General: [Sticky] Welcome to the velospace forums!

Its about time our community had an open set of forums. Kick back, relax, converse, and thanks for checking us out.

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Most excellent!

Dope.......

Perfect!

Fantastic!

Posted By: Z4N5H1N... Having all the categories mushed together on the default forum page might get hectic if the forum gets popular, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

That was my thinking. I believe there is a way to default the forum to split up topics into categories, but for the time being I think its best to keep everything in one place to encourage people to communicate.

DOPE!!

hell yeah! Would like to remind people that if they use iGoogle there's a velospace "Bike Of The Moment" Gadget here

17 skid patches....

Sparky, I've often had the same issue. This isn't the thread for it, but it might be nice to have a tech talk thread where we do some experiments and figure out what the deal really is.

Glad to hear it! The forums are a great way for people to connect, though bikes are velospace's core - ride on

And while I'm asking for features: Could the "My Stuff" page also list the clusters I administer, for quicker access?

As long as we're on the subject of clusters....

The opposite end of the "which clusters is this bike in?" issue is: How can someone communicate with all members of a cluster? One of my clusters is now up to 74 bikes - obviously, too many to communicate with individually. If it were possible to manage the cluster members as a list, I could PM them all to inform them that they've been included in the cluster.

An extension of this comes out of a PM discussion with a cluster member, who contacted me asking to be included in the cluster. That's the second-most common way of getting new cluster members (the first is my ferreting out new bikes that meet the cluster criteria). It turned out that the new member lives in a nearby city, and has a bike similar to mine, with similar buildout issues. I suggested the possibility of some kind of offline get-together for cluster members in the area (given the nature of the Bianchi di celeste cluster, probably something like a Tragic Hipster Coffee 'n Beer Cruise from San Francisco's Marina District to the Mission). But there's no easy way to establish which cluster members might be accessible for an event in a particular area; I had to go through the entire list of cluster bikes and drill down to each bike's owner's user page, to select out the ten members in the Northern California area, whom I can then PM individually.

It seems to me that there are possibilities for community-building tools based on clusters:

• some kind of a sniffer that alerts a cluster manager to new bikes listed with relevant tags



• membership in a cluster gives you posting access to a forum specific to that cluster (all Velospace members get read access to all cluster forums, so no big secrets)



• cluster managers get a control panel which lets them see not just a list of bikes, but a list of the bikes' owners, with a geographic breakdown and an include/exclude option for sending out a group PM
  
  A cluster manager could then act as the gateway for general communication with members of the cluster; so, if a Bianchi di celeste member in Southern California or Washington D.C. wanted to have a gathering of people with stylistically similar bikes, they could contact me and I could announce to the SoCal-niks that Cluster Member X was organizing an event, and that they could contact him/her if they wanted to be involved. That also helps to build cluster managers into the Velospace process, by giving them a little more responsibility.

Now, I also have a legal background (I was a paralegal for a big SF law firm for about ten years), so I can easily imagine some of the downsides. An unscrupulous person could create a cluster, include every bike on the site in the cluster, and then PM-bomb everyone (or 10,000 people, anyway) with spam. It would be a pretty labor-intensive task to create such a cluster in the first place; but people will do strange things...however, I think that tools that permit people to confer as fans not of "bikes", but of "this specific interpretation of bikes" provides the small-group thing that really gets people fired up. And if you extend beyond that to "hey, my bike is not just a member of this cluster; it's part of this cluster, too!", it's a bridging mechanism to see the links between different areas of interest.

At the moment, part of the problem with PMing anyone as a social tool is that it appears to be in violation of the Velospace general rule:

Rule 2. Users only may contact one another for the sale or trade of bike-related items.

I know that it's prissy to read it this way; but technically, 95% of all the PMs I've sent or received here are in violation of that rule, as they have not been part of buy/sell communications. Strictly speaking, the system for inclusion in a cluster (email the cluster manager) also appears to be in violation of this rule.

I'm just sayin'. I respect the spirit and intention of the rule, and I agree with it; but it might be time to rephrase it.

Ha! I misread that and thought you'd just changed your mind at some point without changing the rule. It just dawned on me what it was supposed to say.

Thanks for letting us know

anyone seen this hate

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/five-inexplicab.html

Bikesnobnyc has been doing a better job of making fun of fashion bikes for years, the fact that Wired wrote a crappy blog post about it is unsurprising. I can't believe how many comments they got

Hey! My clusters are there! Thanks a bunch, Greg.

Joe Bob sez, ¡Excellento!

Excellent website. Looking forward to viewing some classics!

hi-- Im gstar-- i ride for a living on a 83 guerci track bike-- Im a legal courier--- Im a little uptight, sorry-- thank you for having me------down with building security and pot holes ( same thing in my book)--- im as old as the rocks in your yard and I rarely apologize,,,, you lucky this time.... cheers.

Ahh, I would like to. I wonder how many hours it would take to crunch the current numbers. I'll put it in the hopper

Okay, this will be a troublesome one.

Velospace's popularity as a resource has ramped way up over the last few months. We're getting a lot more drive-by activity: People creating accounts to advertise gear for sale, or to ask a question and disappear, or to come into the forums with rhetorical guns a-blazing. It's become quite common to see top-posted forum discussions advertising a bike for sale (instead of posting in the For Sale thread), and finding that the poster created their account five minutes before posting the listing.

Is this what we want? Every time I come across a new thread from some brand-new member trying to get $1K for a bike, or a newbie's post in a long-running thread insulting a member who's been offering useful information for months, I feel like a sheep being sheared.

Perhaps a posting quarantine for new accounts is in order (three to seven days after registration?), plus a mandatory pop-up window with The Rules.

Greg, I belong to many car websites, very similar to this one, and some of their guidelines for posting in the forsale section, is you have to be a member for 15 days, and have at least 5posts or comments. That would be a good way to slow down the sale process, and it wouldnt be abused for sure. It also makes them see more of the site instead of jumping right into a free post to sell their stuff

a waiting period of x amount of time to post sales and such, or something similar to this.

Keep this great site going, for us bike lovers!!

Eaglerock is right to, pretty much were talking about the same thing. And Im sure most of us can agree that there should be some waiting period on posting certain things such as in the for sale or wanted section, starting new threads in the forums, and having reminded of the rules over and over and over again.

that sounds like a good idea. i dont know if this sounds good or not but maby set up a program that deletes people who havent been on the sight for x amount of time.maby the site is too new for that though (it could clear the website of the ''drive by'' people that have been sighning up latley).

Nice to hear this!!