What Do You Want to See on LetsRun.com?

I don't know if anyone else does this, but after a thread gets older or longer, I'll tend to read it from back to front. Would it be possible to flip the messages of a thread by newest to oldest date? Maybe this is possible now and I just haven't been able to figure it out. If so, could someone please give me some instructions, thanks.

An organized QUICK links section for people to post links to pictures and videos of races, meets, etc.

What happens is after a meet is over, I look each day for a week, google\'ing to find pictures and videos. Why not have the camera volunteers supply the links ?

Only 1 camera volunteer posts complete content within 1/2 hour of the end of the meet. Most take at least 1-1/2 days to two whole weeks.

Have a registration page for the camera volunteers to post the links to their picture and video for individual races/meets and then allow them to post on their own.

With registration, you get trusted volunteers who have real content, and not trolls/perverts.

Allowing the camera volunteers to post the links speeds up the dissemination of information and helps promote our sport. That\'s what we all want too, I think.

wondering... wrote:

"I'd love to see a split in the forums. Have two, Running Related and NRR. If we could have one place to go for our running stuff, and only running stuff, maybe some of the upper crust guys who have left might come back?" At least two sections (training, general running, NRR)

Splitting running-related and NRR could be a very simple change. Simply require anyone posting to designate their post as either "Running-related" or NRR (like you do to separate the World Champs stuff from the rest of the board). Then if people want only running stuff they can get it. If people want it all, they too can get it.

Wejo,

When it comes to websites, content beats form every time. I think that's the position you've taken with this site, and you're doing it very well. That doesn't mean you can't improve things, though, which I think you realize by the fact that you've created this thread. Here are some of my suggestions:

USER-CREATED CONTENT:

Obviously the message board is all user-created, but I don't think you need to stop there, and I don't think you're doing everything with it that you can. You need to do something with the POD and TOD buttons. Either show us some results or get rid of them because they serve no purpose right now. There is no incentive to click on those buttons if we can't see the results. My suggestion is to have a top 5 list somewhere on the message board that lists the posts and threads that have gotten the most votes in the past 24 hours (or week or month or whatever. you could include all of these if you want.). That would allow the users to sift through the front page faster and to locate popular threads that may have dropped from the front page. If you're worried about cluttering up the message board, I understand. You have a very good thing going there. Maybe you could just post a link to the page with the POD and TOD info. Then you could assess how popular it really is.

You might want to think about having another page where users can post links to interesting articles, pictures, results, etc. Once they are posted, users can vote them up or down. That way the popular links will stay on the page longer, and you won't have to do much of anything to maintain the page; it's user-content. If you don't believe me that this can work, check out

www.reddit.com

. It's an extremely popular and well-functioning site. The good thing about having users post links to articles is that you'll have to do less work in scouring the internet for running news. Let us do it for you. There are plenty of running geeks here that already search the internet for this stuff and would gladly post it on the site. The message board already serves a similar purpose because people post articles there already, but visitors who are looking for this type of thing rather than hearing the430miler (love you man) give his opinion will find it very useful.

You need to give us more results. You do a good job of giving us elite results on the front page, and there is nothing wrong with that. We do want to read about that stuff, but we also want to look up our friends and former rivals who are still racing. It would be nice to have a centralized place where we can see results from non-elite or sub-elite road races. Again, this can be done by the users. Allow people to post or suggest results for you to post on a results page. This may create a lot of work for you initially, but if it becomes a popular and well-known page, race directors will be contacting YOU to have their results posted on the letsrun.com results page. Again, this means less searching to be done by you. I think your niche should be road race results because it seems like we have somewhat of an older crowd here. As always, your first priority should be to get as many results as possible and worry about organization after that. Just organize alphabetically and by date to start. Content beats form. It's easy enough to use the search function on our browsers to find what we want.

FRONT PAGE:

Honestly, I don't think it's so bad. I agree with the guy earlier who said he likes when you put your opinions below some of the links. Hey, it's your site, and most of us agree with a lot of what you say. I would just suggest doing something with the columns. Having two main columns is good because it's easier to read lines that don't span large horizontal distances, but it's not clear what the columns mean. Do they read top to bottom then left to right or just top to bottom in both columns? It seems like you put the most important stuff in the left column. Maybe you could put the newest distance news in the left column and the newest "everything else" news in the right column.

To avoid the cluttered look, maybe put a larger space between the columns and limit your linked headlines to one line, or two to three lines for a headline next to a picture. Also, don't put a linked headline immediately below another linked headline. Add a space or a line of black text to break things up. That should clear things up a lot. It's tough to sift through linked headlines when they follow each other immediately with no space between them, and some of them run on for several lines. This means you'll have to get a bit creative to shorten the headlines, but it will be much easier to read. If the article needs more explanation, just put the rest of the info in black text below it.

Also, for the message board, you may notice the the top post on each thread is the easiest to read because the ad makes the text fit into a narrower space. You should make every post on threads fit into a narrower space. It's really hard to read when the lines span too much of a horizontal distance. One more thing is that people have been suggesting the ability to post images in threads. Most don't realize that you can already do this, but the default setting is not to display images. You have to go into forum options to change the setting. Maybe you could just change the settings so that displaying the images is the default. Then people will quickly learn how to do it.

T-SHIRTS:

You definitely need some t-shirts. Don't sell anything but a light blue, old-school cotton t-shirt with a pocket on the left breast. It will fit the letsrun personality perfectly.

live chat.

Live pictures from meets as they occur instantanously. We have cell phones, Treos, Sprint/Verizon/ATT 3G. We can snap and upload while sitting in the stands.

I'm a volunteer, with the pole vault, long jump, trip, crews and I can send pictures from the infield at my school as they are jumping.

kneegrows wrote:

live chat.

I thought about this one today during the London coverage. My guess is it would be a lot less prone to crashing.

Master of Class wrote:

The front page, however, needs a major redesign. I stayed away from this site for years simply because the amateur look of the front page scared me away. A high school freshman with a week of an html class could put that crap together.

Boy are you a tool. Content rules over design anyday. The site is fast and loads easily even on a mobile device.

I'm sure you had a great time visiting all those cool flash sites that had no content whatsoever.

Idiot.

Wejo, great free race snapshots from London. Kudos to all of the amateur volunteers that helped. What would we do without them.

I want to see some of this happen! Wejo, let's get some polls started!

Expand the options for registered users.

Personal messages would be great, since there are many times when people are trying to get in touch without posting their email for everyone to see.

Put the All-Wejo team in its own section, rather than leaving it for volunteers to maintain in the forum.

Post a list of all of the registered usernames, and let people search their posts.

upgrade the message board software to phpbb or something modern.

Make everyone post under the same screen name every time they post. That will eliminate much of the hatred on the board. Posters would be somewhat accountable for what they write.

I agree with the above poster.

Do not allow anonymous postings.

You don't have to use your real name but you should not be allowed to just act like a troll all the time.

wejo wrote:

I meant to do this at the start of the New Year but wanted to know what improvements people want on the site.

I'm open to all ideas and you can feel free to email me as well. I might like we did a while ago make a survey for users to vote on to see what people want most.

So I'm just using this thread as an open forum. The requests can be from the big to small. So whether it be more athlete interviews, more articles, RSS feeds, more videos, more training info, coverage of live events, a site redesign, a calendar, running maps, more user input, more user content, podcasts, more photos, more results, more high school info, etc, just let me know. The possibilities are really endless but I figure the conversation has to start somewhere.

So let's hear it.

Banning anyone who uses the word troll or anything that has to do with the word troll (trolling etc.) It's one of the more stupid things people post on here and really doesn't offer any insight to the original poster when someone uses it.

It would be interesting if there's a way to have meet directors enter in the dates of their meets so we can suppport them. It could be as simple as this: region, city, meet name, date/s, contact info/website.

I enjoyed the chat function during the Stanford invite. It was quite lively and like the message board, a free-for-all, but in tune with the live action.

It would be easy to split out running and not running by just having everyone put NRR at the beginning of their subject line.

Search functionality definitely could use improvement.

I think the POD, TOD links on the front page would be interesting.

And T-shirts!

Thanks for creating a great community.

We'd like an update about if/when any of this will take effect...

an EDIT/DELETE feature

marijuologist wrote:

an EDIT/DELETE feature

agreed.

-edit/delete would be cool, we all make mistakes.

-changing the colors from yellow and black too, is there a reason behind the bumble bee?

-the reversing of articles to be read from front to back is a good idea too when they get over 3 pages long. It's annoying to click, and then click to the last page again.

what are the odds any of this will actually happen?

seems like you guys gave up on this thread.