more improvements

I’ll rundown a few other minor changes made to the forums and touch on a somewhat controversial addition to STR.

Minor Changes

• Background of photo pages in gallery are now a gray instead of teal color
• “Posting Rules” box which are the ones that say things like “you may post. you may create threads, etc” is now collapsed by default. Figured people rarely looked at this and it was just taking up space.
• Small CSS mishandling by Safari was fixed. The panoramic photo in the header would stretch all the way to the right and not be confined by the borders. One line of code fixed this.
• Guests now see a new ad. The first post of every thread now contains an ad for people who are unregistered or not logged in. Logged in users don’t see this ad.

Road forum added

Recently there have been ‘roadie’ threads spread out throughout the forums. Soon thereafter the roadies began to ask for their own forum. And they got it.

Yes, it’s true. SocalTrailRiders now has a roadie forum! I never envisioned STR having a roadie forum when I first built this site two years ago. However, I believe that the site has evolved and is as dynamic as any other community. The mountain bikers who also road ride made themselves heard and it was clear that there would be more roadie threads in the future.

Many argue to keep STR small. They believe that there isn’t enough activity to dilute the posts between even more forums. To a certain extent they are right. So I decided to come to this compromise:

• Ladies of STR was deleted
• Girls Club, a private girls-only forum, was kept
• The Roadie Hangout was added

This accomplished a few things. First, we got rid of the Ladies forum which was getting very little activity. I decided to keep girls club so that girls can still have a place for those women-only topics. The private girls club is not viewable by anyone else; this means that the deleting of Ladies of STR and the addition of the Roadie Hangout forum cancel each other out in terms of number of forums. And last but not least, all the present and future road-related threads will be kept off of the rest of the forums. This should make most everyone happy (I hope).