I was the owner of this site I know what I'd be doing. To yield the best profit from your inventory (which is premium inventory for Tri market) I would be preparing for the mobile switch. The next 5 years mobile spends will make up the majority of all digital spends. Find a solution that's scales to various screen sizes. HTML5 is a good starting point but a web developer would be best to comment there.

I am assuming you're using a common webforum platform bbphp, vBulletin, etc and custom development and not an entire custom coded platform of your own. One should have a feature set for these needs. That means what you can do is limited to the framework. I think a wish list of ideas is great but likely too costly to implement and maintain with release updates of the platform.

Analytics should be the driving force to your decisions. Knowing the community and its behaviour will help drive smarter business decisions and help you make meaningful enhancements. Rich media ads, video pre-roll, and continuing with the banner ads. Mobile app is nice but you'd only be able to take advantage of 1 of the 3 methods of monetization. Google AdMob, Adwords, AdExchange will offer the best integration, analytics and flexibility.

If you want more comprehensive insight feel free to get in touch and I would be happy to help you with the "your side of things". I do analytics and trending insights for digital media so I won't be selling you on anything just sharing best practices.

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"Train so you have no regrets @ the finish line"

"The next 5 years mobile spends will make up the majority of all digital spends."

hence my question. hence the thread. but i think if you ask anyone who actually attempts to make money in this space, they'll tell you that the areas you think are going to be big - specifically video preroll, mobile ads - have been duds. as money makers, i'm talking about.

i also think that mobile will have its rise, its fall, and then find its stasis, as a medium for content. shopping? yes. reading the NY Times? no.

in 1993, when i first saw the world wide web, i stopped what i was doing, took a self-imposed leave of absence from my company - which was at the time the leading manufacturer and seller worldwide of tri bikes and tri wetsuits - to teach myself html code. at that time, the only web browser in existence was mosaic. which we had to telnet onto our desktops through telephone modems. even then it was clear to me what the future was, and Quintana Roo debuted the first-ever commercial website ever by a bike company (and wetsuit company, for that matter). were you writing html in 1993? ;-)

running a manufacturing company was not compatible with also trying to be a propellerhead. when i started slowtwitch in 1999 it was to take up where i left off, but when i came back to the internet world i was already behind (so i am not our tech guy and i don't pretend to be). still, i think i have a pretty good idea what i want because i like all slowtwitchers am a reader. i don't think the great "want" in the market is trying to jam a lot of content through a tiny viewport, nor to type on a mobile phone. i think there's a huge benefit to handhelds, but it's a finite benefit. 4 or 5 years ago everybody thought the future was the tablet, but it rose, it fell, it found its place. we know what tablets can do and what they just aren't good at. you can't stick them in your pocket. it's not a handheld. nor is it a desktop. i gave my tablet to my wife. she loves it. but she has a purse.

the two best platforms for large scale content delivery - sending from your fingers and receiving through your eyes - is the laptop and the desktop. far, far and a way. by a mile. handhelds and tablets don't even come close. but old tech is boring. it's like giro's new, very popular cycling shoes. they've found a way to individually tighten or loosen the shoe upper at a number of various points along the top of the shoe. new invention. very high tech. it's called the shoelace. desktops and tablets are the shoelaces of the internet world. we have to wait until people tire of employing new technologies for uses not optimized for those technologies. then we'll return to platforms that are appropriate for the need.

still, any good business owner manages the tension between leading his customers (seeing around the corner, before your customers get to that corner) and letting his business tell him what it wants to be. this thread is my customers telling me what they want, and if they want a mobile platform that makes slowtwitch (the front page content, and the forum) readable on both a tablet and a handheld, dad blame it that's what i'm going to offer. but i do still wager that, no, in 5 years the exchange of large chunks of content - not data, not music, but read/write content - is not going to be the handheld.

my 5 years from now looks very different from your 5 years from now.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

understood. It's not spambot spam, but actual human spam.

So a solution that doesn't include you having to be the spam filter every day would be a user driven spam-reporting.
Best combined with some sort of user ranking system (number of posts or better likes a user has).
So if a couple of "high profile users" click "this is spam" on a given post, it goes into the spam-folder.
You then go through that spam folder (much less frequently than every day) and see if anything got in there by mistake.

Anyway, until then: thanks for manually clearing out the spam for us ;-)

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if you can read this
YOU'RE DRAFTING!

I cannot get accustomed to the alternating colours (white/grey) of the list of posts when I go through the list. I find that very tiring, and rather would like a list in one colour.

One user in this thread mentioned he liked the categories: as a matter of fact, I see basically only one category (at least which I use): the triathlon forum. Can't this be categorised? With categories like e.g. Bikematerial, biketraining, blogs etc. There can always remain one page which shows everything in chronological order like now.

Multiquote.

But beware: maybe the three features which I mention above are already there but I'm just to stupid to find them.

I'd personally like there to be some sort of official tag or annotation added by Forum Admin to some of our most knowledgable members that reads to the effect of "industry expert", "trusted user", or "professional runner/triathlete/swimmer/whatever".

I know that there is already the facility for users to edit their own signatures with things to this effect, but I feel that an externally added validation would be helpful to a lot of users when weighing up advice.

A good example that I read earlier today was an old post where Ryan Cooper from Best Bike Split provided data on average yaw angles experienced by PROs and AGers on different courses, this was somewhat lost in a sea of "Well I heard that it was..." and "my mate insists that..."

Some sort of "Listen to this guy when it comes to this topic" sign would be useful.

It would be more positive than just pointing out the loud but uninformed users

I never use any of those buttons. I don't see the point of print thread (who really prints a thread?). I'd prefer search thread at the top but that's just me. Just so you don't have to scroll to the bottom of the thread just to search and its not hidden. At the top makes it apparent to everyone.

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blog

If you think that mobile is going to fall, your formerly acute business instinct is waning. The NYT (and all other newspapers, periodicals) will adapt to a mobile audience rather than a mobile audience revert to reading on a computer or paper. This is already well under way. Every newspaper and magazine has a mobile app dedicated to making the mobile reading experience acceptable The NYT android app is excellent; millions use it and I doubt many intend to go back to a paper subscription unless they need a dog poop bag delivered every day (that's why I held onto my Washington Post subscription so long - great poop bag). Content is changing as well to adapt to the mobile audience. Fewer articles are pure text, but use an increasing amount of dynamic content. Articles tend to be shorter than a decade ago. The content providers are changing to meet the mobile wave, because if they don't they are gone. How's Newsweek doing?

You were on the leading edge of the curve when it came to wetsuits, triathlon bikes, and the internet or at least the creation of this forum which stole away all of rec.sport.triathlon's usage. I think you're losing your instinct if you think mobile is anything but an unstoppable wave. Monetizing mobile is hard for sure and may require a paradigm shift when it comes to revenue generation, but I'd also be willing to wager that the eyes of 99.9% of your readership gloss right over your banner ads now or use ad blocking software. It's a difficult situation. Without your content your forums are useless, and your content comes from your users. So, you don't want to risk running them off by charging them or excessively inconveniencing them. Banner ads and advertising on mobile in general is a tough revenue source to depend on. It's tough. There's no panacea. But, mobile is not a fad.

I think Slowman was making the point that desktops and laptops will bounce back.
It's not that people will go back to paper to read the news, but rather that they will read it on a more traditionally sized screen.

The sarcasm-meter should display the text in various shades of pink, depending on how sarcastic the user / post combination is.

You'd be hot pink, for example, regardless of your actual content.

Not sure if Paulo's posts would have even been renderable though. They might have extended to the infra-red spectrum...

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

"If you think that mobile is going to fall, your formerly acute business instinct is waning... The NYT android app is excellent; millions use it and I doubt many intend to go back to a paper subscription"

i don't think mobile is going to fail. i think mobile is going to thrive. and grow. and keep growing. i just don't think it's going to be the preferred platform for reading and writing content. i also don't think the binary choice is either mobile or paper.

i highly suspect we need a mobile reading solution here at slowtwitch. i just don't agree with the views of the person to whom i was responding about mobile becoming the dominant reading platform, and money-making platform, for content deliverers. i am a paying online subscriber to the NYT, and to the LA times and, yes, i have used their mobile platforms, but only when i had not, not by choice.

incidentally, you write in your post that i don't want to inconvenience our users, or charge them. you're right. yet, i am charged weekly by LAT and NYT. and the LAT is horrible at presenting takeovers i must click to get rid of, sometimes multiple ads on a page that i pay for. accordingly, i'm sensitive about that for our readers.

i agree with a lot of what you write. articles are using, increasingly, dynamic content. the NYT pioneered this with their outside-the-CMS articles. can you imagine these features on a handheld?

we'll see who's right. but for you to understand what i'm writing you can't see this as as an attack on a platform, rather on the eventual sorting out process by which the right platforms prevail for the right purposes.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"Can't this be categorised? With categories like e.g. Bikematerial, biketraining, blogs etc."

this was answered earlier in the thread. we have polled this time and time again. always it has been the preference of readers to keep the main triathlon forum as it is, no subforums. but there might be some modification of that, which i'm thinking about.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Amen.

Sounds like you know what your vision is and we can agree to disagree on that, and I'm not here to argue at all. Execute that vision if it's what you think is best.

For the record however, I am the guy who is asked about this space and how to monetize it and yield the highest possible profits. Perhaps a key difference is I use data to drive all of these decisions. This year we've leveraged video pre-roll, mobile ads and our business has increased 157% yielding over $2,000,000 more profit as a result over the previous year and over 230% over the 2012 calendar year. I'm in the industry (Digital Media Advertising) and my role is very specifically, predicting trends based on historical data and creating forecast models based upon that. I also have Realtime Bidding and Remant transactions as a primary focus to drive automation efforts up leaving no inventory unsold on a monthly basis.

While I see merit in your position you have to realize is you and me, and perhaps most ST users, are the edge case. If you know that about your users then you already have insights /data I don't driving that decision. That being said, that doesn't fall in line with the rest of the industry and it's direction. The IAB (whom I work closely with) has been pretty spot on with spend trends over the past 3-4 years when the emergence of digital media eclipsed traditional print media. I will say that I however, am in Canada and we are much more adept overall with deploying technology solutions. We just have less people to educate and inform so it's a smaller scale and often a test bed because of that. A good example is I've been able to pay for things using my phone for 3 years now instead of my debit card which I used from 1994 til then. If you look at the US and it's adaption rates of this it's still nowhere close to this as a cash based country. We don't even have a penny in Canada anymore because nobody used them.


Touching on your tablet comments the tablet has not fallen at all when it comes to digital advertising, perhaps in regards to "computing" but not in content consumption. It's actually the platform that is the most conducive to "reading content" and has a large penetration in the market. This is also what the millennials have grown up using in class and at home and they are your customer in 5 years time. These are the new markets and keeping a close eye on them and their needs is important. They have higher demands for service and expect to access the content they want on whichever medium they choose. To be relevant you have to have a multiscreen strategy in place. Since Slowtwitch doesn't do broadcast we can rule out the television for this case. But that still leaves PC, Mobile, Tablet as offerings. Currently unless I'm on a laptop I don't bother with slowtwitch and a suspect that may be the case for many others. It's not just bad it's terrible on a mobile phone and even worse on a tablet. These are opportunities to drive traffic up and yield more via your advertising opportunities. You're in a rare position as the premium triathlon market online and to stay there you must be mindful of future expectations.


Last but not least I'll give you background since you think I'm just some young whippersnapper haha. In 1993 I was on BBS, usernet etc on mosaic over my 14.40 baud modem as well. I was writing code in HTML, Visual Basic and C (not all of which was web based). I've been a computer nerd my whole life until I found analytics and statistics to be more flexible professionally as well as fascinating. My suggestions were all to help you with the continued success you've had on ST since 1999 but obviously I'm on the outside looking in. As stereotypical as it is, I'd need more data on your userbase and inventory to give a better evaluation. Good luck with whatever path you take though. I know I for one will always be routing for Slowtwitch!

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"Train so you have no regrets @ the finish line"

You could add subcategories to the existing forum that have to be chosen when a thread is started. Replies to a thread would be locked to that category. Add a column for sub category on the main forum and allow users to sort and/or filter by this column. Then allow users to save a configuration as a view. So I could have my training tips view, my bike view, running view, lance view, etc. Then I can switch between views, do nothing and view everything, or have multiple tabs open in my browser with each view I want to watch. Adding forums I think would be a bad idea.

MC

I wouldn't want subcategories to be required, but being able to optionally tag posts or threads from a predefined list would be nice. either have as many tags as you want, or limit the number of tags on a thread to some reasonable number (5 or so??)

So a thread on how to apply FTP to a training program may be tagged #bike #ftp #powermeter #training, all posts in that thread would also be considered to be #bike #ftp #powermeter #training. But, as threads often do, they go on tangents, so it would be nice for a poster to change the tags on their own post, or maybe just add tags. So maybe at some point in the thread #lactate is added to it.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

first of all, thanks for engaging on this. it's a fast-changing marketplace and i'm eager to keep up, especially when i have at my disposal the expertise of people like yourself. let's dive in.

"I also have Realtime Bidding and Remant transactions as a primary focus to drive automation efforts up leaving no inventory unsold on a monthly basis."

this is one of those interesting topics, where finance clashes with reader experience. i kicked remnant networks off slowtwitch about 6 or 7 years ago, and when i did i took an immediate 25 percent hit in my revenue. it's a hit i'll never get back, because nobody can sell all his inventory without a remnant network. but it's just impossible to control the quality of the ad. i remember when cyclingnews published an interview, years ago, of gerard vroomen talking his anti-doping strategy as a pro cycling team owner, and next to the interview was a cenegenics ad. the final straw, for me, was when i started seeing political ads during election season.

this is 1 of 2 reasons why i don't have adsense code on slowtwitch. yes, you can opt out of ads that are distasteful, but you don't know what you don't know. you can opt out of an offensive ad after you've seen it, but i know of no rem network that allows you to preview all media prior to it showing on the network.

the second reason adsense is nonsense for publishers is because it kills your own endemic ad sales. why would i ever advertise directly with cyclingnews if i can get it cheaper via auction? i know you have a differing view, because i'm speaking against how it is you (at least in part) earn your living, but there is 1 and 1 only network in which i'm an affiliate publisher, and it's a network that ONLY features ads from endemic running companies. these decentralized, highly-specfiic, very siloed, networks are the only networks that i would consider, both for my own best interest as well as for the reader experience.

video pre-roll: this is your industry, and i don't mean to lecture you on a subject you know much more about than i do. it's just that when i talk to other publishers it seems very hard to convince an endemic advertiser to pay the sort of money that would make pre-roll pay. now, there are folks - flocasts most obviously - that make their living with video content. and they're an endemic content provider. so it can be done. but i can tell you as a consumer that pre-roll bugs the living shit out of me. i'd much rather see a company's watermark on the video, and then that watermark bursts into POST roll when the video ends. yes, maybe harder to sell. but it doesn't come with the built-in animus i hold both for publisher and advertiser when they conspire to waste my time.

"I've been able to pay for things using my phone for 3 years now instead of my debit card which I used from 1994 til then."

ah, but this is where you and i have to agree not to pick and champion a platform. i'm having this same discussion with kny. the binary choice isn't mobile pass/fail. i use the living jesus out of my handheld. payments. boarding passes. theater tickets. yes, it's the platform for the present and the future. but, is it the platform for reading and writing? let me ask you this: don't you see it as a disconnect that TV sets keep getting bigger, while computer viewports keep getting smaller? don't you think the galaxy, and then the iphone 6, were revolts against that? yes, we can make the worst of a bad viewing/writing experience through mobile platforms (and this we will do at slowtwitch), but i just question whether this will become the dominant platform for an experience that is much better suited for a larger screen and a keyboard.

"Touching on your tablet comments the tablet has not fallen at all when it comes to digital advertising, perhaps in regards to "computing" but not in content consumption. It's actually the platform that is the most conducive to "reading content" and has a large penetration in the market."

well, we have tablets. we'll see what happens with tablets. i spend a TON of time on a tablet: my kindle. but i don't read the NYT on my kindle, and i sure as shit don't try to type forum posts on my kindle. this platform is perfect for reading books, as long as those books don't contain much in the way of graphics.

let me ask you another question: you're typing long, thoughtful posts. you say you're not on slowtwitch except on a laptop because the experience on a mobile is bad. are you telling me you're going to type these posts on your handheld, if i offer you a great mobile reading experience?

"To be relevant you have to have a multiscreen strategy in place."

you and i agree entirely.

"In 1993 I was on BBS on mosaic over my 14.40 baud modem. I was writing code in HTML, Visual Basic and C."

in this case, i suspect you taught yourself html. i know i did. thank god andreeson had the foresight to include a "page source" utility. i was in san diego, i could not find anyone at UC san marcos, UC san diego, the junior colleges, anyone who knew, let alone could teach, html. those were the frontier days.

i am mostly interested in your views on remnant networks, because it's what you do, and because of what i wrote above, which is the other side of the story if you care about the reader experience. thanks for engaging on this.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

this is for you and mchammers also:

what you're talking about is what i'm envisioning. the major problem with slowtwitch right now - and i mean everywhere, everything, every part of slowtwitch, not just the forum - is navigation. drilling down to what you want. and i'm engaged in that right now and have been for some time. you should be able to find EXACTLY what you're looking for, across the various channels we offer (forum posts, how-to articles by experts, links to outside resources).

my opinion is that we ought to take the extra step in offering every slowtwitcher the experience he/she wants, without forcing everybody into one unified experience. so if we can offer 1 triathlon forum, but also the ability to segment threads into categories, why not? for that matter, i read a number of posts that talk just about the color of the site. background color. is there a way that via your user preferences we can offer a choice of background colors? i don't know. i'm investigating how hard that would be.

so, yeah, you and i are thinking along the same lines. the question is who does the tagging. do we ask the person who's incepting the thread to click boxes? do i as moderator go in once i identify a worthy thread and tag that thread via clicking boxes via my admin options?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

My thought is that it should be the poster who does it, but I'm not convinced of my own thoughts. It may be a subgroup of users with "tagging rights", or, and I don't know if this is possible or not, there could be a "smart auto-tag" function and provides tagging options to the user based on the content. That may not be possible though, I don't know.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

how would you want this presented? let me give you an example, and i don't know whether this is the best example. i'm just spitballing, on the fly. let's say we had sub-forums. but they were not obvious. maybe there's a drop down menu with a lot of topics. everything that gets posted gets posted on the sub-forum also gets posted in the main forum (except for classifieds, jobs, lavender room, etc.). but it also gets posted in the sub-forum, where either the moderator or the OP tags his post. at the beginning of every initial thread incepting post the OP is asked:

click the appropriate box for your post to appear in a topical sub-forum: training with power [ ] bike fit [ ] and so forth [ ]

is that what you're thinking? the one thing that comes to mind, for me, is that every spammer will click every box. but that's an admin problem. i just need a 1-click solution to delete all the spam posts.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

That I don't really have a good answer for. My first thought is that it has to be easy. If it isn't easy, and I mean really easy, then people won't use it. If it involves switching to another screen, it won't be used. That's why I was thinking that a smart auto-tag might be the answer, which reads the post and then gives you a list of 4 or 5 likely matches when you click the "post" button.

Or you just leave tagging to subgroups of users. The initial poster has to tag the post as one of 5 options, which are all the options they get. Option 1 can be tagged by subgroup 1. option 2 by subgroup 2, and so forth. You, of course, would be God.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

subgroup is a topic, right? bike fit. nutrition. swim. that kind of thing?

seems to me these would just be voluntary, not mandatory. and they sit right above or right below the screen you read when you author an initial post. in the gray border area. if the thread turns into something useful, and the box is not clicked by the OP, the moderator can go in and click it. something like that?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman