MTR

[Brandon]

Not having been on mtr for quite some time (several years now), I came across a post by Scott regarding mtr in the cable guardrail thread,

Don't know if you're referring to me or not, but by requiring sources I'm attempting to encourage the members to do research and think about it before posting, thus raising the tone of discourse. If you want no moderation whatsoever, by all means, MTR is still available, but I think if you spend enough time around there you'd be happy to have moderation. The mod-free environment there directly results in Carl Rogers, Racist Roadsign Randy, and other terribly cool people like that.

Also, please note that our moderators often do not post in a moderation capacity. We like to join in on the discussion and express our opinions as much as you. Sometimes it can be misinterpreted. As a result whenever I speak as a moderator I try to color the words purple to help accentuate that fact.

What the heck happened over there?  I remember it being a fairly friendly environment back in the late 1990s.  Now, half the posts there (I just looked) seem to be flame wars or trolling. 

BTW, many thanks to Alex, Adam, Scott, and the other webmasters here for providing a troll-free discussion board. 
It it easy, friendly, and fun to read and converse.

[froggie]

The usual trolls.  However, I am of the opinion that MTR is a medium where it's easy to ignore those posters you do not wish to read.  Nevermind that the only way to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in such a medium is to increase the signal...i.e. post relevant material.  Instead, people have simply given up on MTR, and it's never going to improve if they choose such a route.

[Dougtone]

I'm under the impression that part of the downfall of MTR (and Usenet in general) is that many ISPs have discontinued providing Usenet access to its customers.  When that happened, some people just said "forget it" to MTR.  Also, there's a larger number of choices in social media as far as roads go these days.  You have MTR, you have the various Yahoo Groups, the AARoads Forum, Facebook, and the list goes on.

[agentsteel53]

Racist Roadsign Randy

is he the one that attempted to adopt that section of I-55 in the name of the Ku Klux Klan?

[Scott5114]

No...Randy could actually be an interesting person to talk to, as he has gone around visiting DOTs and obtaining a huge box of sign plans, but instead decided he'd rather post to MTR about how much black people suck and how horrible C.C. Slater is for not being racist. Not worth spending time on.

[agentsteel53]

hmm, so if I don a white robe and a pointy hat, I could get my hands on some sign specs?  intriguing...

[WillWeaverRVA]

I stopped posting there when this forum opened. This place has a great deal more maturity, as it lacks the trolls that plague MTR and will continue to plague it indefinitely. It's still a great resource and was once a great place for conversation, but the advent of Calrog and the others have made it unreadable and not worth the effort.

[froggie]

As I mentioned before, the "advent of Calrog and others" can easily be avoided, and MTR will never improve if people simply give up on it.

[corco]

Is there any reason for it to improve, though? Usenet is dead for roughly 99% of all internet users. MTR is just not a medium that's going to attract new roadgeeks, especially now that there's more modern options (like this!) out there. MTR outlived most of Usenet as a successful venue for road conversation, and that's really cool, but I'm of the opinion it's time to move on. Besides that, without a constant stream of new users, it's going to just be the same people having a conversation, and there's only so much a singular group of people can talk about on the internet before it devolves into flame wars.

Neither ISP I use with any regularity even has Usenet access- so I'm stuck on Google Groups. Then it becomes a deal where I can wade through dozens of spam/calrog posts in hopes of finding something interesting or come here and not have to do all that. The choice isn't that hard, and for any currently quiet roads enthusiasts who are maybe looking to come out of their shell and become part of a larger community, or aspiring roadgeeks looking to contribute, the choice shouldn't be that hard for them either. I think that's what really keeps a community "fresh" and keeps it from becoming MTR- is a constant influx of new people and a community willing to welcome those people in. More modern forums such as this one have both. MTR has neither, and when you factor in difficulty of use, it becomes clear that it's time to just put MTR out of its misery.

[vdeane]

The forum also has something MTR will never have - moderation.  Calrog would probably get an instant ban here.

I only skim through the subject lines in MTR, as once in a while there will be something interesting there.

[WillWeaverRVA]

Is there any reason for it to improve, though? Usenet is dead for roughly 99% of all internet users. MTR is just not a medium that's going to attract new roadgeeks, especially now that there's more modern options (like this!) out there. MTR outlived most of Usenet as a successful venue for road conversation, and that's really cool, but I'm of the opinion it's time to move on. Besides that, without a constant stream of new users, it's going to just be the same people having a conversation, and there's only so much a singular group of people can talk about on the internet before it devolves into flame wars.

This. Also, I'm also dealing with the gradual loss of access to Usenet, and comparing the quality of the posts here to the quality of the posts there, it's not worth my time to have to configure newsreaders or sift through spam posts on Google Groups to continue reading or posting there too much.

[N9JIG]

I too have pretty much given up on MTR, I read it occasionally and post infrequently. Obviously I prefer the Roadgeek Yahoo List (I started it years ago) but have recently took a step back and transferred ownership to H.B. I filter out most of the noise on MTR but there just isn't too much signal these days and Usenet is dieing a slow death anyway.

I just started visiting AARoads recently and so far like what I see. While I will still stick with Roadgeek for most of my online road stuff I might start frequenting AARoads more often. I am still torn between the natural simplicity of an email reflector with the formidable power of a vBulletin system like this.

[CanesFan27]

Here's my view...where this forum is strong is that new (younger) folks in the hobby can ask/find threads on things that were really popular in mtr 10 years ago.  Think of all the canonical lists or I found this about routes in New York from the 1950s those kind of discussions.  Things that were relatively new to everyone then - because it was the first online community of people with the same interest - has become pretty much common knowledge now.  Many of these topics, if posted to mtr, are usually overlooked by folks, like myself, that have been around for 10 years or so.  This forum does allow someone to find that thread an they and other new folks can keep it alive.  There are a lot of folks that are college aged and younger in this forum, and it will be interesting how their involvement in the hobby grows or wanes in the years ahead.  A ton of people have come and gone - for one reason or the other.

USenet is a slow death and people do and have moved on.  However, this forum has had its drama also.  I joined after the whole blowout with that middle school kid in San Francisco died down.  So it's not immune.   I have followed froggie's idea of posting again to mtr - and have found on items I have posted (I-73 and other topics) discussed more in depth there or in yahoo groups than this forum.  Also, I have received more suggestions on various trips in those forums (yahoo specifically).  So his point does have a lot of merit.

So far, I see this forum for more of the trivia/sign geeks/MUTCD etc. vs. discussions on various issues and news that you find in the regional yahoo groups or even mtr.  I am sure that this forum will likely evolve into it though.   Personally, I've evolved in more of discussion of various current projects and research and the trivial stuff is mundane (Lists of wrong way multiplexes, sequential concurrences, etc.) but then again that's just me. 

Each forum has it's place, it's just up to the user to participate how they wish.

[Dougtone]

While I would prefer one worldwide discussion forum on roads, the truth of the matter is that it likely won't happen.  So at this time, we have a number of different ways to discuss our hobby, such as MTR, Yahoo Groups, AARoads forum, SABRE, etc.  You do have some people who prefer to just stick with Usenet, it's what they're familiar with and see no reason to have to change.  Some people prefer the e-mail format of Yahoo Groups, some people prefer the AARoads forum, or perhaps more than one forum. 

AARoads is a great place to have a road discussion forum, since it does tend to be a good starting off point for people in the hobby.  What I mean by starting off is that that when someone searches for something like "Interstate 83 in Baltimore", AARoads (or one of its other sites) comes up among the top items in the search, and then people can easily find the Forum or whatever else they are looking for from there.  This is similar to how I started working my way through the hobby, when one night in 1999, out of curiousity, I wondered if there was a web page on the Sunken Meadow Parkway, found Steve Anderson's nycroads.com and the rest is history.

Also, I find that if you post the same question to MTR, the Yahoo Groups and AARoads Forum, you may get different sets of responses from each.  I recently posted a question for suggestions from an upcoming trip to Arizona.  I received some responses about scenic drives from one place, and some comments about SPUIs from others.  And nothing about colored Loop route shields.  So yes, different forums about the same topic may yield different responses to questions.

[J N Winkler]

I gave up on MTR three months ago.  I had had Carl Rogers killfiled for years, but I reached the end of my patience when I realized I had to add someone else to my killfile because he was using one genuine road-related post to, in effect, pay for 20 others full of stridently anti-Obama rants.  I added him to the killfile, but discovered that it did not make all of his previous posts vanish from my newsreader (Thunderbird), said "The hell with it," and unsubscribed.  I have looked at it just twice since then, in Google Groups.  I missed it for about three days and then just got on with things.

For the record, I have never had Randy Hersh in my killfile.  My MTR killfile is still programmed into Thunderbird and it has just two names in it--Carl Rogers and the other individual.

There are many causes of MTR's decline and most of them have been touched on in this thread.  There are a few others, however.  First, MTR is a text-based Usenet newsgroup, which means that for certain types of content--such as photos and PNG rasterizations of sign drawings--it cannot really compete with Web forums such as this one, which have the ability to serve up that content without the need to click on links (which may in turn require launching a separate browser application).  I have been doing sign drawings for close to 10 years now, and when the Roadgeek fonts became available in 2004 I was able to start producing some quite good pattern-accurate drawings, but I never felt comfortable uploading them to a Web server and providing links to them on MTR.  "Hey, click through and look at what I drew"--not my style.

Second, for a variety of reasons such as the advent of Carl Rogers and the gradual diminution of ISP provision for Usenet, MTR has become an attractive platform for gang formation.  There are now several cadres of highly involved regulars who will never leave MTR, no matter what, and there is a substantial amount of back-channel communication which makes itself evident in obscure references in MTR which only the "in" people understand.  That in turn makes people like me question whether we will find an audience if we post something purely road-related.  Others feel excluded from the "gangs," even if they themselves wouldn't really want to join them, and those feelings of exclusion often prompt them to firehose MTR along lines calculated to provoke:  "All other road-related websites are shit," "Do not accept imitations in lieu of the real thing," "People who run road-related websites are incapable of getting laid," "The blacks are awful," "Skinheads are invariably racist," "I work in the cash-based economy so I have tax-free income," etc.  It isn't really possible to talk people down from that kind of firehosing behavior if they have convinced themselves that they are standing up to bullies.  In modern American society racism in particular is the unforgivable sin, and lots of people think that licenses unforgivable acts to punish it, so watching Randy versus the rest of MTR is a bit like seeing Monte Cassino fought with words.

The emergence of MTR gangs means that there are now a lot of people who alternate between making sensible, road-related posts and running with the gang.  One person might provide links to a sign gallery in one post, and say something along the lines of "Randy/Carl/whoever is awful" in another post.  Because I use Thunderbird as an integrated mail/news client, I am essentially limited to putting threads on ignore or killfiling individual people.  (The fact that the killfile is not retroactive is a big disadvantage for me.  When I decide to killfile a person, I want him completely out of my sight, so I don't want to see his posts when I review old threads.)  I can't really deal with the people who alternate between running with the gangs and making road-related posts unless I use a separate newsreader and develop a score-based news filter, as Mark Roberts has recommended several times in MTR.  MTR is supposed to be entertainment and this is, frankly, too much like hard work.

This said, MTR still remains a good source for breaking news.  I think it is still worth looking at occasionally for TxDOT-related news, for example (I try to stay current because I still have more sign design sheets from TxDOT than any other road agency on Earth and the recent trends toward CDAs and design-build procurerment are a direct threat to that).  But it makes more sense for me to find those through Google Groups searches rather than wade through Carl versus ECHM, most of MTR versus Randy, etc.

I am sad to see MTR come to this pass.  Paul Wolf was kind enough to call me out by name (or, rather, posting handle) about a month ago as one of the consistent high-value posters, so of course I am sorry to walk away from that.  But the low signal-to-noise ratio has been unforgiving reality for years now, and I simply don't see how that will change short of a major technological innovation like easy score-based filtering.

[agentsteel53]

I simply don't see how that will change short of a major technological innovation like easy score-based filtering.

I didn't quote the whole thing, but at some point you did note that there was an entrenchment of "MTR and nowhere else" attitude.  Is this attitude prevalent among the quality-content posters, or just those that make noise? 

depending on the answer to that question, the solution may be social, and not technological - somehow convince the high-quality posters to switch over to other road forums.  This would likely imply leaving MTR entirely, because who wants to have discussions fragmented by the fact that they are held in two locations.  I do not know how to make the switch less harsh than it seems at first glance ("everybody start posting on AARoads forum all at once").

right now this forum is definitely oriented towards sign geeks but that is not an innate feature of its design; if people started talking about other aspects of road geekery here, then by definition that one complaint would vanish.  But if precisely one person starts discussing the latest TxDOT project and no one else notices, then he's gonna give up and go back to MTR. 

Damn inertia.

[agentsteel53]

firehose MTR along lines calculated to provoke:  "All other road-related websites are shit," "Do not accept imitations in lieu of the real thing," "People who run road-related websites are incapable of getting laid," "The blacks are awful," "Skinheads are invariably racist," "I work in the cash-based economy so I have tax-free income," etc.

also: could you please define "firehose"?  I cannot glark from context whether it's a pro-MTR or anti-MTR behavior.

[J N Winkler]

I didn't quote the whole thing, but at some point you did note that there was an entrenchment of "MTR and nowhere else" attitude.  Is this attitude prevalent among the quality-content posters, or just those that make noise?

I'd say it is entrenched among both, but to a higher degree among the noisemakers because they would have the most to lose if MTR died and their audience went away.  My reasoning for this is that quality content will sooner or later find an audience--not necessarily on MTR.

depending on the answer to that question, the solution may be social, and not technological - somehow convince the high-quality posters to switch over to other road forums.  This would likely imply leaving MTR entirely, because who wants to have discussions fragmented by the fact that they are held in two locations.  I do not know how to make the switch less harsh than it seems at first glance ("everybody start posting on AARoads forum all at once").

A lot of people are keeping feet in multiple camps.  For a while I was following MTR, SABRE, and SkyscraperCity in addition to AARoads.  There are others, less internationally oriented than I am, who follow MTR and the Yahoo groups as well as AARoads.  (I don't do the Yahoo groups because they tend to focus heavily on parochial issues in places I haven't visited for 10 or more years--my interest is more in design problems.  I do belong to GreatLakesRoads but all of the list emails go to an address I check perhaps once or twice a year.)

right now this forum is definitely oriented towards sign geeks but that is not an innate feature of its design; if people started talking about other aspects of road geekery here, then by definition that one complaint would vanish.  But if precisely one person starts discussing the latest TxDOT project and no one else notices, then he's gonna give up and go back to MTR.

Yes, that is a problem, but in the long run I think it will be overcome by the structural advantages AARoads has over MTR, like moderation and a high proportion of people who are here to listen and learn.  Membership is also rather small, and perhaps geographically not that evenly distributed, so once the forum grows past those particular limitations, it will have no trouble attracting content.

firehose MTR along lines calculated to provoke:  "All other road-related websites are shit," "Do not accept imitations in lieu of the real thing," "People who run road-related websites are incapable of getting laid," "The blacks are awful," "Skinheads are invariably racist," "I work in the cash-based economy so I have tax-free income," etc.

also: could you please define "firehose"?  I cannot glark from context whether it's a pro-MTR or anti-MTR behavior.

It's used metaphorically--what I mean is that there are people in MTR who post either to keep others on the defensive or to manipulate them into acting in a certain way, in much the same way police forces in Southern cities in the 1960's would use firehoses against blacks in the street.  For example, Carl Rogers likes to shill his websites by implying that all other roadgeek websites are worthless imitations of his, run by people who live with their parents and have no girlfriends.  This prompts people to respond predictably:  our websites are better than his; Adam Prince has a girlfriend, and she's sexy-looking; etc.--never once realizing that Carl has manipulated them into letting him set the agenda.

Meanwhile, Randy has a favorite trope--he will post a link to a crime-pages story, usually featuring black-on-black violence, and direct it at C.C. Slater:  "Look what your svartzie buddies did.  You ought to be so proud."  (This is a paraphrase, but svartzie and you should be so proud are standard taglines.)  Once started in this way, a thread can go on, and in the past has gone on, for hundreds and hundreds of posts, many of which contain variations of the phrases "Racist Roadsine Randy," "Rancid Randy," etc.  Randy has now picked up a sock puppet, "Randy Hersch," probably run by his opponents (why do Gentiles seem to think it is acceptable to misspell Jewish names?), who pops up occasionally to say things like "Black people are awful" and so on.

With that kind of intense behavior going on, people who come to MTR to discuss roads fade into the landscape--we're just passersby.  We have to ask ourselves:  should we killfile various people and just try to have our own discussions?  With Carl Rogers that particular solution is a no-brainer, but with C.C. Slater it is not so straightforward since he does make road-related posts.  Randy is also formidably knowledgeable about Interstate signing and his posts on that topic are usually well worth reading.  There are others I have considered killfiling on general grounds of idiocy, but even they occasionally make good posts.

[Chris]

I became active on road forums in the early 2000's, and it always surprised me about the fact there wasn't really one American roadgeek forum, while British, German, French and Dutch road forums popped up between 1999 and 2003. Things like newsgroups/usenet/MTR was pretty unknown territory for me, as such kind of internet activity has died out long ago in Europe. I didn't find out about MTR until like a year ago. I knew AAroads for a few years, but it wasn't a discussion board back then. I found some forums about trucking, roadtrips, and other forums which had subforums about highways, but it wasn't until early 2009 that the AAroads forum was founded, which, to me, looked like the first organized roadgeek forum.

I had dial-up internet until 2002, and after we got broadband access, a whole new world about roads opened up to me. I started following the German Autobahn-online.de forums, but eventually lost interest in that forum due to it's horribly antiquated looks. Then I joined the Dutch wegenforum in 2003, I am active there to this day. My interest has grown since, expanding all over Europe and North America. As digital cameras became more common in the mid-2000's, I found out many more people enjoyed taking pictures of highways. I joined the Skyscrapercity forums in 2006, mostly for the Highways & Autobahns section, which wasn't much back then, but had increased activity from mid-2007. I also have an account on the Swiss Autobahnen.ch forum, and the SABRE forum, but I gotta admit, following the wegenforum and Highways & Autobahns already consumes most of my online time.

I tried to get some interest for MTR, I didn't like it's antiquated layout and the fact there are a lot of trolls there and hotlinking photos doesn't seem to work there either. I have written an entire Dutch-language encyclopedia about every single freeway-standard road and most U.S. Highways in the United States and much of Europe, and even into other countries like Japan, South Korea and Brazil on the wegenwiki, a subsidiary of the Dutch wegenforum.

[vdeane]

I think a main reason is inertia.  The sites in Europe are probably newer and as such bypassed usenet and newsgroups entirely.  Meanwhile in the US, MTR had already been long established.

[Dougtone]

depending on the answer to that question, the solution may be social, and not technological - somehow convince the high-quality posters to switch over to other road forums.  This would likely imply leaving MTR entirely, because who wants to have discussions fragmented by the fact that they are held in two locations.  I do not know how to make the switch less harsh than it seems at first glance ("everybody start posting on AARoads forum all at once").

right now this forum is definitely oriented towards sign geeks but that is not an innate feature of its design; if people started talking about other aspects of road geekery here, then by definition that one complaint would vanish.  But if precisely one person starts discussing the latest TxDOT project and no one else notices, then he's gonna give up and go back to MTR. 

Damn inertia.

Word of mouth advertising has proven to be effective.  While you probably don't want to be constantly advertising the AARoads Forum on MTR or the Yahoo Groups, occasionally advertising the forum may not be a bad idea.  Also, encouraging people to check out the forum may be beneficial for getting a wider and more diverse audience, so the AARoads Forum isn't totally slanted towards one aspect of the hobby.  Granted, you will find people who won't do anything different than what they do now, but a little encouragement won't hurt.

I'll agree that the AARoads Forum is currently slanted towards the sign side of things, but one way to increase discussion about road design, road construction, road history, etc. is to post about those things and hopefully others will take notice and feel comfortable contributing to those discussions.

[english si]

While I would prefer one worldwide discussion forum on roads, the truth of the matter is that it likely won't happen.

There's a language barrier and that it'll be full of country cliques.

I think a main reason is inertia.  The sites in Europe are probably newer and as such bypassed usenet and newsgroups entirely.  Meanwhile in the US, MTR had already been long established.

The history of SABRE is that it part split out of MTR (as it was US dominated and there were few British people), part was new. Originally it was an MSN newsgroup/forum hybrid to discuss one website, but the chance to discuss UK roads with a high signal-noise ratio (not 1 or 2% of MTR anymore) meant that people decamped there and it gathered inertia and members and MTR wasn't a place British roadgeeks went as there was no point anymore - more people and more discussion on SABRE. Then as the membership got increasingly annoyed with the awful functionality of MSN Groups (and Yahoo groups - there was one that dealt with some of the running - sometimes as much as 30 messages a day, almost as much as the MSN page), we examined alternatives, settling with phpbb forums. Membership was surprisingly strong by the end of the MSN days, given how annoying the system was, but really boomed after the move to phpbb.

I joined the Skyscrapercity forums in 2006, mostly for the Highways & Autobahns section, which wasn't much back then, but had increased activity from mid-2007.

This is the closest thing there is to a world forum. However there isn't that much discussion on those places where there's other places to talk about it. It thus becomes eastern European roads dominate. I don't mind that, however, I was there for quite a while and I didn't like the large amount of those weren't road-geeks (but scraper-geeks) and the net-police that weren't mods (I've found a lot of them on various UK railway forums, often far more anal and far more sheltered). I think it was more the people in other sections of skyscraper city than Highways and Transportation (UK transport, subways, European railways) that meant I couldn't be bothered anymore. However H&T had lots of posts I couldn't be that bothered about - lots of in-country discussion and so on.

[Chris]

I joined the Skyscrapercity forums in 2006, mostly for the Highways & Autobahns section, which wasn't much back then, but had increased activity from mid-2007.

This is the closest thing there is to a world forum. However there isn't that much discussion on those places where there's other places to talk about it. It thus becomes eastern European roads dominate.

This is mainly attributed to three factors;
1) most road construction happens in Eastern/Central Europe these days.
2) People from those countries are very enthusiast in sharing that with the world, they want to show countries like Poland and Hungary are not poor anymore, and have very good roads.
3) A major problem in "old Europe" is that people from the "big four" (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) are not very good in English. They usually know some very basic English, but most are unable to participate in a discussion on a somewhat more advanced level of English. So far for western education... There are more than enough interesting issues in Germany, Spain, Italy or France, but most posts in those topics aren't even by natives, but by foreigners (like me). This is also a factor because French/German/Spanish language road forums already exist. Maybe they don't feel the need to discuss/show it to people from other countries.

[english si]

The UK Motorways thread on SSC, despite being relevant to English speakers, is pretty awful, mostly as the intellegent conversation is elsewhere (OK, not a lot happens in the UK wrt Motorways). Ireland is slightly better, as stuff is happening, but SABRE (and boards.ie) take most of the news (which tends to get posted everywhere) and most of the intelligent/informed conversation. There's a critical mass that has been reached in Hungary, Poland, etc, so the standard and quantity of discussion is raised on the whole as there's a lot of informed people there and there's nowhere else really for that discussion (that I know of).

That said there does seem to be a lot of people without much common sense on H&A - check out the discussion as to what the red lines mean on a map of the GB motorway network, after they had been explained by the person who posted the original map.

[MikeTheActuary]

Word of mouth advertising has proven to be effective.  While you probably don't want to be constantly advertising the AARoads Forum on MTR or the Yahoo Groups, occasionally advertising the forum may not be a bad idea.

FWIW, my mtr participation declined from mostly-lurking for a couple of years to total abandonment (and canceling my NNTP server access) about a year or so ago.

I found aaroads recently by noticing in my Wordpress stats how folks were finding the Roadgeek fonts.