Sea of vapours
Guru
- Location
- Clapham, Yorkshire Dales
I've not yet seen anything actively supporting the new scheme, including not from its original proposer (!). It does seem to have at the very least dampened engagement in the overall challenge to a considerable degree Anyone want to argue the benefits?
In the old scheme it was a simple case of:
1. Create a new post based on the previous one, with the new ride added. (Very simple indeed if that's all you're doing, and creates an alert for other participants to see.)
2. Optionally, say something in the chatzone thread if there was anything in the ride you felt like chatting about. (Adds to engagement.)
3. If you were so inclined, click on alerts as they came in to see what the latest postings were, look at routes, go and comment on them in the chatzone thread. (To me, this is the basic point of the challenge as it's the dynamic, engaging element which moves it from merely recoding a series of rides on a little-visited list.)
The current scheme, and the suggested variants, are 'more work' in all cases and, critically, they lose point 3. The only way they don't lose point 3 is to always also post in the chatzone, but not only is that 'more work' but it still loses the regular view, in the main recording thread, of what people have done during the year; the patterns of progress; 'the interesting stuff' to me and some others. Yes, it's there, but since there's no actual need to ever look at the main recording thread I personally hardly ever do that and it seems from comments above that others don't either.
As has been said above, just recording rides 'in public' isn't especially captivating, and hence nor is it motivating, and if we were to just post each ride individually then those may just as well go in 'Your ride today' (which is fine, but different from this challenge).
The unique point of these annual challenges seems to me to be watching them develop, and therefore developing interest in how and what everyone's doing. The previous posting scheme did that pretty well; the current one doesn't and I don't think the various tweaks proposed above would fix it.
EDIT: And I forget to say that I therefore strongly support
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