if only the email tools had a way of assigning preferences to messages with certain subjects or from certain senders such that they would be placed in a certain folder…with which I could engage at the time of my choosing like the rest of the internet? I guess I’ll have throw my toys out of the pram and unsubscribe too.
To complain about spoilers in the year 2025 in which news and information comes to us in a nanosecond and in twenty different ways is just foolish. With a big news item, and in tri there’s nothing bigger than the IMWC, it’s just naive to think the results weren’t going to be splashed across every tri and tri adjacent news, email, and social media the second the race ended.
This is like asking ESPN to not report the Eagles had won the Super Bowl the second the game ended because some folks may not have watched the whole game yet. Too fucking bad.
ST is a tri news organization. Some of you like to think it’s only a forum but it’s not.
6 Likes
I sympathize with those who had it spoiled, but at the end of the day this is not a big deal. Ironman racing is not edge of your set tv, it’s a slow burn, even if you found out he won you can still watch the race with every other detail not known - who rest of top 5/10 was, how stornes did it or when the critical moment was, who blew up, who surprised, how it looked, the visuals of the race, atmosphere, etc.
As far as I’m concerned, just stating the fact that I’m selecting newsletters, websites, etc. and (dis)allowing push notifications in such a way as to eliminate spoilers, and it’s easy. You seem to think running into them is pretty much unavoidable this day and age.
I’ve never tried to dictate to anyone what to do, but I have asked to accomodate a group of users at what seemed to be zero cost to anyone else, or to the site.
ST leadership will do what they want (albeit there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut policy on the issue), and that’s fine.
Thank you for your attention to this matter 
That would require actions on the Receiver’s part:
- to set up a folder or someplace for those messages to go to
- to identify the sender whose messages they want to go into the folder/place
- to remember to look for the messages
- to remember where they put them
That’s an awful lot of work on the Receiver’s side; but if the Sender just conformed to the Receiver’s request, the Receiver would have much more welcome experience
To quote LL Cool J “I don’t think so”
1 Like
It’s really pretty simple to set-up a rule to have emails from a sender go to a folder. That folder will usually show an unread icon count as well. So really pretty light lift for someone who is going to be traumatized by a spoiler to own some responsibility to avoid the trauma.
Sure. Easier to unsubscribe. As the OP, I just want to reinforce that I know to avoid the sites of potential spoilers, including ST. That avoidance is not always perfect, but the notes upthread that compare the Nice results with the Super Bowl or other way larger events are just strawman arguments. Comparatively few care about triathlon results and, as a consequence, comparatively few news outlets bother, especially the major players. Here I am talking about public websites.
My inbox, however, is shared space. I can’t not look there frequently for messages that may be timely and important - work, family, etc. So, when senders misbehave (IMO), I take action, as others have suggested. Some of those suggestions require effort for me. Other strategies are pretty quick and easy. I chose that path b/c I don’t find enough value in the ST email feed to compensate for the misbehavior. ST chooses not to conceal the spoilers to get clicks back to the website. Fair enough.
That is fair that IM world’s are not in the same category as worlds in other sports, but if we treat our championship as a niche fringe group meet up, that’s how the entire world will keep viewing it.
If the entire city of Nice can shut down for IM World’s multiple times as they do for the end of the Tour de France 2024 as they do for Paris Nice, we’re not totally fringe at least in the context of major sport in France. In my own city we shut down the entire city core for Ironman Canada a few weeks ago . It was all over the city news and evening news. the Mayor was at the finish line giving our medals to the winners…and there was whining from citizens that they could not get to Walmart (choose your destination). The Ottawa Board of trade shut the whiners up the next day by saying IM Canada brought $8M to the city(my guess is they had the story pre packaged to trail the event and all the whining from regular people). We had all the local media on board promoting our sport like it was a major NHL Stanley Cup playoff thing.
My point being if we want our sport to be less than fringe, we can’t keep acting fringe. Even if regular people say, “I heard Norway is the strongest country in triathlon” then that’s more important than our internal viewing dynamics
We are sorry this is an issue for what truly is a very small select group of users.Maybe in the future we can find some sort of way to address it becuase we do try our best to make sure that everyone should have a voice.
In the end we are an online website and we will continue to operated at the best way for us to reach the masses in order to bring this information to as many current and potential endurance athletes as we can.
3 Likes
“Grow the sport” shouldn’t mean spoiler in the subject line at 8:07 a.m. PT. Keep reporting, but keep the result out of the header for 24 hours especially for championship events.
This is live sport. Not a TV series.
So reporting the results is not spoiler.
When I lived in Seattle I remember NBC was broadcasting the Olympics on a tape delay, pretending it was live. It was pathetic.
If you do not want the results.
Go off the grid
1 Like
Not really wanting to agree or disagree, but immediately after the sport’s biggest events, is that when you want to capitalize on said event/result the most with exposure/clicks/info. And yes the whole forum vs email format could be different, but would that be exactly when you want to get that info out, and just “accept” the percentage of people you piss off for spoiling.
The knots people will twist themselves into because they need to be protected from “spoilers”.
Spoilers don’t exist in sports. The events are live, the results are known at the completion of the event.
3 Likes
Does the level of engagement with the thread impact the SEO performance? My gut says no but my SEO is rusty.
The reason I ask is because you could just create a category in the forum for “News” and stick them there, so you get the SEO juice but users don’t get spoiler titles or cluttered forum.
It would also limit how much one topic gets bifurcated into multiple threads, which seems to be happening sometimes with the articles posted in here
We tried that. Negative impacts to search performance. So we killed it and mostly publish in the forum category that best aligns (e.g., run news in running, triathlon here, etc.)
1 Like
Why do people subscribe to ST mailings anyway?
Is ST really so unimportant that “for what truly is a very small select group of users” (copyright @E_DUB ) they need an e-mail prompt?
Unsubscribe and just open ST when the urge takes you (and real life/time zone allows) and you’ve made the effort to watch the replay or ffwd’ed the live starting hours late.
If people won’t prioritise watching key events live, then at least put effort into avoiding spoilers: treat it as a competition if that appeals to your competitive instincts.
2 Likes
Are people actually subscribing or is it one of those auto subscribing when you sign up and give an email and don’t read the fine print that now your going to get on the weekly subscription list. I don’t’ know how many lists I’ve apparently subscribed to simply by “signing up” or whatever from random businesses/lists and have to “unsubscribe” from a weekly basis.
I managed to watch the YouTube extended highlights the next morning for both the Tour and Vuelta without spoilers.
How? I don’t subscribe to anything like the newsletter or other news sites. And this topic is why. I won’t pay. I won’t sign up. I will spam it.
It happens in bike racing stuff also and I still find it low class. Folks I know who want to watch basically go dark for a month per grand tour.
It’s pitiful that’s where we are. The 24 hour internet news cycle for weather and politics brought sports along with it. And that’s sad.
1 Like
You actively had to subscribe to us, either via the homepage, or via one of our email campaigns in the past.
Forum notifications come from a different server.
Discourse notifications are one thing. The newsletter, which contains links to stories, the Shop, partner deals, etc. is separate.
At some point I’d like to be able to do segmentation / personalization of the newsletter sends so that we can do dynamic content (e.g., if you visit our bike galleries only, that’s the stuff that would populate in the newsletter for you). But that requires some pretty serious work on both our sending client and our mailing lists to build those various segments…which also take away from content production.