I'm not sure if anybody mentioned this, but a few days ago we passed 100 000 posts on the forum.

Thanks Joe for making this possible!

And to celebrate - this is my 100th post!

That's great! How long has the forum been around?

Carl

All in favor of voting this the BEST WEBSITE ON THE INTERNET say "thanks Joe!"

thanks Joe

Thanks Joe!! This is the best forum around.
Slainte

Thank me? Thank the 3500 members who post here!

Joe. Don't start getting shy on us now?

I want to ask some things, and maybe these have been covered in the past:

1. How did the forum start?
2. Whose idea was it? Yours? Group decision? That sort of thing.
3. Where is it being hosted?
4. To what extent is it moderated?
5. What h/w and s/w is used to host the forum?
6. Anything else of interest you want to add.

Indeed, thanks Joe.

I started out as a Type II daibetic who needed to find something to do for exercise. Thanks in large measure to what I have learned here, first as a lurker and now as a participant, I've turned into a cyslist who happens to have diabetes.

I'd love to see the answers to Bokkie's questions.

Carl

Sure thing,

1) I was sick of the spam / advertisements, lack of moderation and maturity level on other forums. I also couldn’t find a single site that covered all the topics I was interested in, road, mtn, commuting, touring etc.

2) Just mine, for the first two months, we would avg one or two posts a day, now we are up to ~450+ posts a day. (last week we had a day with 600 posts!). Last month, bikeforums.net published over 600,000 page views.

3) VenturesOnline.com, best host I have ever had. At one time, I was on a $99 a month dedicated server, but after one late payment, the host sold my server, and deleted the database, the only back up was a month old. We lost ~500 members and 20,000 posts over night. I was ready to give up, and only came back due to the donations of so many members. A big thank you to all who have helped out! Currently, the hosting bill is just over $100 a month, donations and forum jerseys should cover all costs for the rest of this year! YAY!

4) Currently, There are 3 super moderators that can moderate any / all forums, Dirtgrinder, Fubar5, and velocipedio. James Raia moderates his own forum, Tour de France Times. and Xavier, of bulteksports.com helps moderate the road cycling forum. I also have a welcome team, who personally welcome each new member to the forums. Aerobat and RonH currently do most of the work. If anyone wants to help out, let me know, where looking for a few good welcomers!

5) Im on a shared server with 5 other semi-large websites. The server is a Dual PIII 850 w/ 2gig of ram, running redhat and abunch of other linux stuff i know nothing about. The software is custom hacked copy of vBulletin. v3 should be out later this year, with tons of new features, I cant wait.

6) Why are you reading this? Go ride your bike And seriously, thank you too all the members who help run this forum, its a labor of love, and its great to see the community succeed.

Joe, thanks for the info. Sometimes, we spend more time looking at the meat, and not the bones that support it, if you get my meaning. Well done, on doing a splendid job. In the month or so I've been around, I've learned an awful lot about a lot of things.

Yeah... I gotta say that this is easily the best forum I've ever participated in. Period. Joe just knows how to attract a better class of people. This is the one site that I feel I have to look up every day.

I know what you mean. Right now I'm at work and filling in my spare time looking around the forums. I particularly like the email notification when replies have been posted.

The total lack of adverts in your face also means we get good value for the bandwidth, and it proves you don't need to be carpet bombed with endless crap. Ads/banners usually dilute and spoil the value of what you are trying to look for and take part in. I hope the forums do not commercialise to that extent. There is a place for them, but that's kept in its own discussion group (so far I've never been bothered to go there). I might take a peep just to see what I'm not missing!