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Why Are We Even Still Here? was “A Very Thorough MYOG Site”


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  • #1415010
    Brett .
    Member

    @brett1234

    Locale: CA

    .. make all replies to a post have the original post subject as the new 'subject', then after a "/" addendums can be added. This will immediately end the time wasting hassle of opening multiple instances of replies to one post.

    #1415029
    George Matthews
    BPL Member

    @gmatthews

    If you go down to the bottom of the G Spot Forum Index page and click Show All, then you'll see all of the G Spot threads available. You can then cut and paste the info into a spreadsheet. Here was the results a few days ago…

    Category / Threads / Posts
    ==========================
    100 or more / 8 / 1,038
    50 to 99 / 44 / 2,828
    20 to 49 / 379 / 10,835
    1 to 19 / 3,174 / 20,074

    Total / 3,605 / 34,775

    10 to 19 / 736 / 9,945
    1 to 9 / 2,438 / 10,129

    5 to 9 / 1,015 / 6,700
    1 to 4 / 1,423 / 3,429

    If you sort by subject, then you'll similar threads for the threads with less posts. This point with the high volume of threads without many posts makes it challenging to find previously discussed or answered questions. I know from personal experience that it is much faster to post a new thread to get an answer than to try to find the existing information. If BPL had a better breakdown organized by gear thread subject, then it would be faster to find the existing info.

    The record for posts to a single thread with 178 posts goes to 'Ultralight Outfitters Beer Can Stove System for Esbit Fuel'. Second was 'ULA Arctic 1000 Packs' with 163 posts. Third was a tie with 121 posts, 'Big Sky shelters — who has ordered? who got their's?' and 'Bushbuddy'.

    For the threads with low posts, 395 threads had one post, 365 threads had two posts, and 348 had three posts. Together, there were 2,169 posts for threads with 1 to 3 posts.

    How that for a wasted 1/2 hour? : )

    #1415050
    Roger Caffin
    BPL Member

    @rcaffin

    Locale: Wollemi & Kosciusko NPs, Europe

    Hi Guys

    For what it is worth …
    Yes, we hear you. And yes, we appreciate your constructive comments. And yes, we know a LOT of work still needs to be done to upgrade the web site and the background software. So what is the problem? Basically, as far as I understand the situation, it all comes down to a single word: resources.

    In the beginning … and that was not all that many years ago, BPL was run entirely by a few volunteers in their spare time. There was no large pocket behind it all. The transition from this mode of operation to a fully professional and slick web site with all the bells and whistles … is difficult on a limited budget.

    I am sure it could all be solved very quickly by including paid advertising all over the web site. Dead easy in fact. But Ryan has said many times over we are not going to do that. BPL is and will remain independent.

    But we WILL get there, and your comments are still spurring us on. So don't give up just yet.

    (Disclaimer: Ryan sets official policy: this is just my waffle.)

    Cheers
    Roger

    #1415079
    Stuart Burke
    Member

    @burkest

    Locale: Collegiate Peaks Wilderness

    George,

    Thanks for crunching the data about the number of posts per thread. I agree with you that it is anoying that threads will get buried because of the large number of threads.

    On the other hand I like the fact that there are not too many posts on a given thread. I spend some time on whiteblaze and it is annoying how many people post on the same thread. I get tired of all of the people that post on a topic that say the same thing as previous posters.

    #1415083
    Richard Scruggs
    BPL Member

    @jrscruggs

    Locale: Oregon

    BPL provides a great resource. I can recall the pre-forum, pre-reader review days of BPL, and it was a great resource then. Any frustration in having to search for info or wait for BPL products to become available is well worth the price of admission, at least to me.

    Have purchased the premium membership every year from the beginning, and will continue to have a premium membership until they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

    Unless it gets too expensive, that is.

    JRS

    #1415088
    Brian James
    Member

    @bjamesd

    Locale: South Coast of BC

    Wiki

    Wiki wiki wiki wiki wiki

    BPL needs a wiki so badly that I've thought of building and hosting one myself!

    Please add my voice to the chorus: the most valuable parts of the site are old forum posts and to a lesser extent old articles.

    The new articles are generally gear reviews – which is perfect for yuppies who read the site from their offices and get out 3x a year with all brand-new kit, but useless for people who already have gear and are trying to get out and do more with less.

    All of the valuable articles (i.e. the old ones) are now outdated: fabrics and technologies have changed. Why not keep the articles current or else revisit each major topic annually?

    Maybe a digg-style voting system would help? Or the ability to sort/search articles by number of page views?

    or possibly even a wiki?

    #1415089
    Doug Johnson
    BPL Member

    @sponge

    Locale: PNW

    I wholeheartedly agree! It would make the site much more user friendly. The Digg voting would be awesome!

    #1415109
    Don Wilson
    BPL Member

    @don-1-2-2

    Locale: Koyukuk River, Alaska

    To follow up on Roger's comments – yes we've been watching this thread and we hear you.

    And a wiki is definitely under consideration. There are any number of possibilities for using a wiki on BPL. Expect to hear more in the fairly near future on 2008 plans and assorted improvements in the works.

    #1415113
    Joe Kuster
    BPL Member

    @slacklinejoe

    Locale: Flatirons

    Having installed and maintained several Wiki systems I can highly recommend BPL go for it. If you can get the base system requirements down and a stable platform that meets your needs and will allow for between 15 minutes to an hour a day to moderate incoming material it can be done quite well. Even in an academic environment we pulled it off with almost zero of the usual BS people would think kids would do to a wiki.

    The big concerns most of my clients have had is:
    SPAM – both computer generated and posted by humans
    Hijacking
    Malicous editing
    Worried about too much maintenance time
    People posting profane comments or copyright violations
    Posting of trade secrets – in this case BPL member only content.

    The above can be solved by:
    Choosing a platform that is easy to maintain with extensions that will fit your needs (Mediawiki comes to mind)
    Applying proper blacklist files
    No anonymous edits, membership sign up that is either linked to the forum or has the scrambled letter box for the user to enter during sign up
    Using Patroller add-ins that make checking all new content fast and restorations if needed very easy.
    If you can keep the board clean, people rarely will post bad things, if however they see a few bad things already on the board things can go from bad to worse quickly.

    A system like mediawiki takes only periodic technical updates after the initial system is up. Thankfully it seems that other users clean up after each other rather nicely if you let them. If you give them a chance the good apples often take much of the moderation issues in their own hands.

    Coding wise getting the look right is harder than about anything else so if you can live with a default template look with few customizations your admin's life will be far easier. Itegration with the forum accounts can be cumbersome depending on what type of user directory system you are using. We were on Active Directory which made things very, very hard but it looks like you guys are using something easier to tie the wiki and forum together.

    #1415143
    Brian James
    Member

    @bjamesd

    Locale: South Coast of BC

    "And a wiki is definitely under consideration. There are any number of possibilities for using a wiki on BPL." -Staffer

    The thing about a Wiki is that *you* don't, and can't, control it. (I know: how very un-BPL)

    You won't be able to make a wiki into what you want; wikis contain user-generated structure and content or they don't work. You can't control your users anyway: not even the obsessive attempt at forum categorization worked.

    Your wiki will quickly and thoroughly be populated with everything that you see in the forums, but searchable and constantly updated to keep pace with the market and current thinking: commercial gear, home made gear, technique, philosophy, recipes, Bill Fornshell, whatever.

    Don't worry for a second about vandalism, malicious posts, etc.: your user base is fanatical and dedicated and there are lots of people here who would love to be admins. Just require a BPL login to edit and you're safe.

    The reason that you will never do it is the elephant in the living room: the user content at BPL is far more valuable than the editorial content. Not because the editorial content is bad, but because your users are as fanatical as your staff and outnumber them 10:1.

    The fact that your forums intentionally obfuscate the infinite quantity of wisdom posted to the forums is the only thing that keeps people buying subscriptions. (Are you the last remaining web publisher on planet earth still trying to sell subscriptions?)

    #1415146
    David Lewis
    BPL Member

    @davidlewis

    Locale: Nova Scotia, Canada

    Just integrate Google Search. Simple. Free. Works. Why re-invent the wheel?

    #1415153
    Greg Mihalik
    Spectator

    @greg23

    Locale: Colorado

    Nothing from Google is "free".

    Everything is "mined" for information in order to provide the advertising that accompanies the "service".

    And, someday, it won't be "free".

    #1415176
    Roger Caffin
    BPL Member

    @rcaffin

    Locale: Wollemi & Kosciusko NPs, Europe

    > Are you the last remaining web publisher on planet earth still trying to sell subscriptions?
    Dunno about that, but we may be the last remaining web publisher on planet earth who does not sell advertising space or user information to third parties. So how do we pay the electricity bills?

    #1415185
    Brian James
    Member

    @bjamesd

    Locale: South Coast of BC

    With respect, you may well be.

    There's no need to sell user information to sell ads. Relevant, contextual text ads are nothing new or scary to users.

    People have all but forgotten the flashing popups and popunders of yore, and pretty much understand that easily-ignored unobtrusive text advertising is how the web is financed nowadays. Micropayments or pay-per-website was tried and tried again, but the world just never warmed to it.

    "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

    #1415186
    Jan Rezac
    BPL Member

    @zkoumal

    Locale: Prague, CZ

    Wiki would be great platform for accumulating and organizing some part of (especially MYOG-related) information now posted to the forum.

    And I agree that it may be a problem to incorporate it into BPL business model… although, what about this: Access only for members + free membership for active contributors.

    Fortunately, there is no need to wait for BPL to implement it. And even for free – there are free wiki hostings, and I'm sure that some of them has all the necessary features (being full MediaWiki platform). There is a partial list for inspiration: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiFarms

    Any brave person to start? I don't have time to do it now, but it is a tempting idea and I might try it sometimes later.

    #1415195
    Ross Bleakney
    BPL Member

    @rossbleakney

    Locale: Cascades

    Like a lot of forum threads, this one has a lot of different ideas. I want to comment on a bunch of these:

    1) I think the features are still really good. The recent pole comparison was very helpful and the articles about tarps and condensation was outstanding (complete with the really cool pictures). Perhaps that article was old news to a bunch of folks, but I think this is really helpful for those just getting started. That being said, I think it would be great if some of the old product comparisons were updated. For example, the alcohol stove comparison doesn't have the Caldera Cone and the wind shirt article is really out of date.
    2) The comments on the forums are outstanding. This is probably the most civil forum I've ever experienced. Perhaps it is because people must use their real name, but I find it very refreshing to see experts calmly discuss the pros and cons of a particular approach without making the novice feel stupid.
    3) The forums are often misused. This thread is probably a good example (it probably belongs in "BPL Product Support" or one of the other "Administration" categories and not in "G-Spot"). People often use G-Spot as a general purpose forum when the post really belongs in "Gear Lists" or "Multiple Use Gear". Again, because people are so civil, it is much easier to just answer the thread rather than tell them "post over there".
    4) The forum software needs a lot of work. One reason why people often post to G-Spot is because they know it will be read. Threads often morph into different subjects because people are afraid a new thread will not get the same response (if a thread is "hot", you are probably going to get a quicker response). It also makes it harder for people to scan all the subjects to see if there is something new. I almost always start at G-Spot, but then have to click a couple times to look at MYOG (only to find that there is nothing new). I don't know what the current state of forum software is like, but I would to see the following:

    1) Allow sub-threads. This is pretty common and allows a particular subject (like this one) to be split into different areas while still maintaining its relationship to the original post. Along with that, you would have a thread view.
    2) Provide an "all messages" view. This view would list all the messages in post order, with the category ("G-Spot", "MYOG", etc.) along side.
    3) Add more categories and sub-categories. With the "all messages" view, there would be more incentive to add categories and sub-categories.
    4) Provide tags. Again, I don't know if forum software provides this, but this is one of the most important data management changes to occur in the last ten years. It seems very basic to someone who has ever dealt with a database, but the idea of using tags provides a huge improvement over only using a hierarchical structures. For those who aren't familiar with tags, wikipedia has an entry describing it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29) (http://del.icio.us is a good example). For us, this could mean that you could choose amongst previously used tags or create a new one. Every thread about tents, for example, could be tagged with "tent". A thread that mentioned a Shires tarp tent might also have the tag "Shires". You could subscribe to a tag and be notified when someone added that tag. This would mean people like Henry could be notified if someone talked about his product. Along with the notification, you could also search by tag. You might also have a tag "cloud" which would be pretty cool and give a nice view of what people are writing about.

    #1415203
    Bill Fornshell
    BPL Member

    @bfornshell

    Locale: Southern Texas

    Jan or someone,

    As someone "Wiki" challenged, what does all you are talking about mean to me?

    I went to the link you posted but don't understand enought to see what you mean when you say "Any brave person to start?"

    Thanks

    #1415210
    Brian James
    Member

    @bjamesd

    Locale: South Coast of BC

    EDIT: the very best place to find out what a wiki is is on the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

    #1415222
    David Lewis
    BPL Member

    @davidlewis

    Locale: Nova Scotia, Canada

    The point is Gary… Google works… brilliantly. I've yet to see any programmer that I've ever worked with implement a custom-coded search that could even approach the results that Google Search can. No need to re-invent the wheel.

    Which brings me to my second point. The forum software does not need "work"… it needs to be completely replaced. And there are TONS of great open source (often free) forum packages out there.

    Again… no need to re-invent the wheel for such off the shelf components as forums and blogs and shopping carts. The software is all out there. I can't imagine a site like BPL having anywhere NEAR enough money to build a 100% custom site from scratch.

    p.s. subscriptions don't bother me… but neither do ads. The idea with the no ads is clearly to be seen as being beholden to no one.

    #1415233
    Brian James
    Member

    @bjamesd

    Locale: South Coast of BC

    "no need to re-invent the wheel for such off the shelf components as forums and blogs and shopping carts. The software is all out there. I can't imagine a site like BPL having anywhere NEAR enough money to build a 100% custom site from scratch."

    I already use google to search BPL. Go to google and type a search followed by a space and then "site:backpackinglight.com". eg.

    Son Of Balrog site:backpackinglight.com

    The trouble is that unless users had an index or directory, they'd never know what Son of Balrog was. It's buried and obfuscated.

    Regarding reinventing the wheel, they didn't stop there: the hammer, the sundial, the loom, and the mass spectrometer have all been invented from scratch by a talented coder in the BPL labs.

    The trouble is that we're all now accustomed to open source software that's constantly upgraded and tweaked by *thousands* of talented coders worldwide. So whereas mainstream forums have advanced light years, the BPL forums are maybe a 1.5 release many years later.

    Maybe they wrote off the staggering cost of development over a decade, and now have to use the software all that time for tax reasons?

    #1415240
    Bill Fornshell
    BPL Member

    @bfornshell

    Locale: Southern Texas

    Brian,

    You got to make it easy. Here are a few of my ideas.

    Banana Peel Dispatch

    Son of Balrog, the real stove

    BPL "Readers Rag" Monthly Magazine

    I looked over the Wiki whatever stuff. It is over my head.

    #1415245
    Joe Kuster
    BPL Member

    @slacklinejoe

    Locale: Flatirons

    Actually, contrary to some of the above statements a Wiki can be controlled fairly easily. While individual edits are easy the number of folks who will completely remake framework are low since it requires a bit more finesse than just login, click edit, type and save. If a framework is in place before it goes live with enough base level content, generally speaking, it stays that way unless someone makes a serious commitment to change it.

    Wiki ettiquite usually requires someone to post in the "talk" section on a page (the basically a small forum thread attached to each page of content to help editors determine a group direction of where each other's work should go) for a while before making any radical restructuring pages. These notes of course pop up where the moderators will see the changes proposed and have time to steer to the BPL vision.

    Also it is very possible to have member only content pages. For example I kept sys admin manuals in the same group as the general purpose wiki. It was simple to set up the groups in the system and using open LDAP we just tied it into our existing database, none of the "well joe shmoe's subscription ran out, we need to manually pull his access". Just make sure to make the secure changes to the search page if it isn't ok if the first 255 characters show up as a preview for general public.

    One of the real benefits of a wiki is to seperate the general conversational crap from the real meat of a thread/article. Each page usually has a "talk" page for editors to share their thoughts on what could be added but didn't quite fit in, or proposed ideas or questions. That leaves the real article nice and clean for those wanting to cut to the chase.

    #1415342
    Ross Bleakney
    BPL Member

    @rossbleakney

    Locale: Cascades

    I just want to back up what David said. I think the forum software should be replaced. I also think it makes sense to use an open source package. However, as any developer who uses open source software will tell you, deciding on exactly the right piece of software and then configuring it is not a trivial act. I do think it is worth it. One of the ironies of what we are proposing is that the current forum software doesn't help us help BPL. We have several questions here and a lot of ideas. For example, is improving the Forums the #1 improvement people would like to see. If so (or even if not) what are the things people would like to see in their forum software (I mentioned my list in a previous post)? Hmmmm, maybe we should start a wiki page and then ask people to post their ideas on how to improve the site.

    #1415355
    Jon Rhoderick
    BPL Member

    @hotrhoddudeguy

    Locale: New England

    As a one year BPL subscriber I'd have to say I am definitely not as excited as I used to be, its just got to be that way, but I feel as if every Wednesday my hopes are a bit sullied by the lack of a ground breaking article. The Carbon Monoxide tests were VERY informative for example, and actually were probably 90% responsible in saving a few lives in regards to the MSR Reactor, but the problems lay in the fact that there reallly isn't alot left to talk about, it seems as if most elements have been brought up and the G spot seems to have become more of a 2-7 post thread section. The most information I get is from articles and threads years old.

    The problem IMAO is that we simply do not have enough new articles coming in. The BPL staff I can see really churn out articles, but there simply aren't enough of them. Bill's idea about a reader's article section is a fantastic solution to this. The amount of MYOG knowledge that is not thoroughly presented is vast, and in depth studies into winter clothing and vapor barriers and mountaineering in the spirit of winter would really add to my BPL experiance.

    #1415474
    Kirk Olson
    Member

    @kirkols

    Locale: Florida and Seattle

    Bill,

    There are already some articles in Wikipedia about Ultralight Backpacking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_backpacking

    This would be a good place to start adding your own content if you wanted. It is very easy to add more information or even entirely new topics. Wikipedia is not a commercial site and relies on donations. Look around and see if that is the kind of tool you are looking for.

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