Most Skydivers Probably Don't Know This Site Exists Now

[RMK 3]

A couple weeks ago, I was in a gear shop at a DZ and had some queries.  I mentioned that in prior years you could go onto Dropzone.com, but now that it's gone, it just leaves us with the "shit show" that is Facebook.  Someone overheard me and said "no its still going as www.skydiveforum.com".  I had no idea; however there isn't really much skydiving conversation on here anymore - just the political ramblings of the Speakers Corner thread.

Edited October 5 by RMK

[gowlerk 2,308]

1 hour ago, RMK said:

A couple weeks ago, I was a gear shop at a DZ and had some queries.  I mentioned that in prior years you go onto Dropzone.com but now that it's gone, it just leaves us with the "shit wasteland" that is Facebook.  Someone overheard me and said no its still going as www.skydiveforum.com.  I had no idea; however there isn't really much skydiving conversation on here anymore - just the political ramblings of the Speakers Corner thread.

FB and small screens killed it years ago. 

[rapanui 0]

correct.

The r/skydiving subreddit is fairly active and is a kind of hub, but it sucks skydiving doesn't have a central gathering place like https://scubaboard.com/community/ 

[wmw999 2,643]

Yeah, I found that long after I found dropzone.com. I wish we were back to that kind of community even. The woodworking board I'm on is relatively active, too.

Wendy P.

[GeorgiaDon 407]

I moderate a forum for fossil collectors (!!!) that is a lot more active than this one now. 

[JoeWeber 3,024]

Just now, GeorgiaDon said:

I moderate a forum for fossil collectors (!!!) that is a lot more active than this one now. 

Interesting, the mod's here are also fossil collectors.

[JerryBaumchen 1,492]

28 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

Interesting, the mod's here are also fossil collectors.

Hi Joe,

Miss Henderson, my sophomore English teacher said:  'Intimacy brings hatred.'

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  Miss Henderson was the finest teacher that I have ever had; she truly knew her students.

PPS)  Anyone know what happened to Wolf River Joe?

Edited October 8 by JerryBaumchen

[jakebaustin 16]

The r/skydiving subreddit is active. But its also 98% whuffos and tandem passengers. Go on there and see for yourself the buttfuckery. Questions like “what is TI?” Or “what is a packjob” answered by peopke with 2 tandem skydives. 
 

the moderator is the subreddit is a total chode and doesnt even skydive.

[Bokdrol 45]

9 hours ago, jakebaustin said:

The r/skydiving subreddit is active. But its also 98% whuffos and tandem passengers. Go on there and see for yourself the buttfuckery. Questions like “what is TI?” Or “what is a packjob” answered by peopke with 2 tandem skydives. 
 

the moderator is the subreddit is a total chode and doesnt even skydive.

LOL - Beginner's Skydiving Forum on FB is similar - lots of sage skydiving advice from 'XXX - I already have 45 skydives' and 'XXYY -  I've just done my first tandum (sp) and am now hooked on skydiving'  Given that some of these people may actually become useful skydivers it's  for me, a read for amusement but make no discouraging comments, exercise. 

P.S. I haven't seen 'chode' used outside of Australia for ages. 

[rapanui 0]

On 10/10/2025 at 5:56 PM, jakebaustin said:

The r/skydiving subreddit is active. But its also 98% whuffos and tandem passengers. Go on there and see for yourself the buttfuckery. Questions like “what is TI?” Or “what is a packjob” answered by peopke with 2 tandem skydives. 
 

the moderator is the subreddit is a total chode and doesnt even skydive.

Virtually all reddit mods are chodes, so that's just redundant.

I don't use FB anymore, and it's made keeping tabs on what's happening with skydiving buddies from across the world quite difficult.

The fact that major DZOs and orgs like USPA and BPA haven't coordinated to create an attractive hub for all things skydiving is a bit of a fail, but I understand why it hasn't happened. Hard to compete with the network effect of the Zuckerberg empire...
 

[gowlerk 2,308]

What a bad idea. Either someone would have to moderate it or it would be nothing more than an official place. I believe the original DZ.com was such a hub. Until it wasn't.

[wmw999 2,643]

18 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

What a bad idea. Either someone would have to moderate it or it would be nothing more than an official place. I believe the original DZ.com was such a hub. Until it wasn't.

Exactly. I'll bet that if a national organization wanted to have a forum for their use, it would be OK, as long as that organization moderated it acceptably (e.g. still no jokes about pedophilia, still no personal attacks). Note, this is me as an individual saying this, and definitely NOT an official statement.

Wendy P.

[rapanui 0]

4 hours ago, gowlerk said:

What a bad idea. Either someone would have to moderate it or it would be nothing more than an official place. I believe the original DZ.com was such a hub. Until it wasn't.

I only have bad ideas, that's why I jump out of airplanes for fun.

[Divalent 174]

Well, even if folks rediscover (or newbies discover) this place, it is currently extremely poorly organized for the traffic that expected.

IMO, no chance this place can be resurrected without some reorganization to concentrate the few discussions one would hope would be sustainable.

Here is a copy of a message I sent over 4 years ago (sept 2021) to the folks that ran this place, a time when traffic was waning, but still greater than it was in the fall of 2024 (right before DZ.com got sold). If I were to change any of my recommendation, it would be to combine even more forums. (Maybe other folks can think of additional things.) The problem is I don't know how easy/hard it would be to make these changes.

---------------

I'm a relatively long time member of the Dropzone.com community (~10 years) and am a bit sadden to see the activity here drop so much over the last couple of years. Part of that is FB/Instagram migration (and we'll see how long that lasts; I think it possible there will be some reversal, albeit gradual, back to dedicated topical websites). However, in part I suspect that it is also due to this website not adapting to the smaller traffic levels: IMO the content here is both low, and spread out over so many separate forums that the effort needed to access a bit of content has gone way up.

So I though I'd give some unsolicited advice to help improve things. The main suggestion is to greatly *Reduce* the number of separate forums: at the current traffic level, it is just too atomized. It seems to me you want to make it easy for people to engage with others. Outside of Bonfire and Speakers Corner, there are only a handful of new threads started each week. Who wants to check into 25 different forums to find the 4 posts that were made in the last week to see if you find them interesting and worth engaging? (If they were all in one or two forums, you could see the titles in a glance.)

My specific suggestions would be the following:

1.  Delete these forums:
- Q&A. It's not worth it. And to the extent there is activity, it would have been posted in the correct topical forum. You need to concentrate content, not spread it thin. Questions get asked there and ignored, very likely because few people saw them (not because no one who comes here often knows the answer).

- Tandem (combine into instructors; or kill both and make those topics part of General)

- Wind tunnel (little used, and General or Instructor forum can cover)

- Women (little used, General forum can cover)

- Disabilities (little used, General or Safety forums can cover)

- Combine "Announcements" and the 3 "Dropzone.com" forums (bugs, suggestions, and scams) into just 1 forum.

- consider combining several, or all, of the "skydiving Disciplines" forums into one or just a couple Forums. Or close them all up and shift it to the General Skydiving forum.  I mean, the CRW forum had one new thread started in the last two years (and that was a guy looking for a t-shirt). The Relative Work one has only 2 new threads in the last year, both on the topic of how they might revive the disciple. FreeFlying has just one new thread in nearly 2 years (A guy asking for advice on where to train: *no one* answered him!)  If they were posted in a common area with more traffic, likely those posts would have generated more discussion. As it is, even an excellent topical thread is very likely to go unnoticed by the many here.

2. Cull the pinned topics in the forums. There are too many that are long past their usefulness, but by being pinned, can obscure recent interesting threads (since you have to click on the forum, then scroll past the pinned ones to see what is new there). Plus old irrelevant ones make the place look abandoned (or more abandoned then they really are.) I'd estimate you could unpin at least 80% of them.

3. Create a new forum for DB Cooper (and allow multiple threads)!

Okay, I know I said to reduce them, but why add a new one?

  Reason 1: The DB Cooper thread activity always dominates the History/Trivia forum, so you rarely see a real history/trivia posting highlighted on the front forum page. (so any new post there is likely to be a DB Cooper one, which skydivers mostly don't care about, so they miss it (so then no one posts there with history stories.) IOW, the aim it to make the History forum more useful.
     An example, look in the Intro and Greets forum, where a long time skydiver recently posted a story about redoing his training undercover (pretending to be new), just for fun.  That post should belong in the History forum. But no one visits the history forum (bc of DB Cooper) and most long time skydivers rarely visit the Intro/Greets forum. It got 54 views in 5 days (vs ~300 for the single new post in the Joke Of the Day thread over the same time period). But this post really should be in the History section where it topically belongs, and where it can be found more easily. It is a shame that so few people will see it.

  Reason 2: A separate DB Cooper forum would attract some eyeballs, but still keep the topic contained. And if new threads are allowed, could make it more useful than that single thread is now. There is a good amount of activity there in that single thread (probably about equal to the total of the rest of the site, outside of Speakers Corner and Bonfire), and if you aren't going to get many skydivers using this site, at least try to capture a tangentially related topic that can drive even more unique viewers/posters. Most other forums for discussing DB Cooper are controlled by a particular faction in that community; DZ.com would be neutral, and so likely could "take over" this segment. (Yeah, they are mostly insane whacko's, but they probably generate enough clicks, so maybe try to get a side benefit apart from the main purpose in Reason 1 (which is to improve the value of the History forum).)

I'm not saying this would revive the site, but it might help stem the decline. It is still the best place for folks to go for skydiving information and community, and it would be sad to see if continually decline. Reducing the number of forums by about half, and so concentrating the remaining content into fewer topical forums, can only benefit engagement. I know most of your traffic is in Speakers Corner (and bonfire), but those forums exist in an active state only because the participants were drawn to this site by the topical skydiving forums.

Regards

[wmw999 2,643]

As someone who’s been here longer, the vast majority of those forums were started because there was too much traffic in the old forums. It got crazy.

That said, the vast majority of your suggestions are excellent. I’d have a separate forum category for DB Cooper; leave him all by himself. 

Wendy P.