What... what happened?
 

I'm not well-known on BF, but I've been on here a long time. I used to ride road and fixed, then I got into 24" BMX (both track and street), then I hurt myself a few too many times and stopped (I'm old and don't heal as well as I used to, heh). I haven't been riding much for the past year-and-a-half or so, maybe two years, but I'm starting to get back into the road bike saddle and I have a Kilo TT Pro coming early next week.

My question is... what happened? BF is still here, but LAFixed is broken, OCFixed and IEFixed don't seem to be around (and I started IEFixed way back when), most other sites seem to have stopped in 2015 or so. Are there no more, like, regional fixed community sites any longer?

All the people that used to populate LAfixed grew up and bought motorcycles.

I refuse to grow up.

lafixed is not broken.

and my gf gave me a motorcycle, i didnt buy one.

Can't register, looks like the page only half-way loads, and the part that doesn't load contains the submit button. It's totally missing any CSS; in fact, the code that the register link returns is completely broken. Even the most basic HTML elements are missing.

Works fine for me. Grandfathered in, maybe?

To register? Or log in?

#KiloTT

Login. I've been registered for a few years.

i registered in april of 2010

Just for yuks, I just went to the lafixed webpage and the register page looks good to me. Not going to sign up because west coast people are all wierd.

True.

Hmm.

I've tested this from Windows 7 and Windows 10, on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and IE. Would you mind telling me your system details?

I'm on an Apple iPad iOS 9 and Chrome.

Huh. I don't have an iPad, but I do have an iPhone on iOS 9, and I get the same thing, what's shown in the attached screen shot. How bizarre.

well, youve still got the midnight ridazz forum.

Good point.

must be the artifitial growth hormones

Same thing on Chrome/Windows(8.1). You're not crazy, something is very wrong on their site.

*sleuths around a bit*

It looks like their reCaptcha API key expired and whatever is generating the page on the back-end isn't catching the exception for that. Beyond that, it really looks like the place has been abandoned.

No one rides fixie bikes anymore.

r.i.p sdfixed too

That is actually my main concern with this thread; it looks like most - if not all - of the "fixed gear" internet traffic I'm used to seeing from a couple of years ago is... gone. Like, what happened to it all?

Is that what happened? Was fixed gear cycling just the fad that it was cracked up to be by people who didn't ride fixed?

Fixed gear bikes act as a gateway of sorts to the many disciplines of cycling. Fixed gear riders graduate to road and mountain biking, often times opting to sell off their fixed gear bikes altogether.

No longer possessing a fixed gear bike, they similarly graduate to more mainstream forums such as bikeforums, roadbikereviews, paceline, weightweenies, mtbr, etc.


Another big factor is the cost of hosting for these forums and alternatives.

Usually these forums were supported by member donations or the kindness of the admin's spare change. Ad revenue if any, were not much due to these forums being geographically based.

As for alternatives, with the rise of social media such as facebook and facebook groups, a lot of local fixed gear riders have decided to create facebook group pages instead. Besides easily implementing social media into the picture facebook groups provide ease of creating events, adding members and members adding their friends. Communication was also greatly improved thanks to the robustness and integration of facebook messenger and notifications to mobile devices.

Thank you for this.