Kiss of life?

[Travs]

This is very interesting and topical as the FRA are in advanced stages of developing a new website and you may have seen the new Races/Results platform. Brett has taken the opportunity to retire from the FRA Committee after more than 20 years of loyal service and the future of the Forum will come up for review shortly. My observations are that there are no women and it comes over as a bit of a Gentlemen's Club where old timers all know each other. I would support a change to real names and photos which would make contributors more recognisable and approachable to new members. If pseudonyms are used then there should be a signature, to identify the poster.

I agree that there is a wealth of valuable information but there are also some threads and posts which have nothing to do with fell running and which do not reflect well on the FRA.

So, is there anyone on here who would be interested in working with the FRA to form a small sub-committee / working party to formulate a plan to revive what was a good source of information, to encourage new members and thereby to protect the future of the Forum going forward.

If you are interested, then drop me a line to
[email protected]

Whilst i understand where you're coming from on this point, not everyone on here is ancient....

I'm still in my 30's (for another 6 months anyway!)..... ba-ba is younger still, and maybe in his 20's still (and someone suggested above that there are no high-level runners posting on here, i think they are doing ba-ba a massive dis-service). In the aftermath of the Dragons Back this year, we had very interesting forum posts from two of the top 6 finishers.

Calvin used to post on here, and may still do occasionally, he must be late 20's-early 30's and a regular poster on the facebook page too.

It's certainly true that there is quite a lot of familiarity on here, and indeed i think i've met the majority of regular posters on here at least once.... but even the small number of regular posters on here come from a wide geographical area with a wide variety of backgrounds.

I totally agree on some of the off-topic/political posts and whether we like it or not, this is a forum linked to the FRA and it does not reflect well. However this does seem to have calmed down a great deal, due to either the odd banning, and the disappearance of a couple of the more volatile posters on such subjects.

Also agree on the lack of female voices... but you can't force people to post or join up if they don't want to, and i don't think it's necessarily a stick that can be used to beat the forum down. We could do with more regular posters, male or female...

On the subject of anonimity... i'd have no problem posting under my real name... i think most people on here know who i am, and i know who they are... not sure everyone would be in agreement though.

This is probably an old-fashioned view... but i get the feeling a lot of people would rather spend time on facebook discussing shoes and lightweight jackets... its the easy option, rather than thinking about training harder, learning race routes, losing a couple of kg (would make so much more difference than buying a shoe which weighs 25grammes less!!)...