New Articles

Feature request: Articles.

I you look at the current subscription choices you will notice no mention of regularly released articles. They use to be weekly. Now they are occasional. Even the weekly newsletter is disabled.

Interesting…

Gee, another month has gone by with little in the way of articles or content.  I understood Ryan’s talk to include an exciting new staff of writers.  For me, articles were the real value that made BPL such an interesting and authoritative source.  Articles made the membership worthwhile.  Merely monitoring forums does not seem like enough.  I really hope I am wrong and that I won’t be thinking about BPL in the past tense from here on.

Scott

Here is what roger posted on Feb. 26th

Well, I am sure you have noticed that BPL has migrated to a new website? Indeed, but the transfer has a few bugs still, and one of them seems to be that there are still a few problems with posting new articles. Don’t laugh – please!

Yes, I am sure it is a bit frustrating to find ‘nothing new’ on the web site for the last few weeks. How do you think the authors feel? !@#$%^&* I know we have a whole stack of articles ready for publishing (or some of them very close), but actually getting them onto the website is proving … difficult. Something to do with the editors not having the right permissions for access I believe. Yes, I know, give the editors permission … we’re trying! A case of which *** permission? Sigh.

Cheers

I feel like this website has officially died. I became a member years ago and feel like I got my moneys worth from the articles that use to be written whether it was a shelter review or the fantastic trip reports, etc. I use to enjoy the forums but it’s the same thing over and over now. The staff has officially seemed to abandon the articles and any new useful information. I just feel bad for those members that have just recently joined as they have to look at old articles to even get something useful out of the website. Maybe they will get this site back up and running one day, but until then I for one doubt I will be browsing the site very often.

Roger said new software won’t allow new articles, they’re working on it

Jerry, Link that posted that fact above.

I guess you all didn’t get the email with the secret password to all the new articles. Must be a MLife thing. I particularly enjoyed the article by Bob Gross.

Let me get this straight: They cannot publish articles on a WORDPRESS website?

Let me get this straight: They cannot publish articles on a WORDPRESS website?

Even on a WordPress website, you stll need the right permissions to publish articles. I gather they managed to lock themselves out for a while. Very frustrating for ALL concerned!

Cheers

Im not frustrated, just curious. Directory and file permissions may seem confusing at first, but not to a web designer/technician. Even though, should the problem arise why not email WP support. Or ask at their troubleshooting/howto forum, it is active and you don’t have to pay to participate. Or contact your host in case the problem is in the folder ownership. Correct me if I’m wrong, but none of this takes weeks to resolve?

Yes. This^.

100% agree that permissions can be confusing on a server but it’s a solvable problem. Your host or any competent web person should be able to assist you in short order. This is not a months-long problem. Reformatting the CSS on the forum posts isn’t a months-long problem either…

It would be nice if BPL would send out an update to members letting them know what the issue is, how it’s being fixed and what the timeline is for resuming all member benefits. I don’t understand why they’ve not done this. It’s just good manners

Why not email the articles directly to a BPL administrator and have them post the articles?
Or am I missing something?

Not to make excuses or that I know very much about the subject but,
you can only deduce so much by looking at a web site from the front end.

But it’s built on the Genesis frame work from Studiopress and using the metro pro theme.
WordPress roles and capabilities are pretty straight forward until you add in plugins like bbPress to run the blog and Member mouse to manage   membership. Then it might be hard to find just were the conflict in permission is and which application is the culprit.

I’m with Gabe. I would think a $100 membership would elicit, at the very least, an email explaining what was going on and how you are planning on fixing the issue.

Isn’t WordPress a blogging platform?  Why should it take weeks and weeks to figure this out. The authors could submit their articles to the admin (if there is one) as PDFs.  I would surmise that the web technology is not the problem here.

I’m not interested in hearing excuses about technical difficulties. That would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for a weeklong lapse in articles, but it’s been months now.

This site is essentially a blog and a forum. Technologically speaking, it’s not doing anything remotely novel, and there are a million qualified sysadmins out there who are perfectly qualified to fix anything that could be wrong with it.

Even worse, the communication has been absolutely abysmal. Seriously, this is customer service 101. They have paying subscribers who’ve been waiting for new content, and the closest we’ve gotten to an official notification is a somewhat hearsay excuse from a forum moderator, and even that didn’t happen until we complained.

Ryan Jordan owes us an explanation, and he owes us more than that. Paying subscribers ought to have their subscriptions extended by whatever amount of time it ends up taking for them to finally get this fixed. That’s simply fair.

I plan to let my subscription lapse when it’s up for renewal. I can’t imagine I’m the only one. I’ll see you guys over on /r/ultralight.

“This site is essentially a blog and a forum. Technologically speaking, it’s not doing anything remotely novel, and there are a million qualified sysadmins out there who are perfectly qualified to fix anything that could be wrong with it.”

No. This is a popular misconception. It was not ever designed nor implemented as a “blog and a forum.” It was a paper magazine, now it is a paperless one. This IS a novel, new, technology…an outgrowth of CERN in the late 80’s early 90’s to share physics reports and discus them. Paperless magazines are rare. They do not do too well given the perceptions of the world wide web(the www everyone forgets about using their browsers.) It is not even 40 years old, yet the perception is one of free blogs, forums, not the free information dissemination and discussion as envisioned. We had free forums before the web.

It was never designed to support the thousands of posts here. It grew out of the editorial comments and feedback page in the magazine. The store (now closed) was simply tacked on as a service to the hikers and as a way to make some dollars. The switch to paperless media is a new and different concept. And the old bi-monthly publications on paper were relatively serious efforts to keep people informed…a one way communications media. Ads grew out of this into the major business it now is. But, the web is a TWO way communications media. The web was always designed to allow discussion of concepts.

Here, as it relates to this site, it has simply gotten out of hand with few new concepts and discussions as it relates to hiking and outdoor activities (hiking/backpacking is, after all, perhaps one of the oldest human activities, predating farming on the technology scale, possibly even fire.) Over half the posts are adds. Things “for sale” or “wanted to buy” messages predominate the forum. Many discussions center on comparing available purchases. Few even bother to go through the archives, or, read, think and comment on new posts.

I believe Ryan has responded to this out of the need for more dollars, meaning more people visiting the site. You can run a simple directed forum without a lot of hardware, support staff and such. More people mean more dollars from adds as an example. Bigger is better. Hell, he cannot even pay for his labour, it just isn’t a big business at it’s current size. Blogs, and other sites have taken over the magazine business. More and more magazines are offering a paperless media, today…often out of necessity, because they are faltering.

Authors are common. GOOD authors are few and cost dollars. Nobody wants to pay dollars for information, after all, it is free on the web. But, selling professional grade articles to us (the public) is difficult. Paying for the simple act of publishing professionally is high. Paying for amateurs is easy.

As far as permission problems, this can be a real pain. There are a set of machine permissions. There are web permissions. There are user permissions. There are administrative permissions. Right down to individual files and up to the web itself. It is not trivial to fix an obscure permission problem out of the many combinations that can occur causing failure. A few days of full time work can easily equate to a month or longer of part time effort.

I have my life subscription. I believe that posting of “for sale” or “wanted to buy”  items belong in the back of a magazine, not in general forum posts. Adds are not always uninteresting but the volume makes them so, I never look.

Forget it. This is all so dumb. Fix the website we are paying for.

The paper magazine was a flash in the pan. BPL started with posting articles in 2001. Essentially a blog similar to Nick’s, without comments. Then the print magazine came out in summer of 2004 and had only 11 issues. Over by 2008.

The forums were added in Nov. 2003 look

Sorry James, but the history of BPL isn’t really relevant to the technology problems. Yes, the old site had a lot of things tacked on haphazardly. But the new one is, as I said, a blog plus a forum, built with off-the-shelf blog and forum components.

I worked for a time as a support and development specialist for a web-based domain management portal, which we developed in-house. In fact, when I arrived, we were in the middle of transitioning from an old crusty system to a new one we had developed—another parallel with BPL’s situation.

I spent a lot of time weeding through permissions issues, so I know how much of a pain they can be. But if a permissions problem, no matter how knotted up, had rendered our product frozen in time for three months, I probably would have been fired. And if I had let it go on for even three days without proactively communicating with our customers, I definitely would have been fired.

Why is this level of negligence somehow acceptable for BPL?

^yep