I miss the old BPL…

Apparently binary humor falls flat around here.

I, for one, appreciated it. But I am a barely reformed geek….

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@paulmags

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@idester

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00000010 01101001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 01001110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101111 01101100 01100100 00100000 01000010 01010000 01001100 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111

Binary solo

”

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”

At first you guys charged $1, and only to new accounts. Then you started charging $5. Were spammers paying $1 per account to spam? And why did it need to be yearly and not a single purchase? And accounts that have been here for years before the paywall are charged annually to post. Was it really all about stopping spam or was it a convenient opportunity for the site to start making money?

Hi Justin

I do not remember it ever being $1. At first it was entirely free – which led to the spammer problem.

Then a $5 fee was introduced to block the spammers, and it was immediately 100% successful. Spammers do not pay anything. Ryan was reluctant to introduce this fee, because BPL had been free, but we had NO choice in the face of 50+ spams per day!

Then we had the Global Financial Crisis, which really hurt everyone. It hurt BPL too: it will still be several years before Ryan can get BPL out of the debt hole it got into. The number of members has grown over the years, and so has the load on the HW & SW. As I mentioned before, the servers & SW are costing BPL in excess of $4k/month now, afaik.

Cheers

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@ Gary D

tomorrow morning at 8am we launch our 2016 Wilderness Adventures program to Unlimited Members, who will receive significant discounts and early enrollment privileges for both online courses and our Adventure Treks program in Montana. If you’re not yet an Unlimited Member, you can become an Unlimited Member in 60 seconds.

Whoopidydooda

Still waiting to hear from anyone who attended the recent winter skills seminar

BTW, I was a non-paying member prior to the paywall.  I am still here, able to post and I have not paid anything.  I was “grandfathered” in.  I believe I am listed as a forum member.

If they were indeed using scripts to register and post to the forum automatically then wouldn’t a simple captcha on the registration page or some kind of question that a script could not answer have sufficed?

Larry:  I am surprised by that as I was a paying member whos membership expired.. every time I logged in it told me “your membership has expired” and would subsequently log me out.  I had to create another email address (not sure if this was needed but did not want a conflict with my old account) and sign back up.

All along I thought binary was someone’s sexual orientation and have been waiting for Trump to address the bit for bi restrooms.

It sounds like BPL went with some sort of commercial CMS, is that right? If so… well, that seems a little silly. Joomla is 100% free and open source, extraordinarily well supported, and has an excellent forums extension. And it’s quite efficient too—I doubt we’d be paying $4K/month in server fees without a very poorly optimized server-side intrastructure. Have you considered moving image hosting over to AWS?

If they were indeed using scripts to register and post to the forum automatically then wouldn’t a simple captcha on the registration page or some kind of question that a script could not answer have sufficed?

Nowadays, yes. reCAPTCHA is very good at what it does. But there were a few years back there when spammers really did have the upper hand and were able to bypass almost every captcha system available, so I can understand why BPL did what it did. It’s no longer necessary to keep spam out, but it sounds like now it’s become a needed part of the revenue stream.

You would need to ask Ryan about the SW he is using. I have managed, with great fiendish cunning, to avoid playing sysadmin at BPL. Done enough of that in the past.

Cheers

LOL! I don’t mean to be rude about this, but when has anybody asked Ryan anything and gotten an answer? The guy probably lives in a shrine atop the Himalayas.

Seriously though, I was quite disappointed when I saw that the new software didn’t take advantage of any of the myriad quality forum platforms out there. Even something as simple as phpBB would offer a ton more power and a much more well thought out feature set. I administered a phpBB forum about a decade ago, and even then it was more advanced than whatever this is. And it’s free.

It also would probably help to move to a community-moderated model. Perhaps with this software that would be a more difficult proposition, but it’s fairly standard for communities our size to have one or two admins or super-moderators, then a team of moderators below them, each responsible for one or two sub-forums. Of course, those are typically volunteers, and it’s harder to recruit volunteers to help a for-profit enterprise that charges a subscription fee.

Especially when you get emails from the subscription enterprise offering you access to content, that you assumed you would have paid for years ago with the promises they gave you about your Lifetime/Unlimited Membership.

46 articles, ready to go, but locked up unless I pay more… Hmmm.
No real indication at all of what the articles are (like not even a keyword). Click on the link in the email and its pay to find out….Hmmm.

I just miss the younger nicer me from  the old BPL ;)

@Adam    I like your avatar

Adam

If you had life membership before, you should still have that now. Can you access articles?

Cheers

I’ll bet Adam is talking about the 46 “articles” that BPL is hawking as their Ultralight Boot Camp.

Even if the $4k a month was true, less than 2000 Premium memberships cover that. Certainly there is a much larger subscriber base than that. Hammock Forums has over 40,000 members.

My theory is much simpler… Lineloc 3’s killed the mindset of UL backpacking..  Overnight people went from using dental floss for their guy lines to using “thick and heavy” guy lines that actually worked.  And the extra weight didn’t add negatively to their trip experience so now with their guilty conscience, they could no longer talk about UL like they use to..

In all seriousness though, I think BPL use to be a cult and the forum was were all the members would meet and talk in grams, which helped to attract Engineers, Europeans, and Drug dealers.. Which is the reason for all the intellectual conversations and cultural clashes.    These were things people were drawn to though…While this was not an actual topic title it would not be a stretch to see a form post that started like this..”Does anyone here know the coefficient of friction on a titanium wire tent stake in a clay soil and if so how does it compare to 7075 Aluminum Y stake in loamy soil?  On any other forum a question like this would get one reply telling the person to go take a hike while also insulting their unborn children..  Here something like that would get pages upon pages of conversation from people that could answer the question and quantify it.. And for the most part everyone would be friendly and respectful to the OP (unlike other forums)

The other thing that is at play (I think) is BPL is being run like a hobby and not a business.   Like it gives Ryan J street cred to charge for consulting and hiking lessons.  But since he is doing a million other things he doesn’t have time to invest into it..   Like why the hell isn’t there a print magazine?   People would jam up the site paying $25 a year for a magazine delivered once a month with good quality content.  Plus even with a lean amount of ad’s.  The total potential revenue would be insane and would make more then any of the aforementioned revenue streams.

I also think BPL is too narrowly focused and is part of the reason there is less participation..  People that have been here for a while have got bored talking about the same old thing and there is no new members because of the fee.  I love backpacking but I also love doing a million other things outdoors.  If there was a good forum like BPL was say 5 years ago that had more topics to talk about related to the outdoors I would think that would much more popular and something I would like to join.

Lastly, The old website design never bothered me.  The lack of recently added content is what it is..  I wish there was more but who doesn’t..  And paying to write on the forums is stupid…  I can’t wrap my head around it..  Its almost like they are asking people, please do not join..   But then again I cant wrap my head around charging extra for shipping on my own website either..

Just my 2 cents..

Hi Lawson

To answer some of your questions:

why the hell isn’t there a print magazine?   People would jam up the site paying $25 a year for a magazine delivered once a month with good quality content.  Plus even with a lean amount of ad’s.

There was one, with ads. I don’t think it ever made any money, just losses. Print media is dying or dead.

The website design has never bothered me. The lack of recently added content is what it is..

You are not the only one to be concerned about the lack. The web site migration was … traumatic. However, I have been told that publishing has started up again – the last 2 weeks have seen articles, and i KNOW there is a stove series for the next 5 weeks.

Was BPL and UL gear a cult? Maybe so. Was it all very new and fun to explore? Oh yes. But UL is now far more mainstream – although some PRINT media has been a shade slow to wake up to this. Things change.

Cheers

I know I have four articles in with the publishing department now. I’m new at writing here and it was a pretty slow start. The site migration was … Yes… Traumatic. Good word Roger.

As far as other interests go, you bet, we all have them, usually several and we have forum sections for mountain bikes, pack rafts and even off piste topics.

I’m a farmer, a trail maintainer, a kayaker, a xcountry skier, snowshoer. I’m big into land, culture and water conservation, humane animal treatment, genetics and calling BS on politicians platforms. This however is where I come for backpacking and a few other tid bits. Mostly I like you people.

I don’t know if I agree about print media being dead…  As I personally would much rather read something in a magazine than on the computer.   Especially long articles.  Plus every-time I visit a grocery store, airport, pharmacy, book store, etc there is a huge magazine section full of the craziest hobbies..  So if they can make it then there would be no reason why BPL couldn’t..

Lets say for arguments sake there is 100,000 stores that carry magazines.  If you could get BPL in 10% of those stores via some magazine distributor (which I wouldn’t think would be hard given it already has a national audience) and sold a dozen magazines a month per store that would be 120,000 magazines.  Even if you only made a $.50 per magazine after printing costs (at the wholesale level) that would still be 60K a month in gross profit +  the amount of money you could make off the ad’s inside.  I called Backpacker once to see how much an ad was.  They wanted something like $600 a month or more for a business card sized ad in the back. A full page was something like 5-10K..  And with the reputation BPL has built over the years as the go to place for lightweight gear and how its pretty much the standard way people backpack now and how gear is being made, it would be safe to say BPL wouldn’t have trouble filling all the ad space the first month which would gross another few hundred grand a month.

Not to mention the added revenue from subscriptions of magazines your shipping directly to customers and then if your charging extra for additional content like BPL is doing now plus you could sell a ton of t-shirts, hats, stickers, etc..  While this would be some hard work (being in business usually is), I see no reason a print BPL couldn’t compete directly against something like Backpacker or Outside and be successful in the process.

If publishing a magazine was something I knew anything about I would seriously consider making Ryan J an offer to buy the rights to this place as I see the potential.  You could hire the full time staff this place needs and pump content out faster than people could read it..  And in the case of a printed magazine, the more the content, the more the ad space..

That said, 10 years ago it might of not worked as well due to UL backpacking being a small niche and having a smaller customer base.  But now, it would have no problem what so ever..

My numbers were WAY off.  I found a 2016 Backpacker media kit online.  A full page ad is $38,394.  A two page ad is $69,109, a half page is $21,548 and a 1/4 page is $9,600.  A text ad is $573 so that’s must of what they quoted as the smallest ad you can buy is 1/24 of a page which is 2.25″x1.125″ and that is $1,682..  So I am thinking your talking more like a million bucks+ a month in ad space given how many ads there are in a backpacker magazine.  So even if you cut out alot of those ads, charged less per ad, and gave more content to read I cant see how you could lose?

Roger; yep I’m talking about the “Ultralight Boot Camp” stuff. The email says I get a big discount if I’m a Lifetime member, which I most certainly was and never tried to relinquish. When I click on the link to Boot Camp, it only gives me the option to pay the full price.

Seems now that I am not a Lifetime member. No where does it say I am, and I seem to have lost a ton of functionality on the site, like I can’t start a thread. Yes, logged in clearly as me. I go to the subscription page and it kindly offers me all these options to pay money.

I filed a support ticket (I think) this morning (ACST time). Cheers