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A perfect response, thanks my man. I can't even remember how ended up here back in 2008 but it was definitely East Drinks where I met real life people in the flesh for the first time and truly discovered what a bunch of hilarious, generous, enthusiastic, degenerate pissheads lurk on here. From there on in it was rides and polo and weird parties in warehouses and naked Dogsballs and who knows what other shenanigans. I dip in and out these days but there will always be a place in my heart for this sordid enclave. Viva La LFGSS!
(dan)
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/