What would you do if the forum had a subscription fee (to post classifieds, etc)?

Before this whole debate descends into a capitalist/communist mud-slinging debacle, may I just interject with a ha'penny's worth of wisdom from my old noggin, for I have a salutary tale to tell that may help smooth a few furrowed brows out there in Fixed Wheel Land.

As some of you cycle nuts may recall, the very first online bike forum in the UK (lovemyraleigh.com) faced the very same dilemma in its inaugural year, 1997. Back then, I was running a small, well-loved naturist campsite on the Quantock coast. I was also the proud owner of several vintage Raleigh track bikes, as well as a doughty dual-processor Macintosh 9500/180 MP. On account of a vicious whispering campaign in Nether Stowey, the village I used to call home, I had more time on my hands than my bank manager was comfortable with, so one evening, after quaffing a few too many Thatchers at my local watering hole I hatched a plan with my old mate John 'Zebbidee' Critchen to make a few bob from the Raleigh forum he'd recently started.

In these recessionary time, the idea of a middle-aged man getting cock-a-hoop over a business plan must strike many of you as peculiar, repellent even, but to put all this into some sort of historical context, these were the heady days of Britpop; a time when New Labour was feted as the antidote to Tory sleaze, Millie Ray Cyrus's dad was a chart-topper and Will Smith’s movie Independence Day serendipitously coincided with NASA’s Mars Pathfinder programme to instill in many of us a burning desire to share our earthly bounty with little green men. Oh yes, and - curate’s egg, this!! - Charlie Chaplin's great grandaughter was briefly engaged to Buster Keaton's great great grandson.

But I digress. My proposal for the forum, in a nut shell, entailed a switch to a subscription-based model. For an annual fee, as well as full access to the forum, members would get 10 days free camping at my site. It seemed like a win-win situation: the forum’s membership was after all in, literally, terminal decline. Quite simply, most of its members were elderly and busy, literally, shuffling (sometimes cycling) off this mortal coil. Meanwhile, my campsite had struggled to attract visitors after the Tory council, in an unholy alliance with the local Presbytarian church, had forced me to introduce a partial-nudity-only entry policy (thongs and ‘budie-smugglers’ at the very least)... to save the Quantocks from ‘moral mayhem’, as my nemesis, Councillor Steed, felt compelled to write in the Stowey Herald.

The Swedes and the Fins, my main customers, baulked at this and gave me a wide berth thereafter. But I had a hunch I could attract liberal, upper-middle-class German heritage tourists with a minimalist dress code and vigorous promotion of the Quantock coastline’s similarities with the shoreline around Hamburg.

After a spot of number-crunching on my trusty Macintosh, I alighted on £80.55 as the optimum annual charge (it happens also to ‘spell’ BOSS, which my etymologist wife assured me is a ‘digiverbal-dominator’, ie, a ‘wordish’ number capable of subconsciously winning over doubting Toms... or should that be Gunters!!!).

Anyway, to cut a long story shorter, Zeb agreed, and the forum became a pay site. To our amazement we were inundated with new members - mainly Germans, as I’d predicted. In the first few months, the site basked in an anglo-German honeymoon glow. English and German members swapped phrases, photographs and meat-based recipes-me and the wife even named our first-born Wolfgang in honour of one of our most enthusiastic Teutonic members.

In the summer of ’98, however, things started to unravel. Although the forum was still buzzing, veteran forum folk started to complain that it wasn’t abuzzing with Raleigh talk (the ostensible purpose of the darn thing, after all!). Most of the Germans rode geared Kalkhoffs and had little time for the noble traditions of Nottingham’s finest two-wheeled steel son. After a few online complaints from our more verbose and combative English members, a Germanic wag posted an image of the Raleigh head badge with its great-crested grebe motif photoshopped/disfigured to resemble the German imperial eagle.

To many of our older members, this proved to be, forgive the military analogy, as unforgivably provocative asthe 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi forces and the earlier 1937 invasion of China by Japan. A second Second World War didn’t exactly break out, but tensions were nonetheless running high that summer as my campsite welcomed a sizeable contingent of German forum members, including Wolfgang senior (who, it seemed, had borne the brunt of much of the anti-German vitriol on the forum), taking advantage of the free 10-day access offer I’d dreamt up to attract new forum members.

In anticipation of an influx of guests, I’d earlier renovated the rather distressed toilet/shower block, extended the bar and added draft Hooky Haymaker to our roster of real ales, thinking it would go down well with the ‘Arian invaders’, as Zeb was now calling them.

In a bid to aid the integration of our overseas guests into our small community, my wife and I had timetabled a number of light-hearted, ‘patriotic’ evening entertainments. At this point I must add that my wife and I don’t drink excessively. We both enjoy a Thatchers or two of an evening, maybe more, on a Friday, but nothing prepared us for the vast amounts of drink our German visitors downed daily, from sun-up to sundown.

I think, in retrospect, the Haymaker, with its 7.5% alcohol content, was an error of judgement on my part. But I refuse to shoulder the blame for what happened on ‘Morris Dancing’ night. After a few too many, Wolfgang, (who’d wholeheartedly entered into the spirit of the folk-dancing theme and hired from a costume shop the full bolero jacket, rag-shirt and four-cornered hat outfit, complete with bells) had, it transpired, opted to spend forty winks on the lavatory.

I admit that positioning the hand-dryer machine so close to the toilet in such a cramped cubicle was a mistake, but my DIY skills are limited and my budget for the refurbishment was hampered by a lack of funds, on account of my earlier legal case with the local council. Somehow, Wolfgang had drifted off slumped against the machine, triggering its blower.

After a period of some thirty minutes, it seems the sustained blast of hot air had caused his cheap draylon shirt to ignite. Roused by the flames, an inebriated and panicked Wolfgang fled the toilet block and stumbled out of the campsite towards the village, tearing off his flaming clothes and screaming anti-English invective as he did so. By the time he was extinguished, the smouldering, and now naked German, had managed to terrify a host of influential villagers, including Steed - most of whom, as the local rag regularly delighted in reporting - already had it in for me.

My wife and son left me not long after the council forced the closure of my camping site and, to add insult to injury, the forum kicked me off and I was successfully prosecuted for promoting anti-social lasciviousness and causing injury by reckless endangerment.

I write these words from inside Edmunds Hill prison in Suffolk, where I share a wing with Jack Tweedy, who tells me he once owned a Raleigh Bomber (whatever that is), although sadly my discourse on the company’s track bike pedigree left him somewhat nonplussed.

So, to conclude, I’d think twice before switching to a subscription-based format.