But I rcvd a ST email about the news from Nice with the spoiler in the title/subject. That is not cool. OK to send the news email, of course, but how about ‘The Nice Results Are In’ or some such. ST can deliver all the news they want about big events, but FFS, don’t put the outcome in the subject line of an email.
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It doesn’t seem to matter what the community wants or says. The admins seem determined to deliver spoilers for reasons I don’t understand. SEO maybe?
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1.) I wrote and coded the email. If you want to be mad about it, be mad at me.
2.) We’re a news organization. We’re going to break news. If you were on certain IRONMAN mail lists, you had similar headlines in your inbox at the same time we sent them.
3.) With regard to the forum: yeah. Thread (which, by extension, are pages) titles make a difference for indexing / getting picked up by Google News. Those people read us, and a bunch of 'em stick around for the forum. We still run at a very high rate of unregistered users to registered ones.
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- OK, I am mad at you.
- No other spoilers in my inbox, yet, at least, except for the ST a$$hole email.
- Right, that is why I avoided the forum. I get that. But it was not enough. I’m unsubscribed from ST emails now. Bye.
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For each person who says “bye” there will likely be an order of magnitude who join our community (may not be forum people who post and are vocal). Do we expect to get on the internet and NOT know the results of the Wimbeldon finals, Super Bowl, Champions Leage, FIFA world Cup etc the day of the event?
Of course not.
For some reason, a number of you guys want our sport to be niche, tucked into a corner on the internet, that no one knows about. But that’s not how sports media works for serious sports, or any serious news. The story is all in the headline and it is live.
So while some people want our sport to be niche that no one knows about, our race organizers, and our media are trying to push us way beyond an endemic corner and that’s not going to happen without the general internet/media not knowing about major results in our sport.
I am sure over in Norway, the results were on the national news as they where when the Germans swept the podium in 2016. Here in Canada when Peter Reid was winning Kona, it hit the national news. That’s a good thing. Having news about sport obscured is not helping our sport in general. Having ST not able to openly talk about results in events in real time, only makes a vocal forum posters happy but it defeats the purpose of the overall tri community leadership.
I got on youtube to get politics news in Canada, and got all kinds of interviews and results in youtube thread titles about sport from the Vuelta, Track and Field worlds, UCI Worldtour races in Montreal and Quebec city and yes, also from Nice.
Why should ST obscure things when no one else is? Why does ST needs to be penalized when the rest of the sports world is going live with all kinds of results?
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Dev…In most cases I agree you with you. This time, however, I think that some, maybe including you, are missing the point. I was avoiding my news feeds (and the internet, mostly) so I could watch the race without knowing the outcome. I mean, the race timing in the US was pretty inconvenient (not complaining but just saying that there are probably lots of US-based folks who were unaware of the result this morning). Maybe there could have been more sensitivity to that vs., say, Kona where the event is during the day in most (all?) of the US.
I’m not trying to suppress ST (or anyone else) standing on the roof and broadcasting spoilers. BUT…when you slip that news into my inbox, you are no longer on the roof - you are in my house. I knew to stay away from the forum and the ST news page. When the spoiler comes via an email, it’s pretty different (to me) than other distribution methods. Sure, in Norway, the news would be unavoidable. But did everyone in Norway get the results by email? Probably not. So, listen, I’m just saying ‘bye’ to the ST email feed. I can’t trust it. But I’m not saying bye to ST. Just to be clear.
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I agree, I was avoiding going to ST and any channels where i may see it and it the ST email appeared in my inbox with the spoiler. I had been looking forward to watching the rest of the race as I went to bed after the swim. I immediately unsubscribed from the ST email. There should have been more thought for fans that are not on the same time zone that may want to watch during ‘normal’ hours.
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Hey Dev wrote another novel everyone. Can you just make a point in a couple sentences?
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Maybe the admins could make a post or send out a email prior to a major event (Kona, T100 Grand final, Olympics, 70.3WC) to tell people how to avoid potential spoilers and maybe pin it prior to those major races.
To avoid the emails you could do a number of things moving forward, set a rule in your email to the slowtwitch emails go to a folder, go to spam, or just send to your back up email address. Any of those would give you control what you see. If you weren’t expecting the email I can understand the frustration, so maybe something to give unsuspecting members a heads up could be a nice thing to do for members while not impacting SEO.
@marquette42 No worries, already fixed - I’m unsubscribed from the ST email feed. That is the easiest way not to see the spoilers in email. Although it has some downsides for me and for ST. Oh well.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest and at home.
Every sports news org sends out an email to their distribution lists, screaming the results of a huge event, the second it’s over. Whether that’s the league itself, or the organizations responsible for coverage. And that’s without linking to stories talking about it! It’s usually the result and/or selling something associated with said result (e.g., the second the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, you’re damn sure I had four emails from retailers, ESPN, and the NFL to go buy stuff).
We at least gave it until our story published, and even then, it takes a while for our entire newsletter to fire out. The last recipient batch was at something like 11 Pacific / 2 PM Eastern. It’s a mark of our sport, and our coverage, trying to do the things that make it more appealing to more people.
Not sure there is any rule against writing more than a few characters, but since you asked one liner for you.
Stick to the point of discussion and don’t make it personal.
I got the Stornes news in my email probably the same time as you. I was out riding and socializing with friends, with a loose plan of watching the coverage later (and not engaging on the forum and forum live thread), but it got pushed to me, and that’s my fault for turning on my phone and looking at my email, not ST’s fault for pushing out the news electronically.
You can’t really divide up which corner of the internet news gets on. forum, website, facebook page, pushed out by others on whatsapp, text ,messages, email, from the angle of the internet it’s all just 1’s and 0’s getting to an IP address. The job of news media is to get those 1’s and 0’s to every IP address possible. Once it is news, it is news, and if it’s the most major news in our sport, why should ST holds its breath when every youtuber is yapping about this race while it happens. If ST hold’s it’s breath and says nothing it is no longer a source of information.
As @BfloTri asked me above, to not write novels, to appeal to people like him who don’t want to read details, @rrheisler and crew have to get all the information in a title and preview image, because chances are most casual fans don’t even open the story. They just see Stornes wins in a Norwegian sweep and ST sent them the news.
If I decide to make a post on my fb to my friends this is what they would see and that’s basically all the majority of readers will see which is a lot different than an obsured title and image:
I just looked at my gmail account and I see that the ST email with the news about the Stornes win came at 11:47 EDT or 5:47 pm CET. That is still almost 3 hrs on the button after Stornes crossed the finish line.
I did not see the story until around 3 pm EDT when I was back on my phone after riding and a social lunch and browsing first my work emails then my personal emails.
So then I changed my plans. I told the people I was with that I needed 2 min to quickly browse what happened in Nice. The full story was there, I was able to speed read it and I got great service from ST. Now I don’t even have to watch the video until my next long indoor workout (I guess, instead I am debating why pushing this news was of value to me today and others who we don’t hear from may also be happy for the synopsis).
My thought is that the people running ST. want those who are busy, to get all the “day of news” from ST. That might come from reading the article via an email push or a social media reshare, or maybe even visiting the home page for people who do that to get news about the sport.
It is better that they get the news from ST than elsewhere. Those of us in the forum are captive eyeballs, but there are all those out there, that they are also catering to
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Yes, I made a similar complaint some time ago, got a nearly identical response from @rrheisler and of course unsubscribed immediately.
Apparently we’re not supposed to check our inboxes between a race and watching a race either, because in the 21st century, news must travel fast and get in through our windows 
Can you imagine, many of us (undersigned included) do that with great success. We enjoy the freedom to choose our content. It’s still a thing! You just have to know what website you’re visiting and why, instead of using the internet reflexively like a zombie. And: do not subscribe to the ST newsletter. That’s it.
Email options for separate feeds (race announcements, general, whatever) would be cool but I don’t know what kind of modifications to Discourse that requires.
Yeah but then it’s going to be: The Giant That Carried Gustav Iden to Second Place in Nice in the Equipment category 
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Hey, I think we all know how to subdivide our use of content on the internet, and we can roll the dice that someone does not send us a text message with the results.
Having said that, every media site on youtube that was specialty to triathlon had the results in their video title. The big difference is ST is a media site who happens to have a forum. But it is a media site and on the day of the race, it is and should give the internet near live summaries after the race is over. That’s just what media do in any category.
You and others want ST to self penalize themselves relative to all other media by muzzling their reporting by having no relevancy in the title, just for the viewing pleasure of a bunch of people who don’t want to know the news.
But the competition on a world championship day is with all other media. If ST is the place to get the news, those stats roll up for future advertising that keep lights on for the site and this forum. If ST gets substantially beaten by other media who become more relevant it becomes harder to sustain a biz.
I am guessing that there will be orders of magnitude of more people who read about Nice on ST than those of us posting about Nice in the forum on the day of the event. You guys are asking @rrheisler @Ironmandad and Eric the latter two onsite to not promote their work on every possible channel?
Geez guys, get over it.
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Personally, I appreciate the news and the updates. I think you did a good job. Thank you.
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