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Announcement: Mtbr has a new owner!

30K views 469 replies 86 participants last post by  bachman1961 
#1 ·
I am pleased to announce that Mtbr and Roadbikereview have been acquired by Verticalscope Inc. from Invenda Corp. They are a media company expert in enthusiast websites and forum management with many revered brands such as Autoguide and The Truth About Cars.

Myself, Francis Cebedo and most members of the editorial and content team will continue on and run Mtbr and Roadbikereview. The transition should be fairly seamless as we slowly make improvements as they make sense.

This move opens up a whole new array of experience and technologies to the sites to allow them to thrive. We will now have access to resources to improve our product and grow our audience in the ever-changing media landscape.

Our challenging issues such as spam, mobile experience and ease of use will be better tackled now with the help of a parent company with a depth of experience in these areas. And we'll be able to deliver cool features and user experiences once again.

We look forward to your continued support.

Francis Cebedo and Mtbr.com
 
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#69 ·
I'm here for the humor, most of the time. Gotta say that this is the funniest thread I've read in a long time.

Oh, while you're making improvements, could you please try to offer spelling and punctuation help to those who need it? MTBRs are an illiterate group, except for the ladies. Somehow they seem more edumacated.
 
#87 ·
Oh, while you're making improvements, could you please try to offer spelling and punctuation help to those who need it?
Seriously. Though this is a bicycle forum, many (most?) don't seem to know the difference between "pedal" and "peddle." Tsk, tsk. This is just the tip... the iceberg is huge.

Welcome, Philip.
=sParty
 
#76 ·
Overall it's a great forum. Deleting of some of the spy shots sucks, but I understand that you need to maintain relationships in order to get access.
Keep Norcal rule free! It's my favorite corner of this forum and if there is pertinent info in there it's easy to search.

Pop up ads and malware on the phone needs attention.
 
#116 ·
this.
nothing else just this.
 
#95 ·
Yesterday I was on some site with the most annoying ad I'd seen in a long time. It was for a grocery store and just s very quick loop of zooming in on some ice-cream then back out. It was so distracting having that going on in my peripheral vision that I couldn't read anything on the page.
 
#117 ·
Add a bot that parses the first post of a new thread to determine if it contains a question easily answered with a Google search. If so, instead of starting the new thread, send a PM to the OP containing recommended search strings.

Make this mandatory for new users, and for Picard and his socks.
 
#126 ·
Hi Philip, welcome to the nut house!

No complaints as long as we can continue to keep it real. I think the mods do a good job of stepping in only when needed (and sometimes is definitely is).

Only suggestion I can think of offhand would be to add a forum where we could post up the latest news and sightings of Matt Chester.
 
#136 ·
Verticalscope has been buying up motorcycle, outdoor, motorsports, .... every sort of forums for years. This is not a good move for this site - after every forum buyout came increased and embedded ads. I'd expect no different here. They're a huge company that focuses on ad delivery over their entire network. That's the business.

Check out their collection on their own website under "Verticals" in the top toolbar.

https://www.verticalscope.com/

Really unfortunate that this is happening. If you all haven't seen what VS has done to other forums, you're in for an unfortunate surprise. Google the name, and you'll find that everything goes downhill shortly after.
 
#137 ·
Verticalscope has been buying up motorcycle forums for years. This is not a good move for this site. After every forum buyout came increased and embedded ads. I'd expect no different here.

Really unfortunate that this is happening. If you all haven't seen what VS has done to other forums, you're in for an unfortunate surprise.
Yikers! Philip, FC, is there more to this buy out than what's being led on?
 
#153 ·
Yes, I'm new here. But what VS has been doing isn't new to me. I come from a motorcycling background and wanted to use MTB to get into shape and train, as there are a lot of skills that cross over for off road riding. Living in NC, we've got some fantastic off road motorcycling trails here, along with some of the best for MTB. Why not dabble in both?

I've personally watched VS acquire up sailing forums, archery forums, and motorcycle forums that I post(ed) on. It was never a great outcome for any of them. Ad presence went up, and moderator interaction went down. Viewership took a plunge on a few of those forums due to intrusive ads. VS has been trying to buy out another community that I post in for years.. Thankfully the owners there know what they've got, and value the community more than the paycheck.
 
#149 ·
Oh now you've waded right into it!

Anyway as to ads:
MTBR and maybe a Verticalscope forum are what pushed me over the edge to install an ad-blocker after not running one for a decade.
The MTBR ads are way worse than the Verticalscope ones, which are worse than most places used to be but now days not too far off from 'normal'.

I wouldn't mind occasional relevant ads, or even constant tasteful ones in a sidebar. But multiple flashing things which re-arrange the web page and possibly are exploiting bugs to install malware? Time for an ad blocker!
 
#154 ·
Your browser experience is yours alone. We don't make you pay to view content here and also don't block you from viewing content if you choose to employ an ad blocker. I am glad you still contribute to the conversation and comradery. It makes little difference to me personally as long as you are nice. :)
-Philip
 
#159 ·
Something that I would like to see would be a sub-forum related to innovative thinking

A place to go or post and see how others have redirected the application something.

How to make something cheaper than you can buy it.

Out of the 'box' custom frame thinking...and why.

Experiments with off the wall ideas for entertainment and who knows...some knowledge?

MacGyver bike skills...survival skills.

Derailleur protection possibilites.

How to reduce the noise of a Rohloff.

Any daft wacked out ideas...a stab in the dark...to solve some concern. Someone just might provide something to make that idea worthwhile in a limited application; if just once.

What say ye? Too daft to be workable?
 
#166 ·
Hello Philip, welcome to the peanut gallery!

I just scolded DJ for quoting an image I posted just to add a silly comment, now there's two of those images and his silly comment. I've seen on other forums where the quoted image will be collapsed so you don't get ten of the same image in a thread because people are too lazy to edit them out, it really clutters up threads. Is there any chance to get that feature set up here?
 
#172 ·
^^^ Actually glad someone mentioned that, it bugs the crap out of me when someone quotes an entire post (especially if it contains a bunch of pics) only to make a completely unrelated one line comment that you have to scroll through pages of quoted pics to get to. So yeah, anything to help clean up after the lazy people would be great.

Speaking of pics, pics posted via BBCode tags get resized to a ridiculously small size. This is not the case on many other forums I use. I host all my pics on another site and use BBCode to post them here, I don't need an easier way to post pictures, I just want to be able to post them via BBCode and not have them resized. The horizontal limit appears to be 550 pixels. I resize my externally hosted photos to 800 px in the long dimension. When I post here, this means that landscape pics get resized to the same width as portrait pics, which really makes trip report posts with pics look... lame.

Example pic, should be 800 px wide but displays here as 550 px wide:



Here's the actual BBCode (I wrapped it in
PHP:
 tags, couldn't see any other way to get the BBCode to show up w/o actually trying to display the picture):

[PHP][URL=https://s168.photobucket.com/user/jwintermyre/media/Misc_MtnBike/IMG_4511.jpg.html][IMG]https://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u164/jwintermyre/Misc_MtnBike/IMG_4511.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
There was actually a thread about this issue on the Site Feedback forum here:
https://forums.mtbr.com/site-feedback-issues/mtbr-screws-up-bbcode-embedded-photos-1067470.html

Ironically, the initial post apparently got screwed up by a virus so no longer shows the issue.
 
#181 ·
^^^ Actually glad someone mentioned that, it bugs the crap out of me when someone quotes an entire post (especially if it contains a bunch of pics) only to make a completely unrelated one line comment that you have to scroll through pages of quoted pics to get to. So yeah, anything to help clean up after the lazy people would be great.

Speaking of pics, pics posted via BBCode tags get resized to a ridiculously small size. This is not the case on many other forums I use. I host all my pics on another site and use BBCode to post them here, I don't need an easier way to post pictures, I just want to be able to post them via BBCode and not have them resized. The horizontal limit appears to be 550 pixels. I resize my externally hosted photos to 800 px in the long dimension. When I post here, this means that landscape pics get resized to the same width as portrait pics, which really makes trip report posts with pics look... lame.

Example pic, should be 800 px wide but displays here as 550 px wide:
...

Here's the actual BBCode (I wrapped it in
PHP:
 tags, couldn't see any other way to get the BBCode to show up w/o actually trying to display the picture):

[PHP][URL=https://s168.photobucket.com/user/jwintermyre/media/Misc_MtnBike/IMG_4511.jpg.html][IMG]https://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u164/jwintermyre/Misc_MtnBike/IMG_4511.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
There was actually a thread about this issue on the Site Feedback forum here:
https://forums.mtbr.com/site-feedback-issues/mtbr-screws-up-bbcode-embedded-photos-1067470.html

Ironically, the initial post apparently got screwed up by a virus so no longer shows the issue.
I get why the image sizing limit was installed. It was just done in a lazy way that sucks. I remember when there wasn't an image size limit, and people posting REALLY large images blew out the site layout. Especially on those photo threads. One bad post would wreck the entire thread, because the buttons to reply to the post would be off the page, and no scroll bars available to retrieve them. It was a mess. But the current solution is a hack that wrecks images. It sizes UP small images, too. I used to use HTML embeds when those were permitted, and IIRC, those weren't subject to resizing.
 
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