"celebrity membership?" Anyone can join it if they agree to understand and abide by the rules. That "anyone" can be a Dave Moulton (and is) or a Sheldon Brown (and was), or it can be me and redxj for example (and it is). I'll leave it up to y'all to decide which of us is less worthy of membership over there. If Sheldon had not abided by the rules he'd have been tossed, as have many members of lesser cycling fame.

There's only one mod there and something like 1500 members last time I saw someone mention it. Members sometimes take it upon themselves to exercise "vigilante" judgement, but that usually leads to discussions that require the mod to step in. But, with only one mod who also runs a full-time business, it's not easy to manage everything.

Yes, there are rules, but they're very easy to understand and follow. Also anyone who wants to can read them. It's gonna prove helpful if you want to make judgments about CR or its participants.

Probably the main difference with C&V is that "vintage" is a well defined term, and it's assumed that vintage is of value in and of itself. Here it often happens that when someone wants to talk about a certain bike, he'll get flamed by someone who can't understand how, for example, an 853 frame could possibly be of more value than Ishiwata 025 or for that matter, ANY other steel, if one needs a rider. On CR, people interested already have the knowledge base and the desire to experience the best and decide for themselves on it's value.

There may or may not be more willingness to spend $ on old stuff, over on CR. There is definitely a more consistent desire to understand it and ask "how well does it work?" and a more open-minded attitude toward non-Japanese componentry and frames. Another theme there is to understand classics and classic makers in their historical contexts: racing, randonneuring, and the rider/builders who were involved in them. Based on the actual history, this involves history in France, GB, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Spain, as well as some in the United States. Another thing that happens is that vintage freaks from all over the world are in attendance, tending to mitigate our usual US-centric perspective.

Because many of the same people are here, on iBob, on RoadBikeReview, KOG, RBW, the Seattle Randonneurs list, the Randon and rec.bicycle.tech lists, it's really hard to say "well, these fools just like Campy." But if you look across lists at a bigger picture, you see a different perspective.

Maybe BF should have a "Flippers Forum" or/and a "Good Old Value Forum" in addition to a "True Classics" forum. If the Mods here were to make such changes, we'd still probably see 90% of the same names on all those forums.

Or simply leave the pure classics discussions to CR.