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news
Elephant Bike 7Introducing road.cc's new community editor – here to help you get the most from the site
After more than 12 years focusing on writing news stories at road.cc my role here has recently changed to that of community editor. Here, I’ll explain what I will be doing and how it aims to give you, our readers, more opportunities to help shape our content and give you more of a voice on the site.
When I started working here back in summer 2009, road.cc operated from a tiny attic room in a Georgian townhouse in Bath – three people at a time was a bit of a squeeze. Now, we have 15 people working on the site full-time, and a further 15 or so regular contributors including reviewers.
Part of the ethos behind the site’s foundation was to nurture a club-like feeling, including for people who didn’t belong to an actual cycling club – if we weren’t the first in the sector to use that .cc domain, we were certainly among the very earliest, and it was no accident we chose it.
As the site has grown over the years, including with the launch of our sister sites eBikeTips and off.road.cc, the roles of individual members of the team has inevitably become more narrowly defined, and while there’s a lot of bouncing ideas off each other behind the scenes, we also have to focus on the job at hand – and, with the growth of the site and the volume of content we now produce daily, that’s made it increasingly hard to step back and see the bigger picture.
That’s why decided to create this new role – so we have someone who acts as a link between the road.cc team and you, the readers, without whom we’d have no site at all.
So, what does it involve? Well, for one, it’s about going through the comments you make, whether on articles on the site or on our social media channels, and ensuring that where we need to do something – answer a technical question, clarify some aspect of a news story or make a correction, or flag up a story idea one of you has put forward – that gets acted upon.
But it’s also about getting you more involved in the site, by encouraging you to interact with our content, for instance through knowing that if you do make a comment or suggestion, it will be read and, where necessary, get acted upon.
I’ll also be writing regularly on some of the wider issues affecting cycling here in the UK and further afield, whether for transport or as a sport – topics we already address of course in individual news stories, but ones where it is also worth taking a step back to look at the broader picture and prompt a discussion where you can have your say.
I know that our readership includes a broad variety of people united by the fact they ride bikes, for whatever purpose, and I’ve done a whole range of that myself – from daily commutes to the office back in the day and still using a single-speed as my preferred transport across London and beyond, to riding my Colnago through country lanes in the Cotswolds when I lived there, and using my ex-Royal Mail Elephant Bike to ferry my pup around town in her basket and get the weekly grocery shop home, plus a bit of bikepacking when the chance arises.
I love going to bike races both here and abroad, more likely these days as a fan rather than a journalist, and I’ve been to dozens of protests over the years calling for safer roads for all of us on bikes – plus, chances are that at 7pm on the last Friday of each month you’ll find me underneath Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank, waiting for Critical Mass to start.
Between all of that, there’s plenty we have in common and over the years I’ve got to know a lot of our readers both through social media and in person, and I’m looking forward to meeting more of you through my new role and helping ensure your voice is heard on the site.
So, if you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to sign up to the site so you can post comments, knowing that someone at this end will be reading them, and to interact with us on social media as well as raising any specific issues with me directly on community [at] road.cc.
It's your site – help us help you make the most of it!
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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22 comments
Congratulations on your new role.
If you're after feedback; please attempt to keep this site as apolitical as possible. Also within the comments it seems that more right wing posters are hounded out for comments they make whilst the left wing cadre are left alone - maybe it's the hive mentality!
Personally I'm fed up with it from both sides. I stopped reading and contributing to Bike Radar a number of years ago as it lost itself down the same hole. That site now seems a shadow of it's former self although I very rarely go there anymore.
ETA: While I'm at it - this is a British site so the date format is day, month, year. Today is not May 4th it's the 4th of May. And yes; the way the comments thread is odd.
Cycling and the provision for it, especially nowadays with the environmental crisis, is an inherently political issue, asking for a cycling website to be apolitical is ludicrous. I don't know any right-wing posters that have been "hounded out" for their comments, or at least not for their right-wing comments. There have been one or two right-wing posters who appear to have been removed for their deeply unpleasant personal attacks or racist statements, but that's a different matter. Just because you may not agree with the majority view that doesn't make it a "hive mentality", that just means that your beliefs are in the minority.
I think no news site or publication can be apolitical. If nothing else it's not going to cover all stories from all people. So the selection will always have some kind of bias. It's a reasonable balance for me - I would be suspicious if it was eg. all "Conservatives blocking cycling" even though that party is mostly in power because I am aware there are the cycle-phobic across the political spectrum.
If you mean "limit this just to reviews of gear, news about races and lists of places to ride" I'd disagree.
Comments - I'd say you're correct, that people with more "conservative" (small C) or "non-interventionist" (less "government" or rules - let the market / system run itself) views are fewer in the comments and more likely to get challenged. That's just a fact of groups or "club" - people cluster.
I still find a range of opinions / communication styles here and like this even if I'll disagree with / dislike some. I wouldn't agree with the "hounding out" exactly. There certainly are people here who will go on the attack more quickly or reach for insults and if there are more of one "faction" it will be harder for the minority here. I think that unless you've got a heavily moderated site this is a feature of any "club". If you have a solution for "running comments where everyone keeps to a high-minded level of civil debate" which doesn't involve a police state let us know!
Agree about threading.
Is it hounding or correcting?
I'd agree that the commenters are more left leaning, but there's some commenters that just post dog whistles and lies, so it's only correct that they're called out.
Besides, reality has a well-known left-wing bias.
I'd agree with trying to keep the articles reasonably balanced politically, but sometimes the nature of the discussion will inevitably be highly political (e.g. LTNs).
Do you want to give examples of when people have been forced to leave? And the comments that should have meant people should be have been forced to leave but were not because of them being politically left?
I know of only two obvious banned posters, one I took as from the left who then decided to mention that there was a Jewish Conspiracy NWO*, and a second one for racism. Although if you believe the second one, they weren't banned for racism but asked to have all their posts to be deleted, then came back as a new username SEVERAL TIMES to continue just trolling by making up stuff that we could see the reality from on video, stating several riders were too fat for cars to see around so were the cause of close passes (they were not) and other unplesantness like doxxing by searching for people offsite to use against them.
It is probably because of the second persons multiple returns that new users who show any right wing tendencies usually get jumped on, for example the non political name NototheEU arriving about the same time as the last ban, got jumped on because most thought it was PBU back for more, but pretty much is left alone as we now know it isn't the same person.
*Pretty sure this person also came back and was banned again when posting Covid Conspiracies.
Btbs, cibm, cfka
All the same person with stranger views on things.
Wearing a helmet whilst batting leads to more injuries ( no supporting data !)
I think new users got a hard time, as there was a flurry of trolls who signed up just after then and the benefit of the doubt was not given.
In part as there isn't much moderation so self policing came into effect and I'd say political stance was irrelevant.
It's extraordinarily hard to get banned from here. It requires repeated, egregious obnoxiousness usually in the form of xenophobia or abusiveness.
If conservative politics were all it took, then we'd have long ago banned rich_cb, for example. But we haven't, because he's not a git about it.
As others have pointed out, cycling is a political issue. It's not a party political issue especially though: all the main parties have a cadre of vehement anti-cycling loons and even the Greens' cycling policy leaves quite a lot to be desired. But decisions about how to allocate road space, how the justice system deals with road crime and so on, are political decisions.
All that said, please don't vote Tory on Thursday
I know - I've been trying for ages...
In the interests of balance, they all also have their cycling zealots.
Wait - what? Not wanting to categorise people (well - other than those where it's obvious) but I'd say more "libertarian" / "objectivist" *. Which sadly would barely rule out any of the main 3 now in England (I've little idea what the Liberals stand for - but do they?). Not so sure about Wales, but if rich_cb were more loudly separatist they might even sneak into the SNP. I'm not aware rich_cb identifies as anything other than "not Labour - in Wales at least" and "a supporter of our new self-driving overlords".
* Obvs with a mixed collection of views on issues (animal welfare, environmentalism, Euroscepticism). Not sure if a fan of Campag groupsets or squirrels.
This is spot on!
4th of May be with you.
Greetings from near the Firth of 4th of May (featuring the Isle of May).
Congratulations Simon!
Congratulations on the new role and good luck. One thing that really bugs me about the community aspect of this site is related to the way in which comments are threaded. I quite often see that there has been a reply to an article or forum post in the Latest Comments ticker but when I click the link I can sometimes find it really hard to actually find the comment. Sometimes there seems to be no logic as to how the threaded comments work. Sorting that out could make the site much less frustrating to navigate and encourage users to interact more.
Seconded, and it would be really useful as well if one could see all of the comments made by a particular poster - or oneself - in one place. At the moment it looks as though that was intended, as when one hovers over a username there is a live link, but it just takes you to "403 no bikes allowed in here". Quite often I think oh so-and-so posted a useful link to that a couple of days ago, but without the facility to see their comments it's almost impossible to re-find. In the same area it would also be useful if there was an option for searches to include the comments section as well, at present if one searches for, say, "Bristol", the search engine only returns articles that have mentioned Bristol, not any mention of that fair city in the comments.
Congratulations on, and good luck in, the new job, Simon!
Talking of the search function, I would really like the forum to be searchable. There must be reams of useful information in there from the site community (according to the stats on the front page, there are nearly 14,000 topics on the Bike Forum), but it doesn't seem to be searchable - I can only scroll through pages and pages of topics. If I'm looking for advice I therefore just have to resort to starting a new post apologetically with "I'm sure this has been covered before but..."
EDIT: or using Google, which will find results from the forum when the road.cc search function won't. E.g. "site:road.cc "pictures of your bike")
Also there needs to be a flag button to report breaking the rules or basically baiting which was the main problem. Then 3 strikes and out.
The threading under the initial comments does go weird but I'm guessing it is because there is only one extra indentation so every reply so any further obvious linkages are not there.
Still it is a 1000 times better the previously where replies appeared anywhere. I would suggest to change the threaded to show Newest First (although hopefully you know what they were replying to).
Perhaps it could post the latest thread at the top but immediately focus on the latest comment via the hyperlink. Also, highlighting the comment in a different colour could help.
I agree with Rendel too about the 403 no bikes allowed thing too. There is a thriving community here, but I feel sometimes it is despite the site functionality and could be improved dramatically.
All the best in your new role!
Best of luck in the new role.