The Beacon Message Board

Looking at the performances of Simon this year and him feeling slightly embarrassed about publishing his own results it is somewhat of an anomaly that we can find out minute detail of each club run each week but not much about the racing element of the club. Club run details are extremely well maintained by posting weekly targets/destinations and people adding comments or enquiries. It might work for the racing fraternity if there was a weekly who is doing what each week. There might be more scope for asking relevant questions like where, when and how did you get on? You might get some teams together or lifts to events. These are all the things that are missing from the core of the club these days. I suspect that it would be a great help to Laurence who has little idea who is doing what or where at the moment. Also means people like Simon,Vince, James, Laurence, Jess, Xavier, Jon, Martin, etc, etc, etc can have some idea what is happening where. Just a thought.

From Dave and John, racing in Guernsey!

This sounds great to me.

Weekday races - for me anyway - tend to depend on whether I finish work on time or not so I don't usually know until a few hours before the start, but the weekend races are usually booked in way in advance.
It's lonely racing on your own (as in the only one from your club) so it'd be nice to do a bit more in familiar company.

I don't have anything booked in other than the Staffordshire Oatcake Road Race - 25 Sep 2016. I haven't had my acceptance for that yet mind.

I'm up for some races if anybody else is.

You may find that most of the regular racers use Facebook rather than this board, that has certainly been my experience as far as the coaching goes Most seem to post were they are racing on Facebook and of course Laurence provides a regular report using Hub Ub.

Entirely agree Dave, it would be interesting. However, it requires the racing fraternity to actually report their results. Years ago when I was Comms Secretary, trying to get results out of riders was like extracting blood from a stone.

Pete is also right, the FB group tends to be the forum for such activities these days.

For BC races all the results are on line. This page shows Beacon results for 2016
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/clubp ... perpage=20

I did try to get something like this going (for road racing) last year, in this thread and again this year, but as you can see, not many people post. I try to pick up on what people are doing for the blog via Facebook, but people don't seem keen or to have time to post regular updates about what they're up to there (or perhaps neither the message board nor Facebook are good forums for doing so), so I tend to have to piece things together from Strava and the BC website.

Another option might be a very simple web form (i.e. race name, finishing position, any comments, link to any photos), which people can quickly fill in and which adds a line to a results spreadsheet - the contents of which can be shared here directly but also give me material for the blog.

Given the target audience tend to prefer to be out racing than posting about what they're doing I'm not sure offering yet another medium is the answer. Given FB maybe is possibly easier for most I was wondering whether it's events feature could be used, either associated with the Beacon FB group or a separate Beacon racing group? If any members could create an event for any race they're considering entering, others could indicate their own intentions and then anybody that does ride the event could maybe add results and photos or whatever.

In terms of organisation it would be good if we could work together to enter events and pool cars etc. Especially road races where we start and finish together, unlike a TT where you can have an hour or more between competitors.

Pete is correct in that Facebook and mainly Strava are how I get most of my information of race performances, as I don't use the forum that much.

I'm inclined to agree with Steve, normally if I'm racing: be it road, crit or TT I'm getting home late on a weekday and need to eat and sleep. I'm not one to blow my own trumpet if I've done well in an event.

The entire extent of my publishing of results is posting on Strava the ride details - the event name or the ride time (and that I failed to get away again at Stourport).

John wrote:I'm not one to blow my own trumpet if I've done well in an event.

I think this explains a lot of it. Posting on here or on Facebook feels a bit like showing off, and as a club we're quite a modest lot.

If anyone is entering a race letting the Tudor Grange coaching group on Facebook would be a good start both to encourage other riders and to share resources.
I try and inform those who come to session of forthcoming races and encourage entrants, if we knew in advance of who intended riding it may encourage the others.
The same could apply for LVRC races as there are a few over 40's who regularly attend sessions but have never raced. If I could point them to races that I knew other Beacon members might be at it would be very helpful.

Just popped in to see the response. Many sensible comments here. Will make another contribution when Iget back from Guernsey on Friday morning. Just off for seafood linguini cooked on site with numerous varieties of sea food and heavy on the wine. Camping eh, roughing it again.

Be good to have type of summary on the Message Board - or is it that people just prefer to use Facebook?

I've started to try to use the Beacon Facebook page to share more regular news about people's race results, starting with Stu's win this week and news of the National 10. Anyone can view the page - no need to have a Facebook account (we could probably find a way to embed the feed on the front page of the website). Obviously, this depends on me finding out what people are up to!

laurence_cooley wrote:I've started to try to use the Beacon Facebook page to share more regular news about people's race results, starting with Stu's win this week and news of the National 10. Anyone can view the page - no need to have a Facebook account (we could probably find a way to embed the feed on the front page of the website). Obviously, this depends on me finding out what people are up to!

The other way is to do it via Twitter, and then get facebook and a twitter feed to update onto the website.

Hub Ub is automatically linked to Twitter and Facebook and when Laurence does a report on hub Ub it updates the Facebook page and the twitter feed I created for Hub Ub. I usually try and also update the main Facebook group with race reports from hub Ub but can't update the latest Facebook page.
As I told the AGM that requested this it would be good to actually integrate Hub Ub and the main Facebook and Twitter feeds but this requires an administrator to do it.
Seems daft to me to keep setting up new stuff rather than using and integrating what the club already has. Hub Ub was set up for this but hardly gets used.

petemarshall wrote:Hub Ub is automatically linked to Twitter and Facebook and when Laurence does a report on hub Ub it updates the Facebook page and the twitter feed I created for Hub Ub. I usually try and also update the main Facebook group with race reports from hub Ub but can't update the latest Facebook page.
As I told the AGM that requested this it would be good to actually integrate Hub Ub and the main Facebook and Twitter feeds but this requires an administrator to do it.
Seems daft to me to keep setting up new stuff rather than using and integrating what the club already has. Hub Ub was set up for this but hardly gets used.

The problem is that I only get around to writing a report every couple of months.

We're due to discuss the website at the next committee meeting, so I'll make sure we talk about streamlining things. If you've got any other specific suggestions, could you send me them before the meeting (5 September)?