DISCLAIMER: This post contains a considerable amount of speculation.

I don’t think Lisa ever visited and used the Roadfood forum after December 1, 2019. Before allegedly sending that email, I think she just asked a staffer to find out what the stink was all about.

What if your local power company drove old, exhaust-belching, rusting repair trucks around town with cracked windows, bald tires, leaking engine oil, and making a racket because of a rusted-out exhaust system? The authorities would get on their case.

The Fexy corporate Facebook page has a circular logo. There is two lines of lettering inside the circle. The layout is roughly:

f e x y
technology > brands > studios

Also on that page is their “About” statement:

Fexy Media is the gold standard for online food journalism. Our brands Serious Eats, Simply Recipes, The Food Lab, Roadfood and Relish inspire great eating, cooking, exploring and celebrating for the millennial generation by connecting our audience with our original videos, recipes, articles, features and podcasts. Our sites are visited by over 18 million people monthly, with millions more on social media. We offer brand advertisers integrated, custom solutions to reach our audience on all digital platforms including mobile, social, web, and connected television. Our team is based in Seattle, New York, Austin and Nashville. Fexy was founded in 2014 by digital media veterans Cliff and Lisa Sharples and investment professional, Ben Sternberg with private equity backing by Tritium Partners. See http://www.fexy.com for more.

Like lots of other consumer brands, at least once every day they faithfully pimp the Roadfood website on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Roadfood/
As of right now, there are 17,102 total follows.
If one clicks on one of those pimping links, they will come to a review or other piece of editorial content on the Roadfood website. Visible in that view at the upper right hand corner are buttons for Reviews, Guides, Forums, and About. After they read the review, they might decide to read what is on the forum. Right now, if you click on the forum, you see a fairly clean layout. The troubles start once you decide to read some of the forum threads. A bookworm might want to click on one of the current threads, “What are you reading?”. Might be a good thread, since there are 947 replies. So you click on the entry, and find some posts. They seem disjointed and out of order. Then, you notice the date and time posted on each of the entries of at least the first 5 pages is always the same, June 13, 2006 at 11:08 am. What are chances of that many people posting at exactly the same time? Only people who have visited the Roadfood forum before December, 2019 will figure out right away that there are quotes which referenced the original poster, and that now entries are in descending order. They will find the search function gives stupid results, repeating the same entries over and over after about the first three screens. While using the mouse to search for stuff to click on, they find they can click on poster names. So while I was on page 5 of the search results, I clicked on the name Sandy Thruthegarden. You don’t see anything there at first. However, if you click on the Forums button, you will see a list of forum threads. Interesting is the entry for the second thread: “Bruster’s? in Ice Creams and Custards – Voices: 0• Replies: 0• Last active 10 years, 10 months ago” So I click on the thread, and there is only word in the box with Sandy’s name on the left-hand side: Bruster’s? The date and time is May 12, 2009 8:51 pm. I had seen this before within the last week. What is in the box is the name of the thread. This time I had to go to the Wayback Machine. That thing can’t resolve forums very well. But I remember all the Bruster’s threads had numerous replies.
While the thread was not archived, the list of forums was. On the capture of December 23, 2008, it showed Sandy Thruthegarden started the thread, date unknown, with 21 replies. On February 22, 2009 there were 29 replies. On May 6, 2009 there were 29 replies. On May 19, 2009 there were 30 replies, with Beverly K being the last poster. My experience is that the latest date in the current archives is the date of the last posting to the thread, which was May 12, 2009 at 8:50 or 8:51 PM. At present, all the search feature of the forum and Goodle can pick up is just the title of the thread attributed to Sandy Thruthegarden. The contents of all 30 replies seem to have gone into the bit bucket.

I could go on for a few more hours with this punch list. You get the drift. Yeah, it’s not pretty but guys can live with the austere, drab layout if the typefaces and scaling were better. At this point, I have only documented bugs with READING the forum. I can document many other bugs with the forum without going into the fewer features issue with this software.

Do publishers have no pride in their craft anymore? Is Fexy worried about potential advertising clients kicking the tires of their technology and finding the stuff doesn’t work?

I have to restate my joining date. A recent screenshot from the VNext software showed a date of 1/3/2006. However, I checked my handwritten log of passwords and see I actually joined on August 1, 2004. This was confirmed by several Wayback Captures from the mid-2000’s. I cannot independently verify my post count.

Total Posts : ~2196
Joined: 8/1/2004
Location: I don’t want Lisa finding me
Status: ask bbPress

Timed 1:45 AM EDST Monday, March 9, 2020
David_NYC