September Forums Update

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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:

1. 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.
2. 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!