Bike Forums.net community (corporate-owned) is a fantastic source of cycling and bicycle mechanics knowledge. It stands alongside legendary resources like Sheldon Brown website (enthusiast-owned, like BikeGremlin – my article about Sheldon Brown) and Park Tool repair page (company-owned) in terms of value and depth.
There are many knowledgeable experts there who generously share their experience.
I’ve been an active member since 2010. Over the years, I went from asking questions to being able to help others – and in the meantime, I created my own resource: bike.bikegremlin.com (this very site) – a site built to share useful, experience-based cycling info.
However, that didn’t sit well with a few forum members, as I discussed in this article:
BikeGremlin discussed on BikeForums – is it reliable? 🙂
Soon after, I created a second thread to address concerns raised in the above-mentioned discussion, and invite fact-checking (since I’m building a free knowledge base, expert-reviewed crowd input is a feature, not a bug) – but it was also met with disapproval:
Hydraulic brake fluid article feedback
Since then, I’ve scaled back my participation on Bike Forums. I still post from time to time and continue to recommend it as a valuable resource – but when someone specifically wants a reply from me, I now point them to my own forum: bikegremlin.net.
With limited time and energy, I focus on spaces where thoughtful exchange is likely, and where I can provide the most value (how I organise and share my knowledge).
It’s also important to stress:
- People get good and correct responses on Bike Forums, with or without my participation.
- Thanks to it being a community – and on the Internet – you are very likely to be corrected if you say something inaccurate (peer-reviewed, pretty well, most of the time).
- It’s easier for me to keep track of new questions on my own forum than on Bike Forums. I often direct people to BF and then completely miss their question. On my forum, I can still answer practically every question (there aren’t dozens of new ones every day).
P.S.
I wrote a forum post explaining why I’ve practically completely stopped answering questions on social networks:
https://www.bikegremlin.net/threads/why-i-answer-questions-on-bikegremlin-forum-only.497/
Last updated:
Originally published:
