Late to this discussion, but I also think improvements to photo uploading would help.

i.e. right now it is a hit or miss for me when I up load a series of photos, when I add captions to photos. If photo icons could be displayed as photos are added, this would help adding appropiate captions. I find I am hit or miss when adding photos... I have to refer to photo # in the uploaded set and then compare with the thumbnail listing which has photo #'s in the listing as per photo software upload.

K

Has there been any progress on this?

Where are you uploading images to? the gallery or in a thread?

lee

So here we are more than 6 weeks after this was most recently brought up and discussed (improved trip reports and photo posting has been something the community has been requesting for years). What has the technical team been able to come up with? Any proposals? designs? solutions?

Kelly your effort is great, but I'm afraid its lost cause. Problem runs much deeper. You'd need strategy to attract back all these advanced, knowledgeable users that built the site (Engor, Lobo, Vern.Dewitt, Simonc, John and Katie ..... list goes on) . This is much more difficult that just improving this or that functionality. Maybe not even possible anymore as there is deeply rooted antagonism towards CT that is combination of various things I'd rather not go into right now. Some actually laugh at my continuous efforts on Rockies side & ask "When are you going to realize time has come to throw the towel".

Sadly, I fear you're right. It's pretty clear that ClubTread is just one brand upon dozens in VerticalsSope's portfolio and a small one at that. While we get lip service about how important the community is, it's pretty clear by the lack of action that it isn't really a priority. We've probably lost the critical mass of core content creators. I myself haven't created a trip report on Clubtread in 2.5 years (I'd rather posting links to my blog) and a quick scan through the Active Discussions are mostly quick questions about logistics or ideas. The only trips reports I see are from Manning, Iago, and yours from Barrier Lookout. All it will take is a handful of additional departures and won't be many experienced folks left to answer anyone's questions. Not much of a community left after that

Clearly the admins on this site don't give a rats ass about this site. It's a shame. I posted a few reports a couple of months ago and I wasn't able to post them like I used to on this site because it has gotten so complicated for me. I won't be posting anymore unless something changes, but I'm not holding my breath. I recently, within the last three months, have joined two separate Facebook sites, one dedicated to Backcountry in the Canadian Rockies and another local outdoor site and I find little difference on those sites to CT. You do the work to post pictures and trail reports and even though there are hundreds of people on these sites, I get almost no comments and a few likes. It's hardly worth the effort. I'm slowly reverting back to the time before the internet when I hiked purely for the love of being out there and when I returned from a trip I just started planning my next trip. Nobody ever saw my pictures then and nobody really cared either, like it is today.

You will not get any appreciation on social media groups. Their main purpose is to satisfy instant vanity in form of "like" concept and little else. Only real benefit of FB platform is real time chat ability, as we sometimes do. Besides, ppl are leaving already because of security issues and whole thing is going to blow up now faster than it rose up.

At the end, I will agree with "Forget Internet and hike for yourself". It is a shame though as there is undeniable benefit in sense of belonging to enthusiast community of like-minded people. CT has been that, but has now unfortunately all but died.

I think it started happening when VS took over. When you look at the active members online, it appears to have shrunk considerably.

I'd have to agree. I've certainly lost interest in answering questions.

With respect the last post before you bumped this was an ask from us for clarification on the issue to which there was no response. This has then turned back into "the site is dying and VS doesn't care" except that we do otherwise the site would still have viglinks and everything else, the home page would still require that articles be hardcoded into the page and quite frankly I wouldn't respond here.

So right now in thread mode you can manually attach or drag and drop, in gallery mode you can manually upload and caption.

So what would you actually like to see.

Kyle

Kyle, with all due respect, there have been several threads, suggestions, ideas and requests on how to improve things. Erik put in "a request to the technical team" almost 2 months ago, but we haven't heard a word. However the admins seem to keep coming back looking for some quick fix, a minor tweak, or fixing a bug. Member after member after member have expressed how frustrating it is to create a trail report using the discussion widget (a trail report is NOT just a big post). As a result, more and more of the core content creators are throwing in the towel and giving up. To characterize this thread as just waiting on KARVITK to explain how to reproduce his specific issue completely misses the point. That this thread has been commented on by no less than 4 different admins is also telling. Maybe start by assigning one person to actually look into this, gather requirements, propose solutions, develop prototypes and iterate.

Except what I did is not characterizing the thread at all, by definition a thread is a conversation. The last point in the conversation was about a specific issue.

The frustrations about posting vary in scope and reason some hate the mobile interface, others hate the desktop interface on their phones. Some don't like manual attachments but others don't like the drag and drop. You've now in essence summed it up in that you'd rather trip reports function as something other than a post, by contrasting definition probably a blog. There aren't functional blogs for this platform.

We have put individual admins on here, this is not a permanent resource though as we have a team of 13 having to handle all sites. So once things actually quiet down it gets put back into the queue to have issues dealt with on a first come first served basis. We come here address issues not in the hopes that it's a quick fix but in that it is how things are presented. The last major discussion here was that viglink was killing the site. Nothing to do with how to post or anything like that.

So lets try this a different way. Without digressing into what you hate about the site that is, or how it's managed, or even that you hate the layout. Tell me what you actually would like to see, outline some functionalities you think would work to the site's advantage. Stuff you've seen elsewhere, or stuff you've never seen before but would love to see here.

Kyle

I am probably the most computer illiterate person on this site, but posting trip reports was always easy. Resizing a picture is easy, but auto resizing is better. What I would like is to be able to easily insert text describing a picture. I know that it can be done because others do it. I used to be able to easily do it here. Also, in preview mode, why do we see a bunch of numbers instead of the picture's thumbnail. If you have a lot of pictures in your report, this becomes difficult. Being able to save a partially done report would also be good. This was brought up months ago, why does it take so long to get something done? You guys only ever come on when there is a complaint.

My apologies folks. I guess this is largely my fault. I escalated your site issues/wish list to our tech team and have had quite a bit of 'back and forth' with them about it in the following weeks, but it has obviously taken a long time. I was really hoping to try to tackle the items on your wish list, but based on the conversations with the tech team, it doesn't sound likely. They suggested that they could maybe create an option like our "garage" or "barn" feature that we have in some of our auto and farm sites where basically it could be set up in a way that's more tailored to trails and you could keep track of your log info there. It's not really a trip report though, it's more of an album, but it could probably work if tailored the right way.

They searched for a plugin that would do the things that you'd like for reporting, but were unable to find anything suitable that would work with this forum's software.

With regards to easing the photo uploading process, I still feel like that is something that we could potentially improve, but that request might have gotten lost in the shuffle with the other wish list items. I'll inquire about this again.

Again, my apologies. I wasn't trying to drop the ball or anything. I'm the newbie on the team and have still been learning the ropes with regards to escalating issues/ticket reporting.

Kind regards,

Erik

It's pretty disappointing that the tech team is limited to using existing plug-ins. If find it hard to believe a company the size of Vertical Scope (firmly in the medium sized enterprise bucket) has no in-house development capability to extend and enhance its core platform.