The 30,000 member strong Dirt Digglers Facebook group recently flipped from being one of the largest and most active Facebook mountain bike communities to being shut down overnight without warning.
The group was often controversial but was also without doubt hugely popular, seeing massive growth over the two years it was open with a very loyal and very active community. It was seemingly a proper, homegrown community – run by Dan Rigler and his wife Claire for the love of mountain biking and without a brand or a marketing agency pushing them in the background.
When the page was unexpectedly closed in January 2018 it came as a shock to the community who were left without their online home.
Here’s what group founder Dan Rigler had to say about the life and death of the Dirt Digglers…
Intro by Jamie, Interview by Andy McCoy
Where did Dirt Digglers all begin?
Originally Dirt Diggler, (which was my nickname at school and a derivative of my surname Rigler) was set up to promote riding in the Peak District and was first named Dirt Diggler’s High Peak Exploration.
The peak district is where I grew up and it’s where my love of Mountain Biking first started at the age of 10.
My initial intention for the group was for me to become an MTB guide and show groups of people just how amazing the Peak District is. However after taking part in the British Cycling guiding course at Whinlatter learning about what was involved, I decided it wasn’t for me.
But it didn’t stop there though, right?
Claire and I sat down and had a think about how we could develop the group into something else.
We changed the name to Dirt Digglers MTB and decided to do something new in the world of Biking Social Media that would get people’s attention.
I thought of a few cool phrases that were a cross over between MTB and a bit of sexy fun and we created some images to go with them!
We printed up some simple t shirts too see if anyone would like them. The phrases were “Crank my Shaft”, “2.35 inches of Girth”, “Twist my nipples” and “6inches of pure smooth travel” all with biking related images below.
Then we had the idea of a photoshoot to model them, one of Claire’s friends kindly said she would model for the page in some of the t-shirts with a rip in it, so they had a slightly provocative nature! We felt it would get people’s attention and guess what? It did!
With that and offering free stickers to members of the group for joining the page we soon started to grow in a matter of hundreds daily, Claire sat on the floor every night and sent out free stickers to all our members that asked for them.
You guys always did a lot of charity stuff didn’t you?
We had some amazing support from one of the CEO’s of leisure lakes who gave us some amazing prizes to give away so we started to run competitions for charity and the very first one raised over £1500 for The Brain and Spine Foundation.
Over the course of 2 years we have raised so much money for various charities. I even rode around the peaks and left cards with our name on for people to find and then they could claim a prize if they found one. Think of the amount we have spent on postage alone for sending all the stickers and over 50 prizes for competitions over the 2 years.
And as it grew, did things change at all?
“We had our personal address taken from the limited company details and put on lots of Facebook pages and felt very unsafe in our own home”
The page was great for about 10 months but the more we grew the more problems that came with it, banter escalated into threats and other page competitors became unhappy with how quick we were growing so in came the trolls.
We had our personal address taken from the limited company details and put on lots of Facebook pages and felt very unsafe in our own home because of it. The page also became very male dominated as you can imagine and so any females bikers would not join or they were talking about how bad the nature of the page was in this day and age with equality and sexual discrimination.
So after careful consideration we decided to try and change the page to be a bit more classy and tone down the sexual aspect.
That’s when we were introduced to Miss D, as we thought page was becoming somewhat cliché and almost a joke, we asked Charlotte as she mountain biked already if she could do some nice pictures for us in some biking gear and she was soon to become the face of DD providing us with real pictures (not Shutterstock or internet ones) and a standard of equality that kept most members happy and still interested.
The page was still growing rapidly as we were obviously being talked about, Claire and I did regular videos, some about the page some about products, we wanted to keep as much interaction with the people on our page as possible and even did some live videos responding to members questions.
Our most memorable times of DD for both of us were the group rides as we got to meet our members and that made it all feel so much more real to us, it was lovely to have a chat and find out who the people were behind their profile pictures.
Is it easy running a group like Dirt Digglers? Did it start to become tough for you guys?
“You literally have to monitor the page 24/7 for people being out of line”
We wouldn’t have got to where we did if it wasn’t for the hard work of our moderators. It was such a well run page that everything was sorted out within a matter of hours and any problems sorted out straight away.
You literally have to monitor the page 24/7 for people being out of line and respond to messages of people who are not happy or have been bullied and also ban people for a few days or for good.
At about 30,000 member the page seemed to plateau. Copycat groups popped up and they purposely trolled the page and slated us on other pages using fake accounts. The page become not as fun as it used to be, it became more of an advice group the same as many other groups on Facebook.
As a last push we decided to employ a friend of a friend who is very well know in the social media world. Sophia Blake who did a photo shoot for us, this increased the members which was great but again the bigger the group the more problems that come with that and the more stress.
So when did you realise enough was enough? What made you decide to shut the group down?
“The stress lent itself to us going from weekend drinkers to feeling the need to drink in the week”
Claire and I found ourselves on our phones every night sorting out things to do with the page, constantly responding to members messages or messages from our moderators.
I stopped responding to my kids when they asked for something saying “wait a minute” all the time “I’m just doing this” and would feel the need to respond to the message instantly instead of putting my phone down.
The stress lent itself to us going from weekend drinkers to feeling the need to drink in the week because it helped to deal with it all. I stopped doing family things, swimming, going for walks, reading to my kids at night etc.
I spent my evenings wanting to get them to bed so that I could do things to do with the page. Videos, post something, respond to messages, put posts on the page, go through photos I’d taken, think of memes, stop people slagging each other off, looking at the horrible things trolls were saying about Claire and I on other pages because we chose to put ourselves out there. It was exhausting!
We were both so wrapped up in it all that we were missing our children growing up and family life was slipping away. We feel like we have missed out on 2 years and we don’t know how our eldest has grown up so quickly in the blink of an eye.
We had planned to continue down this road even though it was making us miserable and we kept arguing all the time over daft things. We never used to argue before setting up the page.
Was there a particular moment when you decided to just shut it down?
Then I developed a pain in my side so I went to the doctor to get it checked out.
The results of the bloods showed that my body wasn’t happy and that I needed to make some drastic changes in order for me to get better and I needed to get rid of any undue stress in my life.
So it finally took a doctor to tell me what I ready knew but at least I listened. Claire and I made the heart-breaking decision to give up what we had worked so hard for over the last two years and that took up all of our time and effort.
But guess what? It was the best decision we ever made.
And how is life now?
We now spend our evenings not stuck behind our phones but doing homework with our kids, reading to them, playing games with them, going swimming, going to the cinema, for walks.
Most importantly we’re getting out and riding our bikes and having quality fun family time together.
Thanks to Dan and Claire for sharing their story with us.
Dan and Claire would like to thanks all of the Digglers members for making the community.
