I like to watch most races in full , so sometimes it can take days
Great seeing we can do this with streaming and watch in demand etc
But I do have to stay off social media etc , no bigger as it sucks anyways but I do enjoy coming on here , but lately there has been reports on races and it has in the title who win etc
Would be great if the winner wasn’t included in the title of the topic , so folks like me can still enjoy the forum and just ignore the report on said race until we have actually found out the winner of the race by watching it
And enjoying it that way
I saw these titles as I watched T100 London. Kind of my problem coming on a triathlon forum when top tier races are going on.
In the case of the thread titles they are front page articles that automatically get pushed into the forum. For media articles they are announcing news. News headlines are news headlines. No one is supposed to have to read an article to know what happened. That’s just how media news headlines worked since WW1.
And the internet in general. I avoid all social media if there’s a race I’m keen to watch and not be spoiled. ST should report immediately post race. It’s incumbent on the individual to avoid spoilers.
It’d be nice to do a feature like what Reddit has where comments can get blurred if they are a spoiler/answer. Then you tap the blur to reveal it. So like the title of a thread can be T100 Men’s Results: XXXXXX and that way they can still report but not reveal
I wonder if the site articles that get auto-posted to the forum could be tagged “race results” or “spoilers” or something, and then anyone who cares about spoilers could simply mute that tag in Discourse’s preferences.
If I went to the homepage I would fully expect there to be spoilers a la espn.com but this is the forum. There’s absolutely no reason forum titles should be spoiling results. Yes, I know the articles auto post here, but that can be fixed quite easily.
Maybe just stop posting articles in the forum. It’s irritating and causes clutter. Most of them seem to get low engagement from what I can tell. Let the users drive the forum topics like every other forum in the world
I think the articles autopost into the forum so that people in the forum know the articles exist and start to engage with them. Otherwise if we don’t go to the front page we don’t know they exist. There are lots of articles that have nothing to do with an event on a given day that get pushed into the forum that we otherwise may not go to read. The front page articles also get pushed by ST on its other social media platforms from what I see on fb.
Which is why they post into the forum in an attempt to get ‘engagement’/ click through to the front page, which ultimately funds the forum.
That said, I was pissed to have the result spoilt but was partly responsible as when I got up I was still half asleep and clicked an email to see a reply to a different post and then went to the thread list after by habbit.
Well that’s the thing. It doesn’t take you to the front page since the whole article is posted into the forum. Maybe it still counts toward their engagement numbers which is why they do it
Some forum members will always tell us we shouldn’t not want spoilers in thread titles, which is puzzling (we actually don’t want spoilers in thread titles, and what is the downside of not having them?)
So I think most agree
No problem posting what happened in the race/event just don’t put the result in the headline when it’s posted in the forum
In stead of it’s saying LCB wins the t100 in the title
It could say , epic battle in the women’s T100 in London (which it was )
Fair chance it would get more clicks as those members of the forum that actually just want result have to open the thread to see what happen instead of just reading it in the title and moving on
And those of us that don’t want the spoiler just avoid that thread but can still engage in the forum
Do I think it’s necessary/wanted to post articles to the forum to spark that engagement? No, I don’t. As others have said, engagement clearly remains relatively low and it clutters the forum.
Do I think those article titles, if posted, can be smarter about titles knowing they go on to the forum, and avoid blatant spoilers if they could? Sure, they could, in theory.
Although, in the end…if you’re working to avoid a race result being spoiled for you, stay off ST. That’s where I land on this.
And if you stumble upon it in the forums and didn’t know a race was going on (like has happened to me, I’ve said “Oh, I forgot T100____ was today!”), then you can’t complain about it being spoiled because clearly it wasn’t important enough for you to care about in advance.
Personally, if I’m trying to avoid a race spoiler, I stay away from: strava, IG, YT, my phone’s random news feed, ST, and opening google chrome (since it also feeds me news).
I don’t mind spoilers, as I don’t follow the race schedule enough to know what’s happening, or when to watch, so when I see “So&so won such&such” my immediate reaction is “well, that’s nice for them”
The idea of putting front page articles in the forum is a good one because in theory it should create discussion. Reality is it doesn’t. 2 different T100 London article does not have 1 response at this time.
That’s probably because the conversation around the race is going on elsewhere.
So here is an idea that could make everyone happy and especially get people to engage with the front page article.
Don’t start a new thread for the front page article. Post it in the middle of the ongoing thread where the discusssion is already taking place.
Use a super spoiler title if you want. Google will pick it up from the front page. Win for Ryan !
But the title will not override the existing thread title. No spoilers for forum users. Win for the OP
No complaining of cluttering. Win for the guy a couple of posts up
Isn’t everyone happy in this case ? So tired of winning…
