[Jo Westhouse]

Hello

I am over Facebook.  I love the Aus and NZ Hiking group on Facebook (active, lovely people, no spam, some 60k+ members), but since I want to delete my Facebook account, I need to say goodbye to that lovely group and find a new community elsewhere.

These forums here are very quiet, although I’m sure Darren  has tried hard to get this going. I don’t find these forums usable – no feed of recent comments, no notifications, @mentions etc. Also hate the constant ads.

I’ve tried bushwalk.com, but it feels dated, like the internet from 20 years back.  More irritating ads.

I’ve looked at reddit, and there are some good groups there but they are small, and few photos mostly text.

Any suggestions of lively online hiking communities that I’ve missed, maybe on other platforms?

Joey

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[Darren Edwards]

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Thanks for your honest feedback, Joey.

Under the hood, the forum is actually structured as a single forum with a consolidated feed, but I set up a custom landing page to make it look more like Facebook groups. My thinking was that this would help people find topics that interest them more easily. Your perspective is valuable, though, and maybe I misjudged how people prefer to engage.

Regarding images, I completely understand the frustration. The forum originally allowed direct uploads, but every image impacts my hosting plan and costs. Since this site is a side project alongside my day job, I had to find a balance, which is why I switched to embedded images. I know it’s not ideal, and I’m open to looking for ways to make it easier without significantly increasing costs. The same goes for hike detail pages—I’d love to allow automatic user photo uploads, but storage limitations make that tricky.

As for ads, they’re managed by Mediavine. While I can tweak the ad volume, placement isn’t something I can fully control. That said, I’ll see if there’s any flexibility in reducing ads specifically within the forum.

I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Forums are a tough space these days with so much discussion happening elsewhere, but I still believe in having a dedicated place for hikers to connect. If you (or anyone else) have ideas on how to improve engagement despite these constraints, I’d love to hear them.

[Darren Edwards]

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Hey Joey,

Great question! I’ve also been on the lookout for solid online hiking communities in Australia, and it’s one of the reasons I created these forums. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to promote them, engagement here has been pretty quiet—even though the site gets over 60,000 visits a month! I’d love to see this grow into a thriving community where people can share experiences, ask questions, and connect without the distractions of social media.

I’ve checked out Bushwalk.com, but I find it tends to lean towards an older crowd, and discussions can sometimes become quite opinionated. Reddit has some active hiking groups, but the things you mentioned were another reason I wanted to build a dedicated space here—somewhere with a more focused, supportive community.

As for ads, I totally get that they can be annoying. Trust me, I’d love to run the site ad-free, but they’re currently the only way I can cover the costs of keeping Trail Hiking Australia online and providing free resources. I try to keep them to a minimum while ensuring the site remains sustainable. Hopefully one day I will be able to remove them completely.

For now, Facebook groups seem to be where most Australian hikers are connecting. But I’d love to see more people using this forum so we can create a space that’s truly dedicated to Aussie hiking without the clutter of social media. Hopefully, with time and more engagement, we can build something great here!

Thanks for starting this discussion—keen to hear what others think!

Cheers,
Darren

[Jo Westhouse]

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Hi Darren

I think the forum software you are using is preventing you from building an active engaged audience.

Your forum might look prettier than bushwalk.com, but you have 24 separate forums where you are trying to build engagement, rather than one forum and one consolidated feed.  Silo’ing activity into 24 forums is too hard and too time consuming and too many clicks for me to bother.

Also too hard to add an image on your forums.  People love to share their own photos but your forum software asks for a source (huh?  you mean I can’t simply pick from my photos on device?) and dimensions (seriously?) and its one image at a time.  A forum that is all text cos it’s too hard to add images makes it as boring as Reddit, people disengage.

If you can’t turn off ads from the whole site, then how about you disable ads on just the social part or your website to remove one of the barriers to engagement?

Joey.

[Jo Westhouse]

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With Bunny.net you can offload your image storage at very little cost $100GB to their Sydney server is $3 a month.  If you have mediavine and 60K users a month I think you can afford that.  Calculator here: https://bunny.net/pricing/cdn/#calculator

[Darren Edwards]

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Thanks, Joey. I’ll take a look. Appearances can be deceiving—just because the site gets traffic doesn’t mean it translates to ad revenue. Must have something to do with most of Mediavine’s advertisers being US-based. I’m lucky to receive $8-10 a day, which covers software and hosting but doesn’t leave much for ongoing development or extra services. I’m also using Cloudflare, so I’ll look into some options there too. But I appreciate the suggestion and will see if it’s a viable option.

[Author]

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