I agree that that type of post is not helpful.
There do seem to be moderators or others from active.com reading these threads, however, so let me advise them.
People are resistant to change, especially distance runners who tend to be creatures of habit. Many of us run near obsessively, and just as obsesively do we track our runs and our "mileage". The transition to a new site and to a new log would never have been easy, but it has turned out to be a giant fiasco which will indubitably lose you more customers than you gain. The new log quite simply lacks the functionality that the old one had. There is no ability to see your mileage each week or each month, to track shoes you need to pay for the "premium" site, there are no graphs of mileage easily available, and quite frankly the visuals and presentation are cheap and amateurish. I'm sure there are others who can elucidate even more functionality problems with the site. Perhaps you can fix some of them, perhaps you already have. That doesn't really matter at this point because you have alienated so many people already in the first few days. The other problem which people seem to be experiencing is a loss of data. As far as I can tell I haven't lost any data (but it's quite hard for me to tell given the unwieldy layout of the log), but for any data to be lost is simply unnacceptable. This transition has been in the works for months, as coolrunning advertised it back in August. Why then is the transfer this difficult? Why couldn't both sites function side by side for a time to make the transition easier, and to avoid the types of problems that we have seen in the past few days.
However, my main complaint is this: for a lot of runners, like myself, you are holding our information, our logs, the miles we ran, the routes we measured, the sweat that we poured out, and you are not letting us do with it what we please. Where is the export function? Coolrunning had one, but I can no longer access my log there. I would simply like to export the data that you are holding hostage (my running of the past 3 years) and leave this site forever. The minute that you give everyone access to their old logs, to the information, and the ability to export it, you will hear a lot less complaints.
I will never have anything to do with active.com again. I've been a coach for 7 years, and my teams will never have anything to do with active.com again. My friends, my family, my fellow runners will all know how active.com treats their customers. It's not just here, by the way, if you check out other running messageboards you will see that active.com is being pilloried elsewhere as well.
Let us have our logs, and let us leave in peace.
respectfully,
David Talone
