Welcome Announcement: Bikefanclub.com

Greetings to all my friends!

I'm happy to announce the opening of our new forum and image gallery website known as Bikefanclub.com. For those of you who don't know me I'm the person who hosted and ran the former Serotta message board for the last 2 years. I'm also the current administrator of the Spectrum, Strong, and Calfee forums. For those of you who know me,I wish to thank you for your all your support and I hope you will join and use the new forums and image galleries here. I'm very excited about this project - how it evolved, where it's going, and I hope you are as well.

Also beware there are bugs - possibly many bugs! I still have a lot of work to do cleaning up the interface, tweaking the menus, making mods, etc. Please be patient but also feel free to begin using the forums and image galleries now.

Info regarding registrations:

Because the forums are new, we have a new policy requiring people to register an account on our system in order to access certain features of the site including posting messages. It's hoped that registrations will help reduce the amount of trolling and other silly abuses we've seen in the past. We want these new forums to remain civilized and become an enjoyable high quality online experience for everyone. Registering a simple account with your own password is a small favor to ask in return for enjoying the privilege of being able to participate here.

Also please note our image gallery now makes use of the forum system's membership database. In the past, people had to register with the image gallery separately in order to upload photographs. The two systems have now been merged thus making use of a single registration database - the one that belongs to the forum software. This good news because it means people only have to register once in one place only. The bad news is for those who previously registered with the image gallery under the old system, you will have to re-register again (sigh) since the old image gallery membership database is no longer being used. This also messes up the photos and comments posted to the image galleries prior to this most recent switch-over. It's an unfortunate side effect and I apologize for this inconvenience. Remember if things look really bad, people can always re-upload their images after establishing a new membership account with the new system.

A little history

Over the past two years the cycling forums at hydromedia have grown to approximately 1,000 registered users. In addition, our logs show about twice the number of unregistered visitors browsing the forums each month. The popularity of the site has been surprising considering that many other cycling forums exist with all of them more or less competing for the same audience in the same space. However there's a small problem. Most of the other cycling forums don't do very much to differentiate themselves and most are based on very general cycling topics such as racing, mechanics, fitness, etc. There's nothing wrong with that but from experience we've seen that forums dedicated to specific brands of fine bicycles tends to attract and form niche communities in a certain way that other general forums have been unable to do.

By creating a meeting place dedicated to fans and owners of specific bikes, we create a gathering place unlike most typical cycling forums. People here not only share a common general interest, but unlike the general communities, our readers possess at least one guaranteed common thread linking them together and that's the unique kinship that occurs by owning or sharing interest in a particular brand (or brands) of bicycle. The new Bikefanclub website seeks to capture and build upon this concept, only this time we've added some significant improvements.

In the past I would host forums only for a few select brands of bicycles. This was done mainly for my own selfish reasons. I used to say that each bike forum was created only for those brands I had direct experience with and happened to like. This ignored many other cyclists who asked me to create forums for their favorite brands. For various reasons such as lack of time and interest, I never bothered to accommodate their requests but now that has changed. The new website will no longer be limited to my own personal tastes but will now support more forums and allow readers to request forums for additional brands. If a community exists for brand XYZ bike, and enough people request it, you will see it here.

The old forums existed as separate islands and had limited features that allowed people to co-mingle. The new forums now allow searching to span multiple forums. People can select a subset of specific forums of their choosing during searches. For example, if you hang out in the Calfee forum but wish to do a search on how to soldier cables, your search can span the entire website if you wish. Your best answer may wind up being found in a different forum. Besides providing a place where people can explore the different forums, the built in multi-forum search capability is a powerful way that allows smaller communities to interact as one large family. This kind of cross pollination isn't found in other cycling forums and I feel it represents one of the more exciting value propositions we have here.

Finally I want to mention that we're not seeking "sponsorship" by any of the bike forums being hosted here. They're being operated in an independent "fan club" style format with the understanding that anyone out there in network-land can go to Yahoo! Groups and create a forum for XYZ bike. As such I'm neither approaching the bike companies or seeking their permission to host a forum about their brand. The companies can choose whether or not they wish to participate in their own forum and while we hope they do, it's their choice. If a company complains about our forums, they risk being viewed as a pariah by their own fan-base of customers and potential future customers.

Once again thank you for your terrific support. Please feel free to write me or use the suggestion box to voice your ideas and comments. Wishing everyone a joyful holiday season and a very happy New Year!

Aloha,

Gary (aka Kahuna)