I miss the old BPL…

The Xtherm is the warmest.

Did you buy that Xtherm with your own money?

Thanks, but not sure yof got the right thread, Drew. ;)

Full disclosure, I agree.

https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/13217/

No further articles on gear can be posted because of bias and stuff and non disclosure.  Or something, something.  And Marmots.

Later.

Is there less activity on BPL compared to before the website change (excluding gear swap)?

Yes the traffic on the forums is a quarter of what it was before the switch, maybe less.

Yep. Some of the forums pretty much died since the redesign. It’s hard to imagine a redesign doing that much damage, especially for what is now almost a year.  Something else is at play here, I suspect.

It’s personal blogs that are doing away with this site.

Could be. Lots of personal blogs went away last year, though. Just a few good ones left. Nothing BPL can’t match, at the very least.

They can’t match it because they can’t hire staff.  Members can provide articles (I suspect for renumeration of some kind) but you can’t weed out the bias that may come with it.  Nor can you ensure consistency of product.

I have been a member since 2005.  Back then there were articles every week and the forums were a blast.  We had some of the greatest long distance hikers posting regularly, including Skurka.  Even Ryan Jordan was a daily promoter.  After Ryan Jordan sold the company, it went down hill.  He bought it back (via the Lifetime Membership deal) but it was never the same.

A new website does nothing if it just puts lipstick on a pig.

What we need is Bob Gross back… that should liven things up…

And a lot of other regulars who seem to have disappeared… does anyone know if there is another backpacking forum they went to?

billy

There may be token remuneration for writing articles but not really my place to talk details, that’s Ryan’s business

I got my membership for writing an article.  And some fabric and stuff back when they sold fabric….

People want to learn, talk, discuss, disagree. Obviously they are not doing it here anymore. Where did they go? BPL is slowly dying, so there’s some other hang.    /reddit?

The fact that an ultralight pack weight is so much easier to attain has to be a factor too. As is the fact that you can easily buy all that light stuff so much easier today too.

Blogs certainly have had an impact.

The fact that so many have issues with activating and renewing their accounts on this latest version of BPL along with the long standing tradition of exceedingly poor customer service also has made an impact.

Social media so popular with the youger crowd

Some of the finest people I have ever had the pleasure to interact with are here. All the friends I have now I met here.

BPL’s real value is and always has been the community of members. If you come across a useful informative entertaining article, all the better. This hasn’t changed in the 15+ years I have been here as a member.

The forums are what we make them. Contribute. Demand more. Be better. Be honest. Make friends.

I have met over a hundred of you all at the GGGs. A wonderful, diverse, caring group that plays so well together considering the extremely diverse backgrounds is a thing of beauty.

The past is past. Help shape the future you want to see.

I am not convinced personal blogs are the issue here; other forums using quality forum software [it really helps to facilitate interaction) seem to flourish. I hang out in a photography forum which is very active as well as an Australian bushwalking forum which is reasonably active (reflective of the level of participation in bushwalking as much as anything) as well as a few cycling related forums including one which is Australian focused with over 22,000 members.

If anything I would suspect it is Facebook that is doing the damage from the forum side of things. Writing articles is another matter but.

There is nutting special abouy being UL

just pull out yr credit card and wait for a massdrop …

you can even go UL by going all mainstream brands now …

;)

I think it’s my fault.  I came along recently and have probably asked mostly questions that were answered back in 2008, and everyone got tired of answering the same question for the umteenthed time so they left.  I’m still trying to figure out rain pants and dry baking.

BTW… It seems like a similar situation on hammock forums.  There I blame over zealous moderators.  At BPL the mods seem to be gone hikin’

Maybe just a sign o the times?

Wow, this turned into a novel. TL;DR: BPL needs savvier market trend awareness from leadership and a bigger, better revenue stream before it can recover.

As a lifetime member, and a BPLer since 2007, I think the withering has largely to do with speed, and money.

Let me preface this by saying that most of you probably know me as ‘that Arcteryx whore from gear swap’. Which is true; I don’t post content very often, because early experiences with doing so were… a bit brisk. I was here for the Taming of Max Dilthey, and I don’t have Max’s patience. But I’ve been here, reading, and watching, for nine years, and I miss the old BPL too. I’ve cultivated some very rewarding offline relationships through PMs, and I’ve learned a lifetime’s worth of technique and science from the forums. BPL and BPLers have gotten me through some very, very hard times. I would be sorry to see it entirely go; as it is, it’s painful to watch an old, dear friend keep making the same mistakes.

I think it has to do with speed, and money.

Speed of content releases. The MSR Windburner piece up currently is a great example of an ‘old BPL’ article: thorough and comprehensively researched. And it would have been fantastic in 2014, when the Windboiler was released. You know what was fantastic in 2014, when the Windboiler was released? Hiking Jim’s thorough, comprehensively researched review, which came out within weeks of the stove itself, and on the strength of which many of us bought Windboilers. Two years ago. One dude, who cared, out on a hill with a stove and a stopwatch. Outdoor Gear Lab, for all their failings, get reasonably thorough reviews out in a reasonable window.  There are just too many better designed, more readable, less clubby places to get rewarding, helpful, timely info these days for BPL to compete in it’s current form.

Speed of market turnover. In the late 2000s, shelter and pack designs stayed constant for a longer period than they do now. OR Expo wasn’t the massive popular destination it is now, and frankly UL was much more esoteric than it is now. Outdoor recreation wasn’t the cool market category it is now. You can walk into REI, or not walk anywhere to hit Backcountry or Moosejaw or Campsaver, and get a full reasonably light kit, lighter every year, for much less money, and with much less trouble, than you could seven years ago. You may not know how to use that kit well, but UL as a material category is vastly less of a static ivory tower than it was. There used to be no need to ‘keep up’, because we had lasting answers. We still have lasting technique answers, and, crucially, a wealth of experience to really transform your outdoor experience once you get beyond gear, but gear is where it starts for the web at large, and nobody will take those transformative answers seriously if they’re buried in a UX fireswamp underneath a review of a two year old stove.

Speed of UL market penetration. BPL used to be the clearinghouse for cottage gearmakers, and the secret road to hidden gems. ‘Hidden gems’ doesn’t work anymore as a business model. Over the past few years, reliable light packs sold through professionally designed websites without cottagey wait times and cantankerous cult-of-personality founders have become widely available. Reliable light shelters from big companies with good warranties and, again, navigable websites, have become widely available. BPL is no longer the cottage clearinghouse, because for the vast majority of UL newbies, there is no longer a need for cottages, sadly or not. We are, by and large, and I would know better than most, more gear focused than many sports, and BPL is no longer the gear gatekeeper.

‘Speed’ of the redesign getting fixed. When I joined BPL, I didn’t have an MFA in UX design and hadn’t been working in design and brand strategy for several years.
Now I do, and I have.
The new site is appalling, by any reasonable usability standard.
I use it as a UX counter-example for my grad students (and then tell the hiking inclined ones to go suffer through the forums anyway, because there’s still a goldmine of information there for the dedicated). Somebody tell me the difference between the four categories of reviews? Somebody tell me why it matters that there are four indistinguishable categories, as there are almost never reviews to categorize? Somebody tell me why the latest REI gear deals, sadly presiding over a graveyard of broken image links, is the most cognitively compelling chunk floating in the intermittently capitalized soup of the front page? Tip of the iceberg. The place is a visual mess, a data hierarchy mess, and a navigational mess. I would not presently pay to spend time here; it makes my head hurt. Luckily I already did.

Speed of brand decay. The brand is appallingly managed. Remember when BPL got frequent mention in Backpacker as The Authority On UL? Yes, Backpacker is problematic and pay-to-play and everything else, but they are the market leader and they get the word out.
The redesign and site transfer cost large numbers of users, I suspect in equal part due to the atrocious communication about the transfer, the byzantine membership tiering, and the poor promotion of BPL on the wider web; the bugginess and visual maelstrom of the product we got once the transfer was done was just the icing on the cake. As Ken is fond of pointing out, a month for responses from management is just not okay in today’s market, if it ever was. The FB content is amateurish, typo-laden, uncompelling. I sense a huge reluctance to link to ‘mass market’ backpacking content to draw in new users, and a huge reluctance to strike the sort of cross-promotional content strategy with more popular outlets that would drive membership.

And this is where it becomes about money. Where are people? People are on Reddit, because reddit’s UX works. People are at Outdoor Gear Lab, because they have a clean, navigable layout and spend time doing reviews rather than inventing new review categories. People are at Chenault’s blog and Hendrik’s blog and Hikin’ Jim’s blog and UK walking blogs because they can get amazing trip reports and technique tips without wading through indifferently moderated forum pissing contests and an interface from the seventh circle of hell.

Making things work well costs money. Proper web design costs money. Proper customer service costs money. Proper forum moderation costs money. Proper social media management costs money. Resuscitating a neglected brand costs money.

BPL clearly doesn’t make enough to be run well. End of story. Assure a revenue stream, hire people to do the jobs that need doing, and the site, and the brand, will come back to life.

I’d say that mostly sums it up quite well Will.

I used to post more often before the switch.  I could quickly scan through many posts and see if there were actual questions or discussions that I thought I could contribute to.  Now, with the slow loading speed and FS gear listings clogging up the limited space allotted for links to forum posts, I check in less often.

If others  – those of us who posted a lot of substantial answers and got into long back&forth discussions – are doing the same thing, it becomes even harder to find a posting to respond to because they don’t stay near the top and get buried two and three pages down amongst the FS gear.  Hence my (and others’) repeated and ignored requests for FS listings to be on their own sub-forum like Chaff is, so “recent posts” can be used to find actual questions and answers.

I came to BPL for an exchange of ideas.  Not for the sale of used gear.

Will – could not agree with you more on speed and money being the two main hurdles for BPL. As a design/branding/UX studio owner, I cringed at the new redesign and current “promotion” of the BPL brand.

@BPL – some thoughts on the above:

Money – let me be the first to say that if money is the issue, I would be happy to pay double, triple, heck even a $100 yearly fee for regularly stellar content and its presentation. Look at Spotify’s model – $9.99 lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Totally different beast, I know, but a steady subscription fee is doable and produces significant revenue.

Speed – we as a community can help here by pinpointing new gear, methods, news, etc. BPL can help by consolidating the myriad of forums down to 3-5 channels while adding a reader participation forum where we can all add starter content for BPL to expand on.

I love BPL for what it set about to accomplish – a truthful, simple and academic approach to hiking. Would love to have you back, BPL.

As far as editorial content goes, we’re not launching the space shuttle here.  There’s only so much that can be said about walking with a backpack on before you find yourself saying the same thing over and over again.  I’m not saying that it can’t be done but for those who are disappointed at decreasing quality and quantity of articles and would like to see two per week, go ahead and knock out 104 titles that would get us through the next year.  Remember this has to inform the reader about a product or technique that hasn’t been discussed before or at the very least, add substantially more to the conversation to justify a part two.

Also remember that if you deviate from UL backpacking and share info about a shotgun or bicycle you purchased the previous year as a staff pick, you’ll hear “I didn’t pay for this” and “if I wanted to hear about x I’d go to an x forum I’m here for backpacking” as thanks for your efforts.

Plus, we’re a community of backpackers who don’t care to read about backpacking.  Cross the brooks range solo as a female hiker and post one of the best, if not the best trip report ever published here?  Best case scenario, you’d be lucky to get 1/4 of the chatter for your efforts than any of the half dozen separate conversations that we’re going on at the same time about the Sawyer mini.

It’s really too bad because we can’t count on Henry/Ron/Ron to release enough new shelters and backpacks every year to provide us with a steady supply of articles.  Trip reports are the best source of sustainable content but we’re too enamored with our shiny objects and nobody can be bothered to read them.  Think I’m wrong?  Compare the level of interest and discussion in gear swap and gear to the pre, post, and trip announcements forums.

$100 per year?  Creating a business model that requires that kind of commitment from the membership is the absolute worst thing Ryan could do.  Sure a few will pay that but he would have overshot the sweet spot that would attract new members.  The level of interest just isn’t there.

It’s all about the content regardless if it’s editorial or forum chatter.  The new website made it easier to post a link but it’s now more difficult to peruse and access the content,   In my view, that’s largely why why the new BPL is suffering.  As David mentioned, I used to be able to glance at the home forums page and see if there was a new conversation going on in photography, bike packing, or whatever.  I never use the recent posts option so now I have to click on each and every forum to see if anything new has been posted.  Add the slow load times and migration issues, I’m not surprised to see the activity drop,

Asking for more money is going to be an issue this day in age just because there is a wealth of information out on the web for free if you are willing to spend the time.

BPL most likely will need to find a revenue stream in the interim from somewhere else besides its member base, maybe advertising or didn’t it used to have its own BPL brand gear (before my time here but I have heard of it)?

A few select people heavily invested in the future of this site may need to bear the burden and fork out the cash required immediately to get this site back on the right track. If this site is a business it needs to start running like one which means investment of time and capital to come up with a business model geared to this day in age and one that consumers will pay for now, and is dynamic enough to change with the times.. only after all the issues are fixed, or at least seem to be going in a good direction, will members be willing to pay more for what the site offers in my opinion.

I know my stance is rather high level but honestly this sounds like a business model issue, one that worked a decade ago but never evolved.

EDIT:  Im not big on crowdfunding for my own reasons, but may be something to look into for gathering capital… just make sure you have a spelled out plan with it, and stick to it.