BikePGH Message Board Archive

Discuss future of the Message Board - it's very broken

Hey all, I have some bad news to share. As we all know, the Messageboard has been slowly falling apart over time. My understanding is that the company who created the software are no longer supporting it. It's also very difficult to maintain on our website. We need to figure out what to do with it, and what the future of pittsburgh bike messageboard talk will look like. I'm hosting a meeting/conversation on Tuesday, Jan 25 at 5:30 pm. If anyone would like to join the conversation (on google meet), simply email me and I'll add you to the calendar invite: eric@bikepgh.org Also, feel free to use this thread to discuss some ideas and options. For instance, I think it's important that any new board be searchable by google. Also, we are looking into a way to archive the 15 or so years of this current messageboard so that this braintrust isn't lost. Another idea is to simply start using the Reddit group: https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling412/ Or do we figure out a new out-of-the-box system (that we are not necessarily the official admin of). All ideas welcome. Really looking for ideas on how BikePGH can support in some way an online forum (that's not facebook).

erok

2022-01-20 11:09:35

I just resolved to start hanging out here after years away and was a little sad to see this note, but I’m not surprised given how weird forum software is. Was there any resolution in that chat on Tuesday?

benstiglitz

2022-01-28 18:57:24

I was not able to attend, as I had a triple conflict. If discontinuing this is a given, the better question is what to do with what we already have here, 15 to 20 years of collective experience riding and planning and preparing and outfitting and evaluating: roads, equipment, projects, traffic, philosophy. A lot of the threads here are still active, even if they're many years old. Just last week, I used some of the photos from our 2010 Hot Metal Bridge shovel party since another group repeated our post-Snowpocalypse efforts and tweeted about it. I quoted verbatim reddan's suggestion "For any future fools who might try this...". New people, different platforms, but same needs. We need to be able to find and retrieve those conversations, otherwise our two decades of experience will be for naught.

stuinmccandless

2022-01-29 13:13:24

I'm not an official spokesperson, but I attended the meeting and the consensus was

transition to reddit, i.e. encourage people to communicate on https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling412/ . Jay Walker, its moderator, was part of our meeting. If that particular subreddit doesn't meet all our needs, we could always create an additional subreddit or two.
Preserve the old messageboard content, maybe by just turning off new posts and letting it sit

paulheckbert

2022-01-29 14:48:59

#2 would be OK. It is tiring to have to police spam posts all the time. Would it be possible to enable new posts under special circumstances, if we did that? Give a couple people special permission to do that, perhaps with a one-day clearance process? On #1, I'm totally OK with that, too. On the email reply to the invitation for the meeting, I mentioned some mechanism to index some of the more popular or useful posts. Maybe that could be one of the last posts.

stuinmccandless

2022-01-29 16:57:23