To Eric and Ryan, I think by definition triathlon without racing is all of us just going out and doing each of the individual sports for exercise. Triathlon races are what makes triathlon. Without races, in effect there is no sport of triathlon. It’s just what people did pre 1975 which is do the sports on their own. I would suggest we remove Racing and Results category and put that in the main forum.
I think all the race day thread from various events, the threads about getting ready for events, race reports etc all add flavour to the tri forum
My unsolicited opinion is that the sub-categories are a terrible idea. Change can be good. A lot of change in a short amount of time (what we have going on here) can be very very bad.
I guess this is all of our unsolicited inputs, but minimally I would like racing/race results/race threads as a regular part of the main tri forum. Really without racing, we’re just doing swim, bike, run workouts for exercise. @Slowman and I have had discussions that you don’t need to do a triathlon race to be a triathlete, which I tend to agree with, but I think races are an integral part of triathlete culture just like Decathlon events are part of making decathlon what it is. You can do the individual track events but without the actual event days, there is no concept of a decathlete in training if you know what I mean.
Yeah cycling should be one sub forum. A swim sub, a bike sub, a run sub makes sense to me, but this is taking it too far. Race reports and the like should stay in the tri forum.
I would argue all of these should go in the triathlon forum and then the threads should be tagged appropriately and one should be able to filter by swim/bike/run/race etc if they choose.
Maybe I’m way out of line here but this is just horrendous. Not to mention these changes are getting rolled out without any announcement/explanation/transparency. I’m really shocked there isn’t more outrage about this.
But hey… at the end of the day we are all guests here and while I haven’t been the most active member, I have learned so much from this community over the last 15+ years and I have major concerns about the drastic change in direction that seems to be taking place.
To be fair the announcement and details are all different. Dev started this thread with very specific criticisms of a specific sub forum.
We have no idea what the sub forums will end up being and therefore can offer no specific suggestions. We’re operating under different understanding and circumstances over yonder in the LR.
I also didn’t scour the main forum hat in depth yet. Was there a similar announcement in the main forum regarding the evolution into sub-forums?
I think we also need to figure out how to reinvigorate more race day threads. Or threads on each specific race. I remember we would see many of the “IMxx in 1 month who’s in??” threads more frequently than they pop up now and there would be regular activity.
No idea how to foster that. Guess if I race more I can try.
Just replying to the last post here, but let me offer my view.
I think that any thread about racing it makes sense to put it in the tri forum. Triathlon is not much without racing
Gigantic threads that cover an entire series or the entire leadup to a big race, the race day itself, and the post race lose their effect. What you end up with is the same 10 people trading points after a while. They become too long to follow
Better for each race, a pre race, race day and a post race recap thread (three) makes sense.
I wish people would write more race reports on ST. I get it that people feel more comfortable writing to friends they know on fb versus anonymous people on ST. but in a way the anonymous people in ST are most interested in racing, whereas the friends on the like of facebook generally don’t know much about sport (I’d categorize my fb group as 33 percent know about tri, 33 percent college friends and relatives, 33 percent people who I have met through life thru work etc. Of course posting race reports kind of forces to reveal who you are, and generally we tend to get mainly fast people with top results posting, but that’s OK, from the middle of the pack I want to hear how it went
In terms of swim, bike, run sub forums, I can quickly scan them, its not a lot of skin off my back, but I prefer it they are in the main tri forum with tags specificed by mods that we can pick from. My gut feel is we need a lot of volume of threads to make the sub fora work well. There is only a small minoriy actually starting new threads in general, so you just get gigantic threads that are not followable if people just post add on tangents in old threads (in my work life I tell people to change the title of the stupid email thread once the topic changes and the expected action is diferent…and temporaly stale titles whether on forum threads or in real life thread titles kind of tend to fail)
Hopefully someone somewhere is listening and taking our feedback. Nothing but crickets from the new ownership, which concerns me. I very much appreciated Slowman’s honesty and transparency in his thread over in the Lavender Room.
We have a few months to figure it out, but where is the 100/100 going to live? Main forum? Running Sub-forum? Racing and Results Sub-Forum (though it’s not REALLY a competition, right? Just a “challenge”)
Will we even have one this Winter? I mean, I know that I will be doing one, with or without the ST Community