Vintage Koga-Miyata

Dear members of the LFGSS community,

My friend Dirk Claassen, here a.k.a. (mr.) vintage koga miyata, has asked me to thank you all for your support, kind reactions and very positive feedback during the last months here at LFGSS.

Your positive reactions we're (and still are of course) a great stimulator for him to search with great enthusiasm for even more and more vintage Koga-Miyata racing bicycles. Cleaning them, checking them, and servicing them to get them out of those dusty barns and back on the road again. These high quality hand made bicycles certainly deserve that.

His enthusiasm however made him forget, or not take notice, of the (classified ad's) forum rules of LFGSS. Although he financially donated to the forum, his bikes were and are shown elsewhere on the Internet, at his own website.

They could and can be bought there as well (I'm intentionally not indicating his url as this would of course be seen as a shameless plug), so to the rules of LFGSS the bicycles where not 'exclusively offered to LFGSS members'. And that is true.

For which ever reason these rules were made does not very much matter; Dirk now is very well aware of the fact that these rules should be obeyed - and he didn't.

Yesterday, once in a sudden he was banned for life from the LFGSS community. After contacting the moderator he was clearly, and it has to be said friendly, explained by email what went wrong, and that was it. He was sad not even having the possibility to thank you all personally, so that's why he asked me to write this letter.

Personally I think the lack of his always beautiful and in extremely good condition, vintage koga miyata racing bicycles are a loss for the LFGSS community, but that's how it is. It's only about bicycles isn't it, nothing life threatening happened ;-)

If you should want or need to contact Dirk he can be easily found by Googeling (or otherwise send me a p.m. and I'll inform you his email address).

Rubber side down and keep those vintage bicycles racing!

Best regards,

Gerard

I appreciate your sentiment by standing by your friend, but rules are rules
I have sold here for quite some time, and every thing I sell here is listed exclusively
I have a small blog I use for documenting builds and hosting pictures, but I don't sell directly from it.
your mate listed on numerous other sites, including marktplaats,and placed adverts on marktplaats requesting to buy Kogas (http://www.marktplaats.nl/a/fietsen-en-brommers/fietsen-racefietsen/m645048450-vintage-koga-miyata-racefietsen.html?c=)
this action alone contributed to the rise in Kogas prices at source, as any vendor seeing your friend's listings in Holland raised their own prices , which reflected on buyers at LFGSS having to pay higher prices for exported models.
The same as "Arthur" from Heswick, a nice enough guy, but he expects ebay.com prices by listing on marktplaats, which could be argued has contributed the same way to the rise in Colnago prices at this source.

The good people who built this community deserve the respect of having exclusive listings only on their site.

That's a shame. Just got a bike from Dirk and he was spot on throughout.

I don't doubt his integrity

The good people who built this community deserve the respect of having exclusive listings only on their site.

How on earth do you enforce such as the above? I have seen stuff forsale on this forum as well as ebay.

Was the banned person warned of his rule breaking via' PM ?
Was the banned person a good reader & understanding of the English language ??

Who banned him ? A moderator or Admin ?

I'm a Moderator on another forum though nothing to do with cycling but if someone breaks a rule you are given up to three warnings,
after that it is sent to the head man of the forum for him to look at and he would either suspend or if he has to the last resort is to ban.

Being banned from a forum is a bad thing in my eyes and sticks with you, I should know I was banned from a forum
just because I pulled up a Moderator who swung swear words to a forum member, but when he got swear words back
he didn't like it and I told the Mod' to stop swearing as you are here to protect the forum from abuse and not dish it out.
This Moderator then banned me from the forum because I made him look a fool.

I can understanding banning someone for abusive or threatening behaver, surely this could have been sorted out without resorting to a ban or is this your easy option.

Some good points from Mr Raleigh. My suspicion is that a few bikes for sale here are advertised elsewhere and i cannot see the problem with that providing the seller makes that clear (which is not the case currently). Banning someone on a forum as big as this is a pretty harsh penalty IMHO.

Richard

Read the classified rules. It's the way it's always been. And HTFU. etc.

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this

Personally I don't think cross-advertising is the end of the world if it's a legitimate attempt to sell your bike across various channels of potentially bike-wanting people, but having an account just for selling, for free and without ebay/other places fees, is essentially profiteering.

Agreed VKM (soz for acronym) gave better descriptions and was all round a more decent seller than most people who only use the forums for that purpose, but ultimately wasn't contributing anything outside of that

I remember raising his cross-listings a while ago somewhere - but it seemed that most people were turning a blind eye to 'VKM' because he wasn't doing much harm.

.