Quote Originally Posted by JohnK View Post
As has been said the whole forum requires a shake up and made more welcoming with a much less busy opening menu, so that novice users can feel their way around without trawling through threads they find confusing or intimidating.
A few days ago someone mentioned EOD on one of the Races threads, and it jogged my memory to 12.5 years ago.

When I started I gleaned all my knowledge of the sport from this forum. Along the way I found something that took me to somewhere with forthcoming races.

I was able to work out AS and AM etc from the race distance and ascent, and even cracked LK somehow. With EOD, however, it took me two months to crack the code. This was critical to me, as back then I worked a lot of weekends but sometimes only got told this on the Friday before - ie less than 24 hours notice.

I do understand why people abbreviate, and miss words out, to save time in the knowledge that the majority know the term. If we want to make this friendlier and more useful to newcomers, however, we should be careful to make sure we are not using terms, or abbreviations, that are not in every day parlance.

What we could do, probably in the Beginners section, is make a single post thread called something like 'Glossary of terms' to explain abbreviations such as this. If the thread was then locked and made into a sticky thread then it would always be visible to novices.

In the General Fellrunning Issues section there is a thread called 'Reference Guide' created by 'TheGrump' in 2010. It's a great idea, and very useful, but some of the links no longer work correctly so it needs updating