Results for the Zetland at Witton Castle
I'll hopefully get time to post today. Cool, grey and overcast.
Official.going good to firm and having walked it they look to have done a good job of the watering.
Looks like there'll be a big crowd as I was here an hour and a half before racing and had i been fifteen minutes later I wouldn't of got in the field overlooking the course.
Five go in the first. 2 3 5 8 and 9
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I can offer you two reasons, Darran.
First, the association with Pointing Pointers isn't necessarily a comfortable fit with absolutely every enthusiast in the sport. The relatively muted response to the invitation for Freeforum posters to join Pointing Pointers forumites in sponsoring races was perhaps as informative an indication of that as anything (FWIW, I would have needed to see a promise to include the names of both fora on the race title before considering shelling out).
I know I've personally struggled with the association a bit, considering my most abiding memory of Pointing Pointers in the proverbial flesh remains my witnessing the then presenting duo basically giggling and arsing their way through an entire afternoon at Revesby Park a few years back, rather than giving the sport at hand its due attention. Previewing (and superficially at that) the chances of just one runner in the fifteen or so minutes they had to analyse a match represented a nadir.
This was the sort of thing that JFF forumites used to take Ross Brierley et al to the cleaners over whenever they couldn't be bothered to look at a hunter chase properly on William Hill Radio (to the point of raising a complaint after one Folkestone race back in 2009 suffered). If Pointing Pointers' broadcasting output, on course or in podcasts, has become more disciplined since then, that's all well and good, but why create such a tardy first impression in the first place?
Second, the user interface on this forum remains a deterrent to anyone with comparatively limited or small-scale hardware/peripherals. I need the 53 x 30cm monitor I use primarily for the Day Job (library industry metadata is too small to read on much else) to be able to see sufficient threads, or engagements with a thread, for my personal satisfaction. I don't of course take that monitor trackside with me.
The mobile UI, with so much unused real estate on the screen and a hierarchical arrangement of threads that still errs on the side of confusing despite tweaks and the shared advice on navigation, is ultimately hard work to follow on my device.
The Freeforum UI unarguably has more of an earlier C21st feel to it. It's plain row after plain row. One can see how it wouldn't be promoted by the sport's stakeholders as the cutting edge front end of pointing discourse. But its simplicity works for it. Of the two fora, it's the one that feels more familiar in how it handles to JFF's Activeboards UI. And for a sport with no smaller a quorum of people wedded to familiarity and continuity than many, that counts for tons.
All this said, I still await the recently advertised relaunch of this forum's front end with interest and some hope.
gc