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#openbeta

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So excited to announce that the OpenBeta mobile app for android is available to download on the google play store! A huge thanks to our many volunteers who worked on this important part of Our project :tada:

We are still in beta testing mode looking for app feedback- provide any improvements via the play store or DM us!

Vichy97 published a new alpha version of the OpenBeta app, with these changes!

Ok the new version is available for download! To know if you are on the right version, it's 1.0.0-alpha04. Some of the changes include

  • map scale bar
  • map compass
  • "user location" button for map
  • satellite layer for map
  • "view on map" button for areas
  • Lots of small map changes for things like labels and borders to make the map a bit cleaner
  • ability to edit ticks
  • ability to filter climbs by difficulty or type
  • ability to zoom in on images
  • fix timezones issues for ticks
  • lots of tick ui improvements
  • several crash fixes
    And a ton small ui fixes and improvements. Too many to list here.

Vichy97 provided this update on the Discord #mobile-dev channel yesterday!

Another day, another feature. The main items remaining before release are the profile screen, the about screen (to include open betas mission and the ability to leave feedback or report bugs), the ability to tick climbs and upload images (other editing will come in a future release), and deeplinks. Other than those items, just styling and bug fixes/UI improvements. Getting close to a release!

Continued thread

There is a lot of neat stuff about this platform, but already I'm sad to see that they are scraping other platforms and appear to be relicensing the content to CC0.
Their discord is full of discussion where they debate whether that's even legal.
😑🤦

So, I'll be avoiding OpenBeta for now.

Even if there are paid features, it seems mountainproject.com is the active community.

Mountain ProjectRock Climbing Guides: Routes, Photos & Forum | Mountain ProjectFind rock climbing routes, photos, and guides for every state, along with experiences and advice from fellow climbers.

Awhile back I did a #FollowFriday for climbing news publications. Since then, the instance actually migrated to a new address and it's likely the followers were lost.

So I wanted to do another one again, this time with the new addresses under the #OpenBeta banner!

If you want to follow the general news feed (which is all of the above except for the Ontario Alliance of Climbers and the YouTube channels):

If you want to follow only the videos feed

The admins:

Thanks!

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!

OpenBeta Forumsbean👁️🫦👁️ just a silly little guy Contact: brankin@mail.openbeta.io

I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!

(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)

During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben (@bean@community.openbeta.io and also @bean@uvix.cc)... stuff I'm sure you've come across:

  • Fragmented nature of conversations
  • The idea of an instance
  • Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model

... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.

Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to mere mortals laymen non-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.

All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with @andypiper@macaw.social on documentation!

That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io