I miss the old BPL…

Whats interesting is that there has not been one single post in this thread from a mod

I think the lone moderator deserves a lot of credit for taking on his thankless job and keeping this train on the rails.  Name one person who has consistently cared for and invested as much into this forum as he has in terms of time, editorial content, and refereeing the largest group of self righteous misfit backpackers to ever haunt the interwebs.

Roger, I salute you.  This Nuun is for you.

edit to add but if you were to name someone who is Roger’s equal in the afore mentioned qualities, it’d be David Chenault who is a moderator as well.

Links to all the prior GGGs at the end of this photo essay

Link to 2016 GGG

The very first Gathering of Gear Geeks 2009

The GGG Stands for Gathering of Gear Geeks, which is a term I came up with when I posted the first photo essay of a gathering of BPLers who met at Point Reyes, CA. in 2009.

It was organized by Ken Helwig and there were only about 12-15 people who came out….essentially all strangers who were on BPL’s website.

Successive GGGs were organized by Ken Helwig and Ken Thompson and held at Point Reyes until the gatherings were getting too large and the park rangers would not let us reserve two group sites side by side.

By this point, the GGG was held at Henry Coe State Park in California, which allowed for group sites side by side that could accommodate up to 100 people.

Essentially, with the move to Henry Coe State Park, Ken Thompson become the sole organizer of the GGGs but was generously helped by fellow BPLers in donating firewood, hauling in water, and even the donation of propane fire pits on the year that high fire risk prevented wood fires.

I believe that the largest GGG was within the past 3 years and had anywhere from 80 to 100 people attend with cottage manufactures being generous to come out and hang out, show products, and to demo prototypes of new products.

I have been told that the manufactures enjoyed coming out because it was low pressure and simply fun vs. working a trade show.

As the GGGs have grown, people starting coming from other states to attend and other GGGs starting springing up around the country….adopting the GGG term.

I have been fortunately to be witness & unofficial photographer to all but one of the GGGs in Nor Cal and guess I am the one to blame for coming up with the term Gathering of Gear Geeks…..GGG.

However, the terms means nothing if it were not for BPLers taking the initiative and posting and organizing their own get togethers….simply like minded folks who love the outdoors and follow the lightweight principals put forth by Ryan Jordan and BPL.

Anyway….hope that explains the whole GGG thingy…..better to just see the pics in the links.

Tony

Their forum software has never been what I would call great, but now it is abysmal, and the BPL-supplied content (articles, reviews, etc) is virtually gone.  It also aggravates me that I have a paid lifetime membership but still have to see so many ads.

Should BPL have changed to a new hostng site and new SW? It’s a good question. Certainly there had been many people saying we should, for quite some time. But, of course, such a change when you don’t have a paid professional SW support team always turns out to be far more difficult than everyone says.

The trouble imho with so many packages these days is simply bloatware. The SW creators try to make their package everything to everyone, and that always ends up in a huge tangled mess of settings and interactions and bugs, because the original core of the SW was never written all that well, and they dare not try to rewrite it. (Windows comes too mind.)

Ads – yeah, sigh. As the size of the site has grown, so have the costs. Massively. I think server site costs are now over $4k/month. How do you cover that?

Articles and Reviews: yeah again. There’s a backlog – quite a large backlog, that built up while the web site upgrade dragged on for months. Trust me, I am as frustrated as anyone about the delays, or more so. I believe the flow is starting up again this last week or so. In the meantime, light entertainment is provided …  :-)

Cheers

“Should BPL have changed to a new hosting site and new SW? It’s a good question. Certainly there had been many people saying we should, for quite some time. But, of course, such a change when you don’t have a paid professional SW support team always turns out to be far more difficult than everyone says.”

Correct me if I’m wrong (or, hell, even if I’m right), but I seem to remember a post that said the change to a new site/software had little to do with members clamoring for it, but instead was due to the old site shutting down, or at least not renewing BPL’s  contract. So BPL was forced to move quickly/hastily instead of a planned changeover. If that’s correct, that no doubt adds to the mess that the new site so quickly became.

Hi Doug

Not entirely correct – infogears.com still exists. The end of a yearly contract might have been influential. The many advertising claims about how easy it is to use the new XYZ software may have been a bit deceptive too.  :-)

Beyond that, I know not.

Cheers

PS: there are lies, damn lies, and software vendors …

Good timing, KT!
You said earlier, “All the friends I have now I met here.”

Suggest getting involved in a trail club, or more involved in one that you already belong to. That’s why I don’t have much time anymore for BPL, let alone FB. The small clubs need all the help they can get to create and maintain the trails we enjoy.
And with some effort, there is far more to enjoy and find out about oneself and about others than would ever happen on BPL, let alone FB.

But the BPL annual fee has been well worth it. Just Richard Nisley’s posts about testing new fabrics have provided invaluable info to this gearmaker.

Unfortunately, our society has become, as Ross Perot said, one giant sucking sound.
It is the sound of money being sucked out of every kind of creative endeavor. BPL is just one tiny example. It has been obvious for several years. We can lament about that in some other forum.

Fortunately, the site is still worth the price. I hope BPL stays around long enough for me to write long original posts about the tent and pack I’m designing and building. It won’t happen terribly soon, because as noted, less time is being spent in the virtual world now.

Don’t see any reason to moan and groan. It is just taking the bitter with the sweet, a fact of life.

Speaking of which, thank you incredibly much Roger Caffin for your contribution to this site, not to mention your help with some projects. Should BPL go sour on us and suffer a bitter death, I wouldn’t want it to happen without having thanked you big time.

I aten’t dead yet.
Granny Weatherwax

Cheers

What makes me so depressed about BLP is that everybody thinks there BS is correct and should be negatively inserted into a forum even though about 90% of the time it shouldn’t.  On top of that, the majority doesn’t think its a bad idea to post in this nature.

What this means to me is that BLP acts very Republican like.

So if this is a small interpretation of what the rest of the US is like, it means that Donald Trump will be president.

So, yes, I miss the old BLP.

now we gotta bring trump into it?

its the 2016 version of godwins law …

;)

I would imagine the reason why there was such a large drop in membership after the software switch was that it was literally impossible for the user to re-subscribe under that same account if your membership expired… when you tried to log in it would just tell you that your membership had expired and not give you an option to re-subscribe.  When going through the normal signup process there was not an option to re-subscribe under an existing account so you would have to subscribe under a different email address… I would imagine it gave people a reason to ask themselves “is it worth it to sign back here, or contact support to re-subscribe?” … I would imagine it was a resounding “no”.

I dropped out for a while. I didn’t like that Bob Gross got the boot for voicing an opinion on an article, and frankly I miss his contributions in the forums. I don’t like heavy handed moderation. I don’t like that you have to pay to play. It’s one thing to make someone pay to read the articles, or to participate in gear swap, but to even post? That will kill a forum. I re-upped because they finally came out with an article I was interested enough in reading that I paid the fee (and was pleasantly surprised that someone actually missed me and welcomed me back). But I think the current rules are stifling the forums.

Yes, welcome back Dena. Your contributions have been missed and you are one of the regulars that I missed hearing from…

billy

yes, welcome back

I agree, Bob Gross missed, interesting contributions.  I don’t know about the issue between Bob and Ryan (if there is an issue).  That sort of thing happens on the internets.

Hi Dena

Yes, there is a paywall for posting, but it HAD to be introduced to block the spammers. A new release some years ago of some widely used spam SW allowed hordes of script kiddies to start posting commercial click-thru spam to BPL, and we were getting more than 50 (fifty) spams about shoes per day. The phrase ‘shoe spammer’ remains a bit of an internet meme to this day.

By introducing a small charge, we were able to block the spammers totally, within a week. It took that long to be 100% effective because some of the spammers had created several backup accounts before the paywall was introduced.

Cheers
Roger Caffin

(Paraphrasing), “Too many people go off topic. . . . Trump!”

“The irony is strong with this one.”  -Darth Vader

“BPL: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” – Obi-Wan

Things change and “You Can’t Go Home Again”

To quote the great Donald:

“Make BPL great again!”

“You Can’t Go Home Again”

great book with great life lessons.  Possibly too depressing for some people.  But better to acknowledge that reality rather than delude yourself into thinking you can.  And that we should make America Great Again.

Well I see that Roger shut down the quilt thread.  Unfortunately for him, the flame war is far from over.

Starting at 1700hrs tonight, the acrimony continues.  Since the helpful and unhelpful buttons are still active, we will continue to communicate in binary.

As good fortune would have it, the last page has exactly eight commenters on it.  If their helpful count is an even number, for binary purposes, it’s zero.  Odd numbers are one.  All communications will be in upper case, because you know, caps lock is shouting and this is a flame war.  A new letter every minute.

01001001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 01100001 01100111 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101110 01110100 00101110 00100000 00100000!!!!

Yeah, people, but don’t forget that “something special is coming May 17.” What do you suppose that will be? Maybe Bob Gross is  being reinstated? Or John Abela will post something to dispel all the rumors about him? The Idster will finally get a date with a hot one? I can hardly wait until I can log on tomorrow, bright and early. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy–this should be something to behold!

Or…probably not…

You guys have got cabin fever R E A L  B A D …

Oh well, more good articles coming soon.

Cheers

Hi guys,

I’m new on staff, how can I help? Is there specific article you would like to see? I only have so many ideas per day, so I’m always open to digging up neat stuff if someone has an idea.

Emylene

Apparently binary humor falls flat around here.

Note to self, no more binary humor.

Hi Emylene,

Here are a couple thoughts.

• Articles on meteorlogy and studying clouds and other weather patterns in a wilderness setting.
• A “Welcome to BPL” video series for new members that explains why most of us wear trail runners (ie pound on the foot/five on the back), UL shelter overview, water treatment options, etc that’s pinned somewhere conspicuous on the website.

01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 01101110 01111001 00101110 00101110 00101110