Welcome to Mountain Project!

Thanks for taking the time to review the new site.

If you see any problems, have suggestions, or feel like complaining - this is the spot!

Andy, Nick, and Myke

Andy, Nick, Myke:

Thanks for putting up this new site; it has great potential to be the best climbing site on the Internet.

Several comments:

1. I hope you will require users to login with their user id and password before they can post anything to the site. No more Anonymous Coward! This approach seems to work reasonably well on rockclimbing.com, although supertopo.com is still plagued with users posting using multiple id's and fake "troll" personalities. Users concerned with protecting their true identities can use handles or nicknames, but still must login with a password to post.

2. I'd like to see the "Report to Moderator" capability retained, so users can report "Jerk" comments and forum posts.

3. I think you should add a Community forum for non-climbing-related discussions. These discussions are very popular on rockclimbing.com and supertopo.com.

4. The forum message posting capability should be enhanced to what is provided by rockclimbing.com: include photos, ability to preview message before final submittal, buttons for text formatting, etc.

5. The "Friends" capability on rockclimbing.com is very useful and would be a good addition to your site.

6. Route photos should have some basic identifying information shown below the photo without having to click on the photo to get the information. Perhaps the photographer's name and names of any people in the photo, or else a short caption.

7. Spell checking would be a big help to reduce typos in forum posts and route comments.

Keep up the good work; this is going to be a great site!

-- Ron

Semicolons and pound signs are deleted when a message is posted.

Thanks for the great feedback Ron.

1. Anonymous Coward is now muted. His contributions have been retained for historical purposes, but he won't speak again :)
2. Report to Moderator - we'll definitely implement some form of this - just not sure the specifics yet. We're also curious if with the email validation and improved administration tools this won't be much of a problem moving foward ... but you never know
3. Community Forum - good idea
4. Forums Features - all in the works. We have some basic formatting stuff now (click Text Formatting Hints when editing something), but the buttons would be nice. Are you looking to attach photos, or simply link to images, or - most likely - both?
5. Friends Feature - I'm not familiar, but I'll go check it out now.
6. Good idea with the route photos.. we probably don't have room for the description, but some info would be nice.
7. Spell check - as a poor speller, I would like that too. We'll see what we can find.

Thanks again
Andy

Several more comments:

1. The "quote" feature in forum posts truncates the quoted text. I tried to quote my previous message and it was truncated midway through the first bullet item.

2. Another option for displaying photo information: if there's not enough room to put a short caption or other info below the photo, have a pop-up window come up when the mouse is placed over a photo. The pop-up would contain the same info that appears when you click on the photo. This pop-up window would be a small tooltip-type window, not a full-fledged browser window. This would allow a quick scan of photos to see what each one is about, and which ones the user might want to click on to see the full-size photo.

Another useful text-formatting option: fixed-width fonts. I once posted a comparison table showing Aliens and Camalots side by side to a rockclimbing.com forum. The only way I could get the table to have the proper spacing was to use a fixed-width font. A variable-width font would not have worked.

I hope this capability can be added to the text-formatting options in forum posts on this site.

Ron - all good ideas with straightforward implementation.

We're planning a pretty useful text feature in the next few weeks. From within a message you'll be able to popup a window that will allow you to pick any route/area/etc. in Mountain Project and link to it - without pasting the URL or knowing its id number. The same will work for photos if you want to attach a photo to a message.

Regarding quoted text - it would seem they need to be truncated at some size, perhaps our current size is just too short. Otherwise the quote could be 2 screens long! Have you seen it work better at other forum sites.. and how did it work there?

Thanks
Andy

Probably worth starting a new forum topic for each discussion area (i.e. forum features, etc.) in the future..

Thanks for the great feedback.

Thanks for the invitation to check out the site. Three comments:

1) The site looks really sharp -- great idea to combine the climbingXXXXX.com's into one site, as well as incorporating some other great features. When I browse climbing sites I do so for three reasons: first, for beta (climbingboulder.com), second, to find partners (the mountain project looks like it has more potential here than either climbingboulder.com, rec.climbing, or rockclimbing.com), and third, for entertainment (usually rockclimbing.com or the comments section of climbingboulder).

2) Under the "People" pages, individuals have a tab called "todos" ...please put an apostrophe in here (todo's) or better yet change it to "To Do". todos is not a word.

3) Regarding logins & moderating. Logging in - great idea. Report to moderator, in my opinion, one of the worst ideas ever. This really has been the primary cause of my dissatisfaction with climbingboulder.com, and more recently, rockclimbing.com... the moderation.

I find irrelevant and irreverant crap to be pretty annoying. The problem is, what I find negative may be something that someone else finds really entertaining. Likewise, something that another person may find useless might be really entertaining for me. But there was a time when I could just skip through the pages of comments on "dogs at the crags" or "who chipped what climb" to get to the comments I wanted to read... now it seems that someone is doing that for me: selectively removing comments that someone happens to think are "being a jerk" or comments from fictitous users. There are a few problems with this. For example, some of the anonoymous coward's posts have been hilarious - where have they gone? Remember "Floyd Honeysuckle's" anger management comments to Bob D'Antonio - I remember reading that and laughing hysterically. Charles Vernon and I still quote him to each other out climbing today. And Sven... it will be a sad day when his comments are removed because he doesn't really exist.

Another problem. Some threads just don't even make sense anymore. An argument will turn into a name calling session, but then a few posts will be deleted, and suddenly you can't follow the thread anymore. This is especially disconcerting when the comments include tidbits of beta or opinion buried in the insults - when this disappears, I feel like I'm missing out on information that I might have found useful.

OK, the bigger problem. I see it all over the site: square brackets. These have replaced misspellings and misinformation, supposedly. I've had my own route discriptions altered with these. I must admit that when I submit a comment or a route to the database, and it's deleted or altered without my consent or without even notification, I feel a very negative vibe. I feel like I'm being misquoted - even if it is to correct a mistake I made. I feel like someone else is posting under my user name - identity theft. If a correction needs to be made, it should be done knowingly by the person who submits and the editor, or otherwise it should be done through a comment. When I read someone else's route description, and there are brackets, I always wonder what that person *acutually* said.

Moderation like this bothers me to no end, and, honestly, it's the primary reason I've stopped contributing like I used to both rockclimbing.com and climbingboulder.com... not out of retalliation! Rather, I just become attached to the routes I climb (and then subsequently take time to submit to the database, and the idea that they can be altered "just like that" without me knowing devalues the whole thing to me - I can't "leave my mark" anymore. rec.climbing happens to be wonderful in this respect.

Obviously less moderation means a lot more crap out there. It's just my opinion that sifting through that crap is the better of the two evils. People have tried and failed to legislate morality - it just doesn't work. I think "don't be a jerk" is a WONDERFUL guideline... but it should be just that - a guideline, not a rule.

I know that I'm going against the grain here, and I would fully expect that the mountain project listen to the masses or defer to the site manager's wishes... but you *did* ask for my thoughts so here they are.

Josh Janes wrote:and it's deleted or altered without my consent or without even notification, I feel a very negative vibe. I feel like I'm being misquoted - even if it is to correct a mistake I made. I feel like someone else is posting under my user name - identity theft. If a correction needs to be made, it should be done knowingly by the person who submits and the editor, or otherwise it should be done through a comment. When I read someone else's route description, and there are brackets, I always wonder what that person *acutually* said.

Josh -

You make some very good points -- points I hadn't considered. In particular, notification to a contributing user when their content is modified (or, unfortunately, deleted) is a very good idea. At the very least it keeps the user in the loop.

You referenced square brackets - I'm not familiar with specifically what you were describing. Is this on cb.com or rc.com?

Thanks for the feedback,
Andy

Square brackets - one of the best examples I have is of a climb called "Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Scrutiny on the Bounty)" - Redgarden Wall, Eldorado Canyon. I understand the intent was to include information I didn't have about the first ascent and the original name, but the decription is barely recognizable as what I originally wrote up. Another example is "Lifestream" on the Mickey Mouse Wall on Eldorado Mt. I know I wrote about it requiring a #0.75 Camalot, but it's been converted to #2 friend... why? Neither of these examples are a big deal really, it just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth... I think moderation should be saved for stuff like spam and kiddy porn. On the other hand, if I were approached by the moderaters - and they said something like, "Would you be interested in updating your route description for Scrutiny on the Bounty with this new info?" or, "...updating your lifestream description with beta on the first pitch now that you've done it?" I would have been delighted and honored to go back and change that stuff. I also would feel included and like I still get to speak in my own voice.

I love reading route descriptions that capture the "flavor" of the author - Steve Levin and Crusher Bartlett are particularly good at this. I occasionally try to put my own flavor into route descriptions - perhaps that's why I'm sensitive to this.

Hope this helps. So, yes, the brackets are found all over cb.com route descriptions.

Also, out of curiosity, how did you make the conversion from the old 3 star system to the five star system? I think it's a good change :) Curious how you did it though - when I submitted "The Delicate Sound of Thunder" in Black Velvet Canyon, red rocks, I gave it three stars. On a five star scale, I would have given it 5. I'd give it 6 if I could. It has been converted to four stars however, and I don't think anyone else who voted on it gave it anything less than three out of three originally...

Brackets: thanks for the description. We'll ponder the best way to handle moderation of content.

Stars: I think this is what I did.. been a while. With MP, the stars displayed are actually the average of all the user votes rather than the submitters stars... seemed like (to us) a better system.

bomb = bomb
old 1 star = 1 star
old 2 star = 2 star
old 3 star = 4 star

Josh Janes wrote: 3) Regarding logins & moderating. Logging in - great idea. Report to moderator, in my opinion, one of the worst ideas ever. This really has been the primary cause of my dissatisfaction with climbingboulder.com, and more recently, rockclimbing.com... the moderation.

Hi Josh; welcome to MP.com. This site will be better because of your contributions. Congrats on your great season at the Gunks!

Regarding moderation: I think the Community forum is the place for wide-open discussions, name calling, pissing matches, fake personalities, trolls, etc., and should only be moderated when things get way out of hand. Moderators should contact the poster before editing or deleting a forum post. There is no need for a Report to Moderator feature in the Community forum, and perhaps not in any of the other forums either.

Route comments, on the other hand, should be focused on route beta or other information relevant to the route. If off-topic discussions get started here, as they often do on cb.com, then I think the moderator should move the offending comments to a new thread in the Community forum. Let the combatants have it out in the proper arena.

The "Report to Moderator" feature should be retained here to allow users to report inappropriate and off-topic comments that are not relevant to a particular route. Moderators should evaluate the report, and decide if the comments should stay in route beta, or be moved to a new thread in the Community forum.

A route comment should not be deleted without first contacting the poster.

Regarding editing by moderators: I agree with Josh that the editing brackets on cb.com are annoying. It is reasonable for a moderator to correct typos in route comments and descriptions, but not to change any content. Typo and grammar corrections should NOT be surrounded by brackets; just fix the errors and leave no trace.

If a moderator wants to change the content of a route description or comment, they should contact the poster and get agreement to the proposed modifications. Even better, let the poster do the editing.

Perhaps this discussion should be moved to a new thread called Moderation.

Josh, thanks for posting your comments. This sort of feedback is very important to us so please keep it coming. I'll try to give you some background and point of view from one admin.

Intially, when Myke and Ben said that the website was going to close down, I offered to help out together with Frances and Leo to try to keep the site going. It was the first time I had ever done this sort of thing.

From the start we got a lot of comments from people that were telling us to clean up the site, fix the spelling mistakes and remove the slanging matches that were impacting the site. A lot of this feedback was from friends and climbing partners and people we just met rather than from "report to the moderator". We even had one person that threated to take legal action against us if we didn't remove his comments.

Between the three of us we divided up the work. I have no idea how Ben and Myke who did this for years as the amount of work involved from the start was considerably more than we thought it would be.

Fortunanately, as we have got more use to the tools and also as the weather has got colder, things have quieten down so we have the time to start testing the new project.

Meanwhile on the current cb.com site I try to read comments, do route corrections, and slowly work through areas to correct names of FA's etc. I revisit climbs that I've done, correct beta etc, for example, sometimes it says things like go left and follow the crack, when it should say, go right... etc. If I see something really weird or if I don't have the guide book for reference I ask people on the climbingboulder email list for help, and in most cases I get one of the orginal posters coming back to me with Beta.

I live in Littleton, not Boulder so my access to news probably isn't as good or up to date since I don't go to the Spot! Hence I spend time scouring sites such as supertopo, rc.com and climbing.com for local news. Often climbing.com has more info, say about eldo than we do, and hopefully that will change over time and people will start sending us noteworthy news. I would really like the colorado section to be head and shoulders above any other site on the planet with local news and events, etc.

If I see a comment or a flame war starting I try to contact the users, but more often than not, the email address they have on file is a phony address like "biteme@noyahoo.com" and the mail bounces back. Many wasted hours are spent through this progress, and it has become a very frustrating process. Sometimes people send me phone numbers and they tend to be bogus as well!

The new login will solve this problem and hopefully let me spend more time climbing and not sitting in front of a pc as much. The new site also has improved admin tools so they will help as well. I'm also hoping that a spell checker can be incorporated into the site when adding routes and comments. We have lives outside of cb.com and and spending hours correcting comments etc probably isn't the best use of our time or resources. I'm sure that between all the admins we will work out a policy on this that suits everyone and ensures that the route beta and comments are not altered without some way of engaging the person who posted it. Or even better bringing them on board to fix it themselves!

Without people providing comments and updating routes etc, cb.com would just become another static website with aging information and no soul. The comments and banter is what makes cb.com and the other member sites so much more interesting and fun to be involved with.

Hopefully you will like the new changes and I look forward to seeing your posts coming thick and fast.

Cheers

john Mac
cb.com admin

Thanks guys for taking my thoughts seriously - I appreciate it! Ron, I know we have our disagreements on all sorts of things, but I agree completely with what you said in your response to my posts. I think that your suggestions would be an excellent way to keep a sense of freedom of speech alive and to simultaneously preserve route descriptions as concise and readable sources of information.

It makes me wonder if, perhaps the reason things got so out of hand on cb.com is because there really wasn't a discussion area on the site that caught on - the email list and the misc. topics headings aren't really used, so people use the route comments sections as their venue...

John, I can't even begin to imagine the volume of work these sites take to keep up and running. I hope you see my comments as I intended them - opinions and suggestions - and not as personal criticisms of the moderators of sites like cb.com, rockclimbing.com, etc. Thanks for all your hard work!

Andy, I don't know how I misread the stars, but I did. I see now it is a four star system, not a five star - and three star climbs were converted to four stars. This makes sense.

Oh, and by the way, if you'd like to get a wing of the site opened up that is focused on the Gunks, or Arapiles or the Grampians in Australia - let me know - I know my way around those areas and could write up some area/crag description pages.

Josh Janes wrote: Oh, and by the way, if you'd like to get a wing of the site opened up that is focused on the Gunks, or Arapiles or the Grampians in Australia - let me know - I know my way around those areas and could write up some area/crag description pages.

GUNKS - yes, definitely! Let me know if you really want to tackle this and we'll make a New York top area when we go live in a month or so. One important consideration - we'd rather be "deep" than "broad"... if that makes any sense.. so anytime we commit to a new area we'd really like to make sure it can get built out enough to be beneficial to users... i.e. we want to avoid lots of random areas with one or two routes.... that seems to be the problem with rc.com

Is there an existing local Gunks site we'd be competing with?

ps. Arapiles.... had the pleasure of climbing there for a month three years ago. Wow... what an awesome place. Hard to beat for access, variety, and intriguing climbing (and some good quality scary trad action). For now we're sticking to North America ... (the deep rather than broad thing again)

Now we are talking, I could add heaps about the pines too, the blue mountains, etc, and if you want to go really broad, how about Castle hill back home in NZ. I used to climb there during the pre-pad days, back in the dark ages when we didn't even name boulder problems ...

Josh, I didn't take any of your comments personally, keep the stuff coming, its what we need...

Cheers

John Mac.

The site looks good. Keep up the good work.

Josh... FYI...Todos is a word. It means "all" in spanish. I also think it means to stir or commotion in english... But I could be wrong.

I think that you have to find a balance between over and under moderating. You need to keep things under control. Vicious attacks that happened at CB.com (especially by AC's) do nothing but promote frustration, hate and anger.

RC.Com in my opinion does a good job of it. They have over fifty-thousand members. Check out their Community...or as we like to call Scumunity. We kinda let things fly...to a point.

If you need information from me, please feel free to ask.

Josh...are you back in the area??

Later, Bob

I would strongly agree that there be a "Community Forum" as well as a "Route Forum" especially since one of the goals of this project is to be open to climbing world-wide.

Having said that, I think there needs to be some thought going into how to handle the "Route Forum". Clearly areas like Joshua Tree and Yosemite Valley are there own seperate locations but what about a place like Boulder, CO? Maybe you can organize the climbing areas by state or something like that, but it would be great to be able to access all the areas around a certain location easily without having to search through a lot of other areas, especially since some areas don't neccessarily have "accepted" names but, we know where they exist geographically.

Also, I agree that it is time for "Anonymous Coward" to go away. And, I would suggest that, unlike CB.com, accounts must require a username and password. Even if someone creates a bogus ID, they still must post under that ID and that ID has some sort of "personality" associated with it.

Please make it easy to do account management. If I want to change my E-mail address or password that should be easy to do.

Cool,

Bruce

Bruce Hildenbrand wrote:I would strongly agree that there be a "Community Forum" as well as a "Route Forum" especially since one of the goals of this project is to be open to climbing world-wide. Having said that, I think there needs to be some thought going into how to handle the "Route Forum". Clearly areas like Joshua Tree and Yosemite Valley are there own seperate locations but what about a place like Boulder, CO? Maybe you can organize the climbing areas by state or something like that, but it would be great to be able to access all the areas around a certain location easily without having to search through a lot of other areas, especially since some areas don't neccessarily have "accepted" names but, we know where they exist geographically. Also, I agree that it is time for "Anonymous Coward" to go away. And, I would suggest that, unlike CB.com, accounts must require a username and password. Even if someone creates a bogus ID, they still must post under that ID and that ID has some sort of "personality" associated with it. Please make it easy to do account management. If I want to change my E-mail address or password that should be easy to do. Cool, Bruce

Bruce,

AC is dead. To contribute you need a username and password and a *validated* email address.

It should be easy for you to change your contact information - it is available via the "Account" link on the top, right of the page if you're logged in.

Community forum. Definitely will be added.

Route forums. We have regional forums already... if you're anywhere in the Colorado areas (for instance), there is a link to the Colorado forum. Are you suggesting a Boulder, CO forum *in addition* to the Colorado forum?

Thanks
Andy

Andy,

I guess listing areas by state is probably the most logical way to do it (versus having smaller geographical areas like Boulder). Places like California and Colorado might get a whole lot of areas, hopefully it will be manageable.

One other suggestion I would make is to have the ability to change area names, route names and route locations. Sometimes, people get one of these three things wrong and as it used to happen on CB.com there appeared to be nothing that could be done about it. Also, it would be good to be able to delete a route as sometimes the same route gets added twice. I dont' think these things should necessarily be able to be done by Joe Anybody User but, there should be some administrator type person who can make this happen.

Bruce