Hello and welcome to the OpenBeta Forums' September update!

It's been a pretty wild couple months here as @bean and I try to set things up here.

To give you a bit of history, before these forums were re-branded under the OpenBeta banner, it served as a news aggregator for climbing news publications. I was finding that I was missing certain important events (related to the 2024 Olympic qualifier series, mostly) and wanted one single place to check for climbing news. To achieve that, I turned to my old friend RSS (remember that?) in order to proactively pull in content from all sorts of publications, @Gripped, @climbing, @HowNOT2, etc...

All of that still remains, and can be viewed in the @news and @videos categories.

By August I teamed up with @viet and @bean to re-brand the forums to expand OpenBeta's social reach. The idea of running a forum paired very nicely with OpenBeta's mission to advocate for a free exchange of beta and ideas, as well as an underlying current of maintaining freedom of content ownership.

We want the OpenBeta forums to be your one-stop shop for climbing-related news and discussion. Help us make it happen by joining the conversation today!

A couple new items this month to introduce:

You don't need to actually visit the site to be kept up-to-date. You can register your for push notifications and receive updates straight to your device. This works in-tandem with the in-app notifications, and email notifications/digests. We updated the main homepage to a more "feed-style" concept, which highlights content more than a traditional category/topic layout. There are obviously many opinions on whether this is preferable or not, but in the meantime, the original category listing layout can be found at /categories.

N.B. The NodeBB team has generously provided hosting for OpenBeta, and in exchange, we get to test our brand-new functionality before it is released, win-win!

I think my son knows what Discord is!

Our wonderful fiscal host, the Open Collective Foundation, has made the difficult decision to cease operations by the end of 2024 (read the official statement).

Fiscal host, Topo drawing and more

Our wonderful fiscal host, the Open Collective Foundation, has made the difficult decision to cease operations by the end of 2024 (read the official statement).

(openbeta.substack.com)

How to map climbs and crags on OpenStreetMap

Live event (6/22): OpenStreetMap for Climbers

How to map climbs and crags on OpenStreetMap

(openbeta.substack.com)