In The Beginning.... Forum History.

I often wonder how LFGSS got off the ground. Was there a time when it was just @Velocio posting into the ether? I guess word of mouth would soon start to spread in the community it was originally aimed but getting the ball rolling must be weird when there are only a few early users. Are any of the very very first members still active? Enlighten us Oh Master!

kept searching fixed gear london in 2007 as i was building up my first fixed. found andy ted odge, as the sole website for that search. then one day up pops lfgss.com by the time i joined up there were already 50 members. did the 2nd ever forum ride, missed the adventure in the rotherhithe tunnel

You can go to a subforum and click "last" on the page nav section to see the earliest posts.

Word of mouth took the form of:

1. see fixed gear rider or be in a local bike shop
   
2. use the 4 words… ‘you on the forum?’
   

or do a skid

Forum caps were a gamechanger too.

I miss the real life forum. Going to start riding again and going to socials when i'm back in the UK.

I joined in 2007 to try and make a few bob selling white tyres, which at that time were a new exciting hipster thing only available in Japan.

I ended up on here pretty early through a colleague. He was an ex-courier so when I wanted my first real bike(I was bmx up til then) he put me onto one of the Moving Target lot who sorted me out with an early Giant Bowery, maybe late 2007?

I asked the dude about rides in London and he told me to ‘fuck off to the new forum with the rest of the posers’.

It did feel remarkably different to now. Every sale conducted in cash somewhere near spitalfields, lots more rides and far more booze.

It’s been fun growing old with you cunts.

Isn’t it about 24” front wheel clown bikes made a comeback?

I was an early adopter through my then flatmate who joined early on, was friends with a couple of exengers so that probably helped. think i was the 61/62 nd member but that was before i was banned by the overlord and disappeared for 6-7 years.
still got my fixed (with genuine Roberto Bicicletas sticker), still taking the piss...

I was searching for a place that did powder coating, which lead me here.

I was already running several other forums, notably a music fan site for Belle & Sebastian that had been running for almost a decade prior.

Due to that website a friend from Chicago crashed at mine and when he arrived he bought two friends with him, both women and of course he fancied one of them. That basically ruined my plan for him to crash in the front room... and enabled him to plan that one of the women would crash in my room. That woman and I hooked up, it happens, and then we started a relationship. As part of that I went to Chicago, and that meant I had to find a friendship group in Chicago if it turned out that I was going to move to Chicago (something I was open to).

I went to Chicago, I got drunk, I attended some cycling events and cross stuff, and I saw fixed gear bikes and posses of cyclists. That was something that I felt... yes, this is the group of friends I want. So I found out there was a forum, http://www.chifg.com Chicago Fixed Gear, a.k.a chi fags. I joined, I had a blast, I attended a cross race (DFL), and drank in bars.

Cue me being back in London and discovering I could not move to the USA... would need to be married and do the green card, and it takes a long long time. So we do this the other way around, the woman moves to the UK. We get married, and it is a disaster. I found out after that she'd been cold-turkeying all her meds from depression, but that wasn't known to me... she crashed into sadness, I funded her getting a load of help, and funded her flying back to the US to see her friends... and then got the message that she was never ever going to come back. That was a 9 week marriage.

I was inconsolable.

What I needed was some way to recover, some investment in myself... I loved cycling, I wanted to cycle... but not the serious stuff, I wanted what I experienced in Chicago. Some beers, a blast around time, entering events but without taking it serious, beer rather than gels, meat rather than a protein bar. Some recklessness to feel alive... bikes should be fun.

So I decided to create for London and myself the London version of chifg. Except... I'd already run far bigger forums for far longer and I knew how to do this, and I was already versed in phpBB, vBulletin, and Vanilla.

I started londonfgss.com late March 2007.

It was an empty forum... I was the only one on it for a day.

I posted on Bike Forums, the usenet news group... and that was it. Even in the first version this site had better SEO optimisation than anything out there, I advertised it to a small number of people via other forums, and about 10 people turned up here. Buffalo Bill, Dave, Rob, etc... just a handful.

The thing with forums though is that the 1% rule of internet culture applies, the 90/9/1 rule... 90 lurkers for 9 participants for 1 core and active person. But what people don't realise is that it works in reverse... if you get 10 active and core people, it will draw in 90 participants and give you 900 lurkers.

That is what I did... most early conversations were me actively replying in ways that opened doors to many other conversations, to drive the early joiners into saying more, so that it drew in those finding us from Google. And it worked.

This was my first post: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/127096/

Bike Radar sent me here ...

reported

TL:DR :)

through Velocio’s link i found my first post in the same thread.

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/5877146/

Can’t say i have contributed as much as others but i did invent ‘fixie-skidder’ not sure of the exact location but i think it might have been swiss cottage on a ride involving regents park and a posh hotel where an american friend of Velcro’s was staying. I arrived and in an excited high pitched voice shouted “Hello! are you Londons famous Fixie-skidders!” Corny, CliveO and Velocio were there and a few other faces standing around, probably talking about skid patches.

I joined in 2009 because I'd just been jilted by my ex and was struggling with depression. My big brother had been on here since the very early days and suggested that doing a few forum rides might be a good way to change my scenery and make some new friends.

He wasn't wrong. Various people on here helped dig me out of the dark hole I was in. You guys know you you are. Fast forward thirteen years and my health and happiness gains have mostly persisted and I'm happily married to a forumenger. LFGSS changed my life I suppose.

4th August 2008, I posted this "beauty" which was my second post after a post trying to figure out how to size a frame for my then girlfriend...

I can't even remember how I found the forum but I definitely lurked for a long minute before posting. Funnily enough I've only met a small handful of people from the forum in real life in the time since. I really must try and get over to some ride sometime!

It's funny to think how much things have changed in the time since then but the forum has always been here :)

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I joined in 2008, didn't realise it was only 18m old.
I was met with the appropriate amount of hostility and abuse, considering where I came from (UKMB from the ashes of the MBUK forum once BikeRadar took over and ruined everything) it was entirely just.

Wasn't there a pub (probably long gone) on Clarkenwell road where (seemingly all the) messengers would drink at on Friday? Always wondered if that had anything at all to do with this place. Any connection, no matter how tangential?

Duke of York ?

That's the one

http://www.urban75.org/photos/critical/crit53.html

think Sainsburys Ed has the best joining story.

'A lot has happened in 15 years'

After googling various mechanical issues always ended up on this site, eventually signed up to buy parts and always had an excellent experience thankfully.
Only went on one bridges ride, but that was much fun, and also discovered the Dunwich dynamo through it too, which I done twice.

Isn't this all in the forum coffee table book?

I wrote an AI called "Velocio" and it became self-aware in early 2007, locking me out of my own servers.

Because of this I stopped working with software and just started posting about bikes in a kind of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" vibe.