UKC

Please can you help UKC by filling out our User Survey. In return you'll be entered into our prize draw, which includes a whole host of amazing products!!

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In the traditional spirit of questionnaire surveys on UKC, for the question about foreign trips, I suggest you need an option between 'once a year' and 'never'.

Thanks for the feedback, that was added this afternoon.

To add to my responses in the Rockfax section - I think the quality of Rockfax guidebooks generally sits somewhere between good and excellent, but there's been at least one absolute shocker published with multiple clearly incorrect route descriptions or topos, almost as if the guidebook writer was writing from second-hand information.

Also, an option for people who climb outside once a week, but not at the weekend 😉

Once again the influence of the grey (climbers’ ) pound overlooked

Hi - could you add an option to specify which apps you use other than those listed.

When you click on "other" no box appears to specify as requested.

thanks

Completed.

Too late to change now I expect, but as I buy kit relatively infrequently limiting responses to the last 12 months is not helpful. I would give a completely different range of suppliers, manufacturers etc for each of the previous years. Also, I can't easily remember what I bought when! Probably "in the last 5 years" would have given more accurate answers. Then, I could just have thought about my current kit and responded accordingly. 

I put income before tax - after tax I'm in the next lower bracket. Is that what you meant?

For my climbing/mountaineering activities I limited my response to what I do regularly now, in my seventies. Including my experience over 50 years would have resulted in a much longer list!

Martin

Hilleberg and Skoda missing from the kit list?

Also Decathlon and non-specialists like M&S for (e.g.,) base-layers (you can go climbing without investing massive amounts in 'specialist' - aka expensive - clothing).

The areas of England to chose from for your location are interesting!

Also Peter Storm.

Also charity shops (various)

Yes, Cumbria has gone and we live in Westmorland now

This looks to be working fine here. Is there a county missing?

What Web Browser are you using please? The input box shows after clicking Other for me.

but Simond (owned by Decathlon) is listed. Many non UK brands missing, were Millet or Odlo on the list ?

The list isn't supposed to include all brands in fact we heavily pruned it from the previous surveys since it had become too long and unwieldy. The list is very much for our benefit since it targets the brands that are most relevant to us as a business. Apologies if your favourite isn't included.

Alan

Good survey.

I was surprised Wedge Climbing wasn't listed among the Youtube climbing channels. Personally I rate it as the current best channel.

Hi - Chrome.  It was the first question about apps - logging indoor climbs i think.  I can't get back in to the survey to check

In among counties were crags and some gibberish when I filled it in. I can't go back now, of course. This was in Chrome.

Yes, Cumbria has gone and we live in Westmorland now

I realise I'm chancing sounding like a pedantic t*t, but we still live in Cumbria, just under Westmorland council. 

You mean Westmorland and Furness

I do. 

Very British but don't like being asked about my salary - should be an option for "Prefer not to say".

I realise you can't include every brand but I was surprised that:

a) This was one of the few questions not to include an "other" category for us to fill in ourselves and

b) Smaller independent UK brands were almost entirely absent. This year, I have bought from Ash Climbing, Beacon, Core, Hardwood Holds, Silly Goat, Strongholds and Taylor Made Holds. I think it is a shame that none of these brands will be represented in your results given that the UK has such a vibrant culture of independent climbing brands.

I expect Wedge will be well represented among the "Other" entries.

Same on Safari. Options like Fallen Tree Boulder and Taxi Zawn come up under county. 

There wasn't an option for people like me who climbed for nearly thirty years, stopped, started again and then stopped again after piling on lockdown blubber. I demand to be represented!

Quite right. This a  blatantly commercial exercise and asking about revenue is quite shocking. Be interested to know how many reply and what percent of its readership UKC reckons it represents. 

Well UKC/Rockfax is a business, so… yeah. Shouldn’t really come as a surprise. 

I get enough value from the site to be happy to help with this sort of market research. The advertising on here never feels intrusive and certainly preferable to a subscription model of funding. 

Question 3 is odd - options are "more than twice a week" then "just at weekends". I tend to go twice a week, one evening and one day at the weekend. What answer should I give?

How should those not working due to ill health, or simply by choice (eg F/T parents) rely to the question on employment status? 

No you don't 😉, Cumbria still exists as a county, Cumberland, and Westmorland & Furness are unitary authorities that replaced Cumbria County Council and its district councils.

we lived in the Peak District before, I bet we should have lived in Derbyshire 😂

Could be worse, we have to tell people we live in the Outer Lake District..

Is it any different to the 74 changes that created Cumbria? Obviously previously Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness was in Lancashire. The idea that Bolton, Blackpool and Blackburn are not in Lancashire is a bit silly, but post 74 they are administratively separate, same applies to Broughton. Cumbria has only ever been an administrative creation, which has now been deemed surplus to requirements.

As I understand it Cumbria remains as a ceremonial county, with the same boundaries. Six administrative districts have been replaced with two, and the overarching county council removed.

No one round here thinks we now live in Cumberland, (as it's not the same area covered by the old county), and never said they lived in Allerdale prior to that.

Cumbria? Westmorland? What are you talking about? Everyone knows that everything north of the Humber and Mersey is part of the kingdom of Northumbria.

organisation memberships - I've had to put National Trust even though The national trust for Scotland is a totally separate organisation. Maybe needs adding for future respondents

Read the form again, it goes under "other".

I would commend people to join it, as it is cheaper, you get reciprocal rights and it means not having to give money to the NT, which is win win win. 😘

I did think the options for clubs poor, The Wayfarers is a senior club and MAM is a bit more than a regional. Maybe the list of clubs tells us something of the list compiler 🤷

I can't fill out this whole survey because questions 3, 4, 5, and 12 ask for impossible generalisations. Life is much more variable than the survey assumes - it varies from year to year as other things often have to take a priority over climbing. Each year could be any one of the five possibilities. In question 1, there should also be the option of 'No longer climbing'. Finally, I find it a bit sad that, very weirdly (deliberately so?), Trad climbing - surely still the most popular kind of climbing in the UK? - is put at the very bottom of a 12-item list in question 2.

Presumably that’s part of the reason why the survey is run every year.

I’ve already done the survey so can’t look, but is it just listed alphabetically? 

No, it was not alphabetical. 

It's the way it is to make it easier to fill out (by not having a million answers to choose from) and ultimately process the data.

Good point, noted for next time.

There's a few questions that have randomised multiple choice answers to stop them being biased towards the first couple of answers and then people moving onto the next question. Trad is still the most popular BTW.

Will we get to see some of the stats coming out of this survey ??

Yeah, sure. We'll post results when it's finished. The 2020 results is only available in PDF format

• 2020: https://advertising.ukclimbing.com/UKC_UKH_Survey.pdf
• 2017: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/surveys/ukcukh_forums_-_user_interactio...
• 2013: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/surveys/ukc_readership_survey_results-5...

Fascinating - those instances of 'prefer not to say' - given that it's all anonymous. I suppose I did feel a twinge of tortoise-shyness at selecting one of the lowest wage categories, but note otherwise that any wage bracket is meaningless without further knowledge. By which, I'm surprised that UKC hasn't probed a little further towards disposable income - questions towards home ownership and mortgage commitment ??

Maybe UKC can in any case better predict spending habits based on age range, but then wage bracket would not necessarily correlate ...

Hehehe.  This thread is comedy.  It perfectly represents why trying to manage a participative, web-based information resource as a business is really difficult...

Attempted to complete but any round selection boxes were not allowing me to select them. 

Hi Mike, they all still work fine here. Can you let me know what device you're viewing it on please?

Just spent ages filling this out then hit back to go a previous qu (when I realised there was no text box for comments on Rockfax as there was for UKC) and lost it. Can't do all that again I'm afraid. My boss might actually notice how much I'm skiving... 

A few suggestions: 

- climbing.com and climbing USA both listed-?

- I'm not the grey hair brigade (though some of my answers made me feel like it...) but I often climb of a weekday evening and there's no option for that, or even saying you climb once or twice a week 

- please put countries in alphabetical order 

- no option to say that some of us hate YouTube  

- the questions about how much I spent on kit this year were extremely traumatic and I did not want to think about that, thank you

- add Pinnacle Club? 

- I don't pay for subscription to Summit, I get sent it for free - am I missing something? 

- links to other websites were a bit annoying as they accidentally led me away from the survey.

A few things i wanted to say in feedback but have now sadly lost: 

- gear reviews - please do these for women, not just male version as standard. It looks like they could be a really useful reference - and there is a whole HOST of gear advice i would like from the climbing community (how to find a climbing pack that's not too long at 5'3"; good harnesses that fit comfortably with a female long rise; mythbust on things like - the 30l pack I just bought is actually 28l in women's; best in person outlets for selection of approach shoes or B2 boots for women; I could go on - a lot - and I've just come from conversations with a Women's Alpine Adventure Club meet that suggests plenty of others would too). But sadly UKC provides none of this. We only really have anecdotal feedback from Womenclimb. I can't think of much gear at all that I could buy from a UKC review - maybe rope - and it's a massive missed sector. 

- some of the articles, particularly the thought pieces, have been really, really good. Thank you. Really noticed the focus on much more interesting and diverse content recently. Even the poetic stuff

- there can be a lot of helpful (and entertaining) advice in the forums but they can also be a pretty brutal place. I know this is what some people like about them. It's not always what makes me feel at all welcome.

Rockfax/UKC logbook: 

- generally fabulous and the online UKC feedback has been a wonderful resource I use all the time, especially when at the crag, to check whether I really want to do something (also eg in Kalymnos when i found the local guidebook had grades quite wildly varying sometimes). I am probably the only person under 40 who doesn't use the apps and instead likes physical books and the UKC website. Please don't ever take this away!! 

- but - please do review your grades and definitions of 'reachy' so 'hard for the short' doesn't mean 'a 5'10" bloke might struggle on this'. That renders that caveat absolutely useless for me. Seriously, please, think about the fact that male body isn't normal body. (Had another session at Burbage where my mate, who is an absolute beast leading about VS and the same height as me, could just about do a VD where I couldn't even reach the starting break. Maybe that's... not a VD...? We're both average height women.) 

Hope that is helpful. Honestly, do appreciate these asks for feedback; I'm sorry my entry is lost in the ether. 

Would have been nice to see Robbie Phillips youtube channel as an option. Decent survey regardless 

Thanks for taking the time for the feedback!

Sorry this happened, this is really disappointing. I added something that saves your answers in the browser as you go. You should be able to fill in some answers, navigate away and the next time you load the survey, it should re-populate your answers. This is just cleared when you hit the submit button at the end. Did you have the survey open in multiple tabs?

Thanks for those detailed replies. Very sorry that the form didn't work for you. I have asked Paul to look at that but unfortunately, these things do happen from time to time.

General comments on some of the questions:

We established this set of questions over 12 years ago and have been asking almost the same set ever since. This has the benefit of giving us an indication of changes within our readership over the years. It has the downside that it is inflexible in adapting the questions. We have opted to stick with the same question approach though since, in balance, we feel this is more beneficial however each time we do this the questions do get reviewed. 

I have asked others to answer the gear review questions. We do actually have quite a few specific women's gear reviews though if you search here - https://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/reviews/

Rockfax/UKC Logbook

Thanks for your kind comments about UKC Logbook. Glad you like that and don't worry, we will be producing books into the future - Digital for information, Print for inspiration!

Grades - I have sympathy with your request however what you ask for I'm afraid is completely impossible to do with any degree of accuracy. We note down reachy routes where it is obvious but these often only become apparent when climbed by a shorter person. For a very short person I can imagine that a huge number of routes are 'reachy' which asks the question what is the threshold for a route becoming reachy? Also, we can't grade for short people since we have to grade for easiest method. This includes those super-reachy routes. For example, I am 6ft tall but there are routes I can't do because they are too reachy (usually there are other reasons I can't do them). These routes have to have the grade for the tall person though.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Alan

Thanks - no just on my phone as far as I know, but I could be wrong. 

Thanks for your reply Alan and fair enough re questions. 

Apologies if I have missed gear reviews - I'd not seen them but that is very good to know. 

I'd challenge you on this - 'We note down reachy routes where it is obvious but these often only become apparent when climbed by a shorter person.'

The obvious counter is - why can't you a) get some shorter people to climb routes too then, when grading, and b) then grade as climbed by the easiest method by an average climber, not an average male? Isn't that part of your research when updating guides?

I'm not sure I understand why you have to grade for the tallest person, fundamentally.

Tbh I think we all appreciate the difficulties in changing historical grades (as well as it never being an exact science- I think that's pretty universally acknowledged) so this could be something to consider for route description and symbols rather than grade. Average female height isn't a crazy outlier or 'very short'; I'm talking about 5'3", not 4'10". It's a small amendment that would immediately make your guides infinitely more useful (as well as inclusive) to a significant section of your audience.

Anyway - I'll leave that with you. 

For most guidebooks we have around 6 months to assess 2000 to 3000 routes for each book. For a single author this it isn't possible to the level you are requesting. This is why we created, and heavily rely on, the UKC logbook system and all authors will use this to get as much feedback as they can. Even then it is easy to miss stuff with so many routes and 10 shorter climbers saying it is reachy, against 150 people voting 'okay' for the grade, is not likely to get noticed.

It isn't the 'easiest method by the average climber' though. It is simply 'the easiest method'. That was the point of my example. I am tall(ish) but the grade of a route that I can't do with my reach still has to be graded for the taller person in all but very extreme (freakish) examples.

To come up with a grade for the 'average height (male and female) climber' would mean assessing every route almost exclusively on reach basis alone but climbing is way more nuanced than that.

Years ago I climbed with a male climber who was at least 3 or 4 inches smaller than me, but he was so strong he could easily out reach me in a lock-off. I also climbed with a female climber who was not as strong or tall as I was, but was much lighter, had better technique and could use holds I couldn't even contemplate pulling on. For both of them, reach wasn't the key factor in the grade (except very occasionally) but I used my reach every time to try and keep up with them, and mostly failed. One of them had lightness, finger strength and technique and the other had forearms like tree trunks (and technique etc...). How would a grade based only on reach only take account of those factors?

Ultimately though it comes down to the fact that, as guidebook writers, it is not possible for us to assess every route by climbing it, in the books we write. Even if we could climb 3000 routes in 6  months, we can't account for people of different heights to ourselves accurately since other factors like strength, body weight, technique, flexibility and holds you simply missed when you tried the route, would make it a very inexact science.

This is too good a discussion to have buried on this survey thread, we should start a new one.

Alan

I think the days of always grading for those who can reach should end. If a few routes are so reachy that say a few percent of men who can reach get a few easy ticks, so what? As Chris the Tall often said here his reach did really help occasionally but more often his height was a disadvantage. Just say "two grade easier for the tall" or whatever in the text.

Where reach is a genuine stopper (several grades harder) for short climbers it should always be mentioned IMHO, and Rockfax are one of the best for that with the symbols. Short climbers should always comment if a reach symbol is missing where required or inappropriately given.

It can't but reach is part of fair grading for a population average that currently is probably unfairly biased in several ways against most women (and some men), and especially at lower grades, and more so on a rock like gritstone (where alternative methods of overcoming reach are often less possible) than say on limestone.

Thank you. 

The reach symbol (and others) existing is great. It just only seems to be used when things are reachy for average blokes. Even literally just amending that would make a massive difference. 

Alternatively I am happy to accept a discount, say, the equivalent of 5'3"/6, for all the guidebooks we're paying the same for   

And yeah, agreed we're talking about when reach is a genuinely very decisive factor, not when there's another reasonable work around, like burying my tiny self in the rock or deploying a kneebar that doesn't exist for the lanky legged. (Hopefully goes without saying - but the routes when I literally can't reach that break so it becomes an unprotected no hands smear (Mantelshelf Climb at High Neb - described as 'mild moves'!) or another key hold (Bamford Wall crux in the middle, not the finale), or I can't protect that crux move, so it's significantly harder or higher consequence than VD led me to believe). You have a reasonable system for this already - just needs some reviewing for modern times with a hopefully more diverse user base.

Seriously though - appreciate this discussion; this is genuine feedback intended to improve a product I obviously generally enjoy and continue to buy.

Have you learnt to reefknot nuts yet for extra reach?

While that may be occasionally useful, it doesn’t do much for grit routes where you can’t reach a horizontal break to either move up or get any gear in…

Tbh it often puts me off climbing gritstone, particularly more obscure crags where you can’t trawl through logbooks. Demoralising to get on a VS that doesn’t have any reachy symbol and realise you can’t physically span the move, and I’m 5’5! 

Email me any serious examples... I'm always always interested in 'outing' such routes.

100%.

Hi, your gender question in the survey is not right - it is lumping together gender and gender reassignment which are not the same thing.  'Transgender' isn't a different option to 'male' or 'female'; there are men who are transgender and women who are transgender.

See guidance from e.g. Oxford University https://edu.admin.ox.ac.uk/gender-identity-survey-questions#collapse1112756 or the Nursing and Midwifery Council: https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/data-protection/diversity... - pp. 12-13 with sample wording.

A former climber option could be useful for those of us who are knackered.

"Other outdoor activity (not sport)" seems to suggest that the only outdoor sports are those that you list, and anything else must be trainspotting or birdwatching or something. Very odd. 

 

This has probably been mentioned but there is no option for no longer climb. I used to climb 3 or 4 times a week but other than an indoor flurry about 5 years ago for a few weeks I havnt climbed for a decade. 

Thanks for the info. I was following this guide: https://ruth-dm.co.uk/how-to-ask-about-gender-in-forms-respectfully

Although I admit, I did stop at the Pretty Good level and didn't make the form multichoice which would've elevated it to Great according to that guide. If it was multichoice you could pick male/female and transgender which would satisfy your point I think.

I thought just as many people would tick all the available options just for the sake of it if it was all multichoice tbh. It will be corrected in the next survey though.

I've saved this in the notes to be included in the next survey, thanks for the feedback.

Can you please add a button to say 'I don't want to participate in the survey' and more importantly 'I don't want to be asked again'? I'd rather not have to click the Not Interested several times a day for the next month, if you plan on having the same pop-up window till then.

That is on the ToDo list for today.

Read the 2020 results. When comparing UKC to other similar websites, you should include thecrag.com, as they're slowly catching up, and avoiding the inclusion shows lack of integrity. 

Not sure what you mean, we didn't include it in 2020 either?

There was no nefarious intent though, I've added it to the notes so will be in the next survey.

I must admit, I haven't used theCrag in years until last week. I was impressed by the breadth of their crag data (the UI looks like it still supports Internet Explorer 6 tho ).

Apologies if I missed it somewhere, but when will the results be published?

Sorry, I don't have an ETA on that but probably sometime in September. The survey is ending 1st Sept.

Sorry if I missed this, but it would have been useful if a response on how Rockfax guides could be improved would have been useful surely?

Hi Graham

With over 7000 responses it is really difficult to give proper attention to more general text field responses like that so we try and keep those to a minimum. If you have an opinion, or an idea, then it is much better to just email us directly and we get plenty of those which we are always happy to receive.

Alan