Curious as to why most North American clubs/players don’t use Poloverse. Is there something the site doesn’t offer or is it more related to entrenchment in Facebook.?
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I blame the appification of everything “internet” due to phones.
I’ve been on the internet way too long. Mobile isn’t a useful interface for my brain. I need a full keyboard and real monitors I can see.
A lot of people I know, never touch a computer, only mobile devices.
People want apps, and they want notifications from the apps.
The idea of mindfully going to a specific website to do/see/interact about a specific thing, is dead.
Sort of troll answer: where else are we going to get both polo related things, and be triggered by “people” we “know” posting stupid stuff about US politics/culture wars? ;)
I’ve had an account here since October 2021. Stats says I’ve logged in on 33 different days :/
I also created an account on whatever bulletin board Hamersly tried to get US people off fb with.
I almost never posted there or here. Or nag other people to come.
I am part of the problem :)
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I think there has to be a certain percentage of people who hate being on fb and use it exclusively for polo. They will push to switch.
I personally find poloverse/ discourse highly mobile friendly. Tiping from my phone rn…
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Poloverse is based on Discource. Discourse provides an app as well: DiscourseHub
Discourse is an open source Internet forum system. Features include threading, categorization and tagging of discussions, configurable access control, live updates, expanding link previews, infinite scrolling, and real-time notifications. It is customizable via its plugin architecture and its theming system.
Discourse (software) - Wikipedia
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It´s high time for Bikepolo to stop forcing people to use Facebook.
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My iPhone has the ability to make a website into an app on the home screen.
This works really well for PV. On it right now 
For those interest:
hit “share”
and “Add to Homescreen”
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American here,
I recently got on the app. But have been think about this a lot for a while.
Here’s my analysis and a few suggestions to improve it (sorry for the length/formatting):
1. Platform Awareness:
• Many newer players and clubs (especially post 2020) may simply be unaware of PV, relying instead on established local communication channels like Facebook groups, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord Instagram or 🙉GroupMe for coordination and discussion.
2. Platform Migration Challenges:
• Transitioning from long-standing platforms to a new one requires active encouragement. Expect resist change unless they see clear benefits (especially for older players who remember the collapse of leagueofbikepolo.com or the graveyard of abandoned social media groups)
3. Regional Disparities in Online Engagement:
• Players in NA might want some informal or localized communication over a global forum for some topics, especially if they perceive Poloverse as more focused on European players, issues, or tournaments. Personally this was a major factor in my resistance to joining.
A few spitballed ideas for improved adoption in North America:
• promoting NA-specific sections to new NA players, especially regional tournament guide, club highlights, and discussion threads tailored to local interests.
• Highlight NA clubs and players who’ve had success or successfully transitioned to the platform to foster a sense of representation.
• Collaborate with NA clubs and organizations (like NAH, polocamp, & bp calendar) to promote Poloverse across platforms as the go-to platform for bike polo communication and resources.
-influencers-
• Launch a coordinated/targeted awareness campaign emphasizing the unique benefits of Poloverse.net (e.g., global networking, centralized information, potential historical preservation).
• Offer incentives for clubs to migrate their discussions or resources to Poloverse (e.g., icon,badges,flags?, custom reaction gifs are very popular on discord, LofBP had the wall of club logos).
• Use engaging formats like short testimonials, “how-to sign up” “how to create a mobile shortcut” guides, or stories of players/clubs benefiting from the platform.
• All of this above but Spanish; Mexico/Central America are clearly the often forgotten gem of NA bike polo.
Integrate other Tools:
• this one I have little knowledge on how to do it on the backend;
Infusing the site with tools like challonge or stats tracking like podiumbikepolo similar to how bike pole calendar PV fused with the regional tournament guides; pickup scheduling tools, or maybe integration with other social media platforms.
Again I’m a noob on here so excuse any gaps in site functionality knowledge. Just my opinion with love and respect:)
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I remember we had those exact discussions a couple years ago. But yeah, PV was created / pushed by some people who were very well connected and again,
Big parts of the community were already super sick of using social media…
And then it just kind of happened, even though we never really did all these campaigns we had in mind
Seems like the time was right
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It seems to me that the number one use for Poloverse right now is to organize the calendar and post new events… So when it got to a point where the place to see tournaments is almost exclusively Poloverse, you kinda have to check it (we won!). The rest of the traffic and discussions and all is a bit of a side effect…
… and start forcing them to use Poloverse. 
So maybe a pertinent question is how do people in NA find about the tournaments?
Below are the current trending search terms. The full log of search terms in the past year is basically 98% tournaments as far as I can see.
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in terms of discovery of tournaments, North American tournaments are tracked pretty closely on bikepolocalendar.com, and through instagram. my gripe with both is that it isn’t centralized and Bike Polo Calendar (while doing a great job) doesn’t allow for individuals to post or update their own tournamnets. I keep the NA calendar here pretty up to date and I’m leveraging PV for every tournament i personally plan or have a hand in. Maybe it will help drive traffic here, maybe not 
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yeah, I started playing with it more today. Like posted just after you, iPhone can do shortcuts, and that is basically what the Discourse “app” does, just spawns your mobile browser of choice to the site. Which isn’t terrible.
interested to see how well notifications work that way
I know there is an upcoming tournaments category here, but I wonder how good the Calendar plugin is: GitHub - discourse/discourse-calendar: Adds the ability to create a dynamic calendar in the first post of a topic.
direct chat options would be nice too, which is a built in feature to Discourse but I assume disabled.
GitHub - discourse/discourse-chat-integration is an option maybe to not overload whatever server this is on with too many tasks