Hi Mark. I'm Sam from New Zealand. I've been training since the parkour.net days, about 5 years or so, and I've seen various forums in the world come and go in this time.
There seems to be a world-wide trend in parkour circles that is seeing less people use forums. All forums seem to go up and down in their usage but there are a number of factors contributing to the overall decline of use:
1. Facebook seems to be the way people organise themselves these days which seems strange to me in a parkour context. I understand that it makes the whole social thing easier, which is a huge reason people get into parkour, but a forum seems like a better format for permanent information and collaboration. Parkour is about growing and building, as a community as well as individuals, but that is not a perspective noticed by most people starting who are focused on their first moves.
2. Local forums are better for organising regular trainings and nobody wants to get lost in a huge (international?) faceless crowd. Especially if they are a beginner.
3. This may not be the case here but many forums tend to change their format just as they get to a point where they have solved all of the world's problems. The repository of great information that the community has put together is often lost and that frustrates and drives away those "wise ones" who have helped to build things.
4. Those of us who are old hands at the parkour forums are less likely to engage beginners because we can either link them to an answer or just don't get involved because it's boring to us to say the same thing over and over. I really think that it is up to us to make an effort to engage beginners with our experience so that they feel a part of the community. If we just fob them off with a link or expect them to use the search function all the time then those community connections suffer. They need to work through the issues that we did and we just have to be patient I think.
5. As always, there is a limited amount of time that we each have and it's only a dedicated (crazy) few who can cover so much ground. I used to visit lots of websites around the world but when I got married I didn't have time so I just stuck to our local forum and the parkour generations forum since I preferred to keep in contact with that side of the world - where people from the early days visited and the influence of the founders was greatest. Since they changed it up yet again, I've lost contact and roam a little more again. I actually got hooked here because of the Gorilla PK section (I
lost 80+lbs through my parkour journey)
6. Experienced traceurs tend to end up doing their own thing (branching out into martial arts for instance) or just focusing on their personal training.
]How can APK help to unite Traceurs and Freerunners across the globe?
I think this is an empty goal without giving a reason for uniting. My reason for getting involved in international forums is to meet new people, observe international trends, develop friendships and contacts with like-minded people around the world, and through all of this help to make the world a better place by contributing positive things I've learned.
I don't think we'll ever see a large number of international visitors to any forum, but we can try to preserve the wisdom and presence of those who are experienced and who are the backbone of our local and world-wide communities. But in doing this we need to be aware of the needs of beginners and not alienate them. We also need to recognise that it might take another 10+ years before there are sufficient numbers of dedicated and committed (experienced) practitioners in the world with a shared dream. The face of the internet will be very different by then!
Hopefully there are a few ideas within all of that to help the thought processes. I would love to see more links internationally so I hope we can come up with something.
All the best,
Sam
PS. Hope my Kiwi spelling doesn't throw you too much
