UKC

IFSC commentator Matt Groom reports from an emotional first round of the IFSC Boulder World Cup season.

It was time to return to the highest level of competition climbing and jump into the 2023 IFSC season. Last weekend we were back in Hachioji, a buzzing micro-city within the sprawl of Tokyo and in the same arena where the 2019 World Championships - the first Olympic selection event for Tokyo 2020 - took place. 

Read more

Replays still seem to be available on The Olympic Channel for free, even if you're geoblocked from YouTube.

Did anyone try to watch live on Eurosport? Was it actually on or did it get bumped by some motorsport which seemed to be a common complaint last year? Are the replays available on Eurosport? ... Not that I have any intention of subscribing in order to just watch climbing, but I am hopeful that paywalling these competitions is going to be such an obvious mistake that the IFSC have no choice but to restore YouTube access.

And I was telling a friend in France last week... "At least UKC don't put spoilers in their competition headlines anymore" 🤦

Yeah, that caught me out too. I thought I was safe to look on the forum because I understood there was an understanding that results wouldn’t appear in thread titles.

As it turned out, the men’s comp wasn’t all that great anyway with the problems being over cooked. At least I saw the women’s live.

For what it’s worth, yes, Eurosport subscription provides access to the replays…

Thanks for the spoiler in the topic title 😡

Maybe either:

1. let us watch it live.

or

2. Don't put spoilers up before the replay is available...

🙄

Replays are available on the Olympic Channel (often a bit late and quite hard to find - either try to find a news report from the event and hope it's been uploaded, or just search 'boulder' or 'lead' etc. and it usually comes up, although confusingly often without a year/date to distinguish from previous events and with old cover images...)

https://olympics.com/en/sport-events/2023-ifsc-sport-climbing-world-cup-bou...

We understand that the Eurosport deal (and time zone differences in this case) make things more difficult to watch, but as a news website we can't afford to hide names from the title for SEO purposes. No other sports news website does this. I did hide the result from the forum post, but it must have reverted to the original after saving a new version of the article.

So, going forward, do you recommend we should avoid UKC after IFSC comps, if we want to avoid spoilers, before we’ve managed to catch up with viewing?

I'd been eagerly awaiting the start of the comp season for months. Unfortunately I accidentally caught a glimpse of the winners whilst browsing the forum. You were so quick on the gun reporting it that the comp had practically only just finished. The full comp is about 12 hours worth of entertainment and therefore I think it's safe to assume that most people won't watch the whole thing live. That is however, 12 hours which is very much ruined by including spoilers in the report title. I don't want to have to avoid the forum for the rest of the comp season but I will certainly do that if you continue to include spoilers in the thread titles and news feed. Please please rethink this in the future.

Might it not be a better idea simply to avoid the forums immediately after a comp? That way you suffer hardly any inconvenience and everyone else gets the benefits they have come to expect.

That would be ideal but unfortunately every time someone comments on the report, it bumps it to the top of the forum. Now I'm part of the problem! Also there's practically a comp every week for the next couple of months so I know I'm not always going to have the chance to be up to date.

I think the solution would be to simply put the result in the report but just not in the title. It would not be a massive inconvenience for those who want to know the result to make a single click to see it. Nobody would then be miffed or avoiding the forum for 8 months of the year...

I've tried turning off the news bit of the forum to solve the problem but it still seems to show up. Maybe another solution would be if we could choose to simply turn off the comp results reporting?

That's what we've done with the first two events in the forum, omitted the names. There was an error last week when an update to the article refreshed the article title in the forum and I didn't realise, but other than that it will be omitted.

We can't omit the names from the title - it's poor for our SEO and defeats our purpose as a news website.

We've added the facility to choose a separate Forum title for the News post now.

Before, we posted the News and then manually edited the Forum title to remove the names. Updating the News post also updates the Forum post tho, so this got reset with the names in by accident. We can now set the Forum title and lock it in place.