Comment Section Trolls

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

Blogs have comment sections. Well, most of them do. This blog has always allowed comments, but that process has changed a few times over the years and with that there are some stories to share.

Originally you could comment and hit "enter" and your comment was there immediately. Anyone could comment at anytime. There weren't "bots", spam comment machines, or the like. But people were, and still can be, troll-ish and mean. The comment section here was proof of this. 

Around late 2006 or sometime during 2007, (sorry! I cannot remember when this was!), I ran into an alarming situation that required me to make a big change to how the comments worked here. It had to do with what was then the new 650B/27.5"er MTB wheels which Kirk Pacenti was championing. I'm not sure which post of mine set off the things that forced me to change the comment section, but it very well may have been THIS POST from late 2007. At any rate, I was alerted to an issue in my comments section via email and when I checked it out, alarms went off in my mind. 

A colorized scan of the OG G-Ted logo drawn in the early 2000's.

There were pages of comments. Derogatory, defaming comments about myself and my take on 650B wheels. Apparently some ill-willed fans of the wheel size hatched a plan on mtbr.com's 650B forums and hit my blog repeatedly all day long with comments. 

This forced me to delete the entire comments section going back to the beginnings of the blog. There was no other way to do the work effectively otherwise. Then I installed a new comments section that required moderation. 

It was kind of a bummer because there were a lot of gems in the comment section back then from a lot of folks who also blogged in the cycling sphere and from folks I miss like Joel Dyke and others from the early Trans Iowa days. But trolls often ruin things and you should never read the comments sections anyway, right?

There was one other time when Google bought out Blogger and I had to flush the old comments out and start all over again with another version of the comments feature. Since then things have stabilized. But what do you expect after almost 20 years of blogging? Things happen. 

It has been really good ever since then as far as the comments go and I appreciate everyone that has taken the opportunity to comment and I have tried to keep things decent and have discussions here that acknowledge other's points of view. I have had a few times where I had to shut down a person because they were just being inflammatory and not adding to the discussion, but that is quite rare here these days.

Thanks for engaging here, if you do use this feature to communicate with me. I truly appreciate that you do comment and especially if you are a regular reader here.

Minus Ten Review 2009- 1

NOTE- Starting with 2019, all "Minus Ten" posts will have the year they refer to in the title. After three years of doing these, I figure I'd better do something to make finding old "Minus Ten" posts a little easier. 

Ten years ago this week it was deep Winter in Iowa and I was trying to find ways to cycle whenever, and however, I could. Of course, back then I was doing this odd activity called cross country skiing. Remember doing that, Iowans?

Ironically enough, I spoke with a man last week, (December, 2018), at the shop and he was from Western New York. He mentioned he was here on a family Christmas visit. He also said he'd skied 34 times already. Thirty-four times?! I don't think I've cross country skied 34 times in the last ten years. Mostly because, well.......it was impossible. That and "fat bike". That came into my life late in 2010, so in another year I would fairly abandon cross country skiing for fat biking. Then Winter, well........Winter with snow, disappeared, for the most part, and as you know, it's been tricky to even see anything white here resembling snow in a long time.

Let's see, so what else was going on in early, early 2009? Well, a couple of years prior, in 2007, Pacenti launched the 650B tire for mountain biking and it was quickly lauded as the "best of both worlds", a tire that would quickly erase 29"ers, (those silly wagon wheels), and replace the too-small 26"er. Two years later, in early 2009, and what did we have but.........(yawn), not much of anything. I wrote a musing on this fact, then I made the following prognostication, just barely after 2009 started.

"I also still think that 650B will not go away, but it will most certainly not attain the popularity that 29"ers currently enjoy without unseating 26"ers or 29"ers."

Hmmm...... Looks like I had that correct, and 26"ers are now, for all intents and purposes, a dead wheel size for mountain biking. Of course, this was not due to riders picking up on the tweener wheel size. No, had manufacturers not foisted the wheel size on consumers by developing the 'new" enduro discipline, and introducing small wheel sized mtb's as 650B bikes and not 26"ers, the "B" sized wheels would have died out, assuredly.

Ice glistens in the branches against an early morning Sun on my way to work in 2009.

 I'm not saying that would have been the right choice, but the industry pretty much dictated that change, not the riding public. I think Europe, whose riders at that time did not want anything to do with 29"ers, embraced the 650B wheel size as a better "big wheel" alternative to 26'ers. Of course, eventually even Europe gave over and accepted the 29"er in larger numbers.

But it was painfully obvious, (both in the metaphorical sense and literally), that the bike industry was swinging hard for 650B by 2011. That hurt "Twenty Nine Inches", the website I owned at the time, and times were tough for anything new on the big wheeled side for a while. But back to 2009. By this time, in 2009, decisions were being made and this is when the whole 650B deal was started, but it would take two years for all of that to come to fruition on the retail side. Manufacturers, bitten by sitting on their hands when Trek/Fisher raked in the sales on 29"ers in 2007/2008, (along with other early adopters), wanted to create the next "big thing" in mountain biking and they saw a chance with 650B and enduro, or in other terms, by replacing what had been known as "long travel" 26"ers. (5"-6")

Of course, back then, all I knew was that three wheel sizes in the shops weren't going to cut it. I was correct. Then "Plus" wheels and fat bikes pretty much wrecked that scenario!

As a side note, I think, because I cannot verify this anymore, but I think this 650B post from ten years ago was the one that spurred a violent rebuke from a few 650B fanboi's from mtbr.com here on the blog. They basically decided to flood the comments with bile, and what they thought was funny. The blog didn't have comment verification or spam control.....until after this point. I ended up having to install that on the blog then. It was my first run-in with internet style "bullying", and it wasn't cool.

But, I learned a lot from that, and so in the end, it was all good. I also had to learn about all this spam management and comment moderation for "Twenty Nine Inches" anyway, so that was a trial by fire! It served me well. In the end, the bullying made me a better blogger and internet site owner, so I guess I should thank those numbskulls.

Minus Ten Review 2009- 1

NOTE- Starting with 2019, all "Minus Ten" posts will have the year they refer to in the title. After three years of doing these, I figure I'd better do something to make finding old "Minus Ten" posts a little easier. 

Ten years ago this week it was deep Winter in Iowa and I was trying to find ways to cycle whenever, and however, I could. Of course, back then I was doing this odd activity called cross country skiing. Remember doing that, Iowans?

Ironically enough, I spoke with a man last week, (December, 2018), at the shop and he was from Western New York. He mentioned he was here on a family Christmas visit. He also said he'd skied 34 times already. Thirty-four times?! I don't think I've cross country skied 34 times in the last ten years. Mostly because, well.......it was impossible. That and "fat bike". That came into my life late in 2010, so in another year I would fairly abandon cross country skiing for fat biking. Then Winter, well........Winter with snow, disappeared, for the most part, and as you know, it's been tricky to even see anything white here resembling snow in a long time.

Let's see, so what else was going on in early, early 2009? Well, a couple of years prior, in 2007, Pacenti launched the 650B tire for mountain biking and it was quickly lauded as the "best of both worlds", a tire that would quickly erase 29"ers, (those silly wagon wheels), and replace the too-small 26"er. Two years later, in early 2009, and what did we have but.........(yawn), not much of anything. I wrote a musing on this fact, then I made the following prognostication, just barely after 2009 started.

"I also still think that 650B will not go away, but it will most certainly not attain the popularity that 29"ers currently enjoy without unseating 26"ers or 29"ers."

Hmmm...... Looks like I had that correct, and 26"ers are now, for all intents and purposes, a dead wheel size for mountain biking. Of course, this was not due to riders picking up on the tweener wheel size. No, had manufacturers not foisted the wheel size on consumers by developing the 'new" enduro discipline, and introducing small wheel sized mtb's as 650B bikes and not 26"ers, the "B" sized wheels would have died out, assuredly.

Ice glistens in the branches against an early morning Sun on my way to work in 2009.

 I'm not saying that would have been the right choice, but the industry pretty much dictated that change, not the riding public. I think Europe, whose riders at that time did not want anything to do with 29"ers, embraced the 650B wheel size as a better "big wheel" alternative to 26'ers. Of course, eventually even Europe gave over and accepted the 29"er in larger numbers.

But it was painfully obvious, (both in the metaphorical sense and literally), that the bike industry was swinging hard for 650B by 2011. That hurt "Twenty Nine Inches", the website I owned at the time, and times were tough for anything new on the big wheeled side for a while. But back to 2009. By this time, in 2009, decisions were being made and this is when the whole 650B deal was started, but it would take two years for all of that to come to fruition on the retail side. Manufacturers, bitten by sitting on their hands when Trek/Fisher raked in the sales on 29"ers in 2007/2008, (along with other early adopters), wanted to create the next "big thing" in mountain biking and they saw a chance with 650B and enduro, or in other terms, by replacing what had been known as "long travel" 26"ers. (5"-6")

Of course, back then, all I knew was that three wheel sizes in the shops weren't going to cut it. I was correct. Then "Plus" wheels and fat bikes pretty much wrecked that scenario!

As a side note, I think, because I cannot verify this anymore, but I think this 650B post from ten years ago was the one that spurred a violent rebuke from a few 650B fanboi's from mtbr.com here on the blog. They basically decided to flood the comments with bile, and what they thought was funny. The blog didn't have comment verification or spam control.....until after this point. I ended up having to install that on the blog then. It was my first run-in with internet style "bullying", and it wasn't cool.

But, I learned a lot from that, and so in the end, it was all good. I also had to learn about all this spam management and comment moderation for "Twenty Nine Inches" anyway, so that was a trial by fire! It served me well. In the end, the bullying made me a better blogger and internet site owner, so I guess I should thank those numbskulls.

Thoughts On The Future

Word is that there will be a whole lot more of this coming down the pike for 2016/17

In Taiwan every year now there is a big gathering of industry marketing and product managers, spec people, component makers, and representatives of factories and bike brands which all convene to decide what the future direction of the cycling industry is going to look like for the next few years. It's called Taiwan Bike Week, or TBW for short, and it has more influence upon what you see on bike shop floors and on internet sites than almost anything else does.

For instance, several years ago industry wonks noted that the wave of 29"er acceptance was waning and 26 inch mtb product was dead and dying. The thought was that the then new "enduro" scene would benefit from bigger than 26 inch wheels, but not as big as 29"ers. The 650B wheel had been floundering around for a few years already and wasn't going anywhere. Haro had tried it amongst a few other brands. It looked to be a dead wheel size, that is until the industry decided that the new long travel mtb's would use that size and reinvigorate the enduro/long travel mtb segment with something new to sell. Before the next two years had passed, 26" wheeled enduro rigs had bit the dust like some kind of extinct reptile and "27.5" wheels, (the original moniker Kirk Pacenti gave the wheel size in 2007), were all the rage. Because the industry decided it would be several years before in Taiwan.

A similar situation with regard to the industry and sagging sales in a certain segment is going to cause another paradigm shift in what you see on shop floors and on the "inner-googles" next season. Recent sales figures for traditional road bike sales show a decline and in fact, sales of road bikes have been in decline for several years now. But wait a minute...... What are those gravel grinder guys doing? And look at Raleigh and Salsa Cycles, what with their success in gravel bikes. Just think! We could reinvent road bikes and sell a pile of them! 

Plus sized wheels will also be a big deal in '16 & '17

I know what many of you are thinking- that the industry is evil, making up crap just to grab money from your wallets, with categories and twists and turns in cycling which are unnecessary and pollute the marketplace with confusion and crap. I cannot say no one in the cycling industry is doing this, because, well.....Bikes Direct....., but honestly, most companies have employees to support and somehow, someway they have to grab a piece of an ever smaller pie. It is what it is, and so far.......consumers voting with their dollars support this. Keep in mind that none of this happens without willing support of individual riders. If they don't "buy in" to something new in cycling, then the products offered will go away. (See 26" mtb as an example here.) Road bikes- the traditional, skinny, lightweight racer boy bikes- are the category that is suffering now, and if Taiwan Bike Week has dictated that these bikes don't deserve center stage anymore, I say, "Bravo!". Why? Because most people do not belong on road racing style bicycles, that is why.

So, if the industry wants to get away from those bikes and do something with more comfort, versatility, and durability than road racing bikes, then I am going to applaud that, even if it is an evil intentioned money grab, which, of course, it isn't. It should be more of what people really need in all-around, go anywhere, do anything bikes. Now we will just have to wait and see if folks can wean themselves away from the knuckle-brained idea that they need skinny tires and carbon fiber to have fun. Not that there isn't a place for those sorts of bikes, but most people are not best served by those bikes.

Which leads me to my last point, and that is that bicycles are getting so stratospherically priced that the average person cannot even relate to them. Somehow or another the industry decided that if they cannot sell more bikes, then they will sell more expensive ones to make up for it. That's a dead end game, and I think it needs to stop and stop soon. I wonder if they talked about that in Taiwan!

Thoughts On The Future

Word is that there will be a whole lot more of this coming down the pike for 2016/17

In Taiwan every year now there is a big gathering of industry marketing and product managers, spec people, component makers, and representatives of factories and bike brands which all convene to decide what the future direction of the cycling industry is going to look like for the next few years. It's called Taiwan Bike Week, or TBW for short, and it has more influence upon what you see on bike shop floors and on internet sites than almost anything else does.

For instance, several years ago industry wonks noted that the wave of 29"er acceptance was waning and 26 inch mtb product was dead and dying. The thought was that the then new "enduro" scene would benefit from bigger than 26 inch wheels, but not as big as 29"ers. The 650B wheel had been floundering around for a few years already and wasn't going anywhere. Haro had tried it amongst a few other brands. It looked to be a dead wheel size, that is until the industry decided that the new long travel mtb's would use that size and reinvigorate the enduro/long travel mtb segment with something new to sell. Before the next two years had passed, 26" wheeled enduro rigs had bit the dust like some kind of extinct reptile and "27.5" wheels, (the original moniker Kirk Pacenti gave the wheel size in 2007), were all the rage. Because the industry decided it would be several years before in Taiwan.

A similar situation with regard to the industry and sagging sales in a certain segment is going to cause another paradigm shift in what you see on shop floors and on the "inner-googles" next season. Recent sales figures for traditional road bike sales show a decline and in fact, sales of road bikes have been in decline for several years now. But wait a minute...... What are those gravel grinder guys doing? And look at Raleigh and Salsa Cycles, what with their success in gravel bikes. Just think! We could reinvent road bikes and sell a pile of them! 

Plus sized wheels will also be a big deal in '16 & '17

I know what many of you are thinking- that the industry is evil, making up crap just to grab money from your wallets, with categories and twists and turns in cycling which are unnecessary and pollute the marketplace with confusion and crap. I cannot say no one in the cycling industry is doing this, because, well.....Bikes Direct....., but honestly, most companies have employees to support and somehow, someway they have to grab a piece of an ever smaller pie. It is what it is, and so far.......consumers voting with their dollars support this. Keep in mind that none of this happens without willing support of individual riders. If they don't "buy in" to something new in cycling, then the products offered will go away. (See 26" mtb as an example here.) Road bikes- the traditional, skinny, lightweight racer boy bikes- are the category that is suffering now, and if Taiwan Bike Week has dictated that these bikes don't deserve center stage anymore, I say, "Bravo!". Why? Because most people do not belong on road racing style bicycles, that is why.

So, if the industry wants to get away from those bikes and do something with more comfort, versatility, and durability than road racing bikes, then I am going to applaud that, even if it is an evil intentioned money grab, which, of course, it isn't. It should be more of what people really need in all-around, go anywhere, do anything bikes. Now we will just have to wait and see if folks can wean themselves away from the knuckle-brained idea that they need skinny tires and carbon fiber to have fun. Not that there isn't a place for those sorts of bikes, but most people are not best served by those bikes.

Which leads me to my last point, and that is that bicycles are getting so stratospherically priced that the average person cannot even relate to them. Somehow or another the industry decided that if they cannot sell more bikes, then they will sell more expensive ones to make up for it. That's a dead end game, and I think it needs to stop and stop soon. I wonder if they talked about that in Taiwan!

Rawland Cycles Sneek Peek

I was forwarded these images of a new frame coming out soon by Rawland Cycles, a company that will be offering several bike models in the future all based off the 650B wheel size .

Take a look at this cool "bi-plane" fork. I love fork crowns like this and this one is a beauty.







These drop outs are awesome! Dragon up! Looks like a single speed set up here and that lower lip on the dragon should operate just fine as an opener for your favorite adult beverage.












Check out the model name, "Olaf". And the "P" on the seat tube is for Pacenti which is the company owned by Kirk Pacenti that is the main proponent of this whole new 650B mountain bike movement. Kirk also sells frame tubing and lugs, so I'm guessing this frame is made from stuff from Kirk's company.









Interesting extended head tube here. Makes me think "drop bar", baby! Hmm..........as if I need another drop bar single speeder! Dang but this thing looks great! I hate it when I see stuff like this. (Heh heh!)










Disclaimer: I don't sell these, I am not affiliated with this company, nor do I know anything more than I just posted. I do happen to know that these bikes will be shown at Interbike as frame sets and /or complete bikes. I do know one of the guys involved with the project. (Thus the photos I got)

I also expect that soon I will be able to test ride one of these to get a take on what this whole 650B thing might be adding up to in terms of mountain biking. I suspect that it will ride pretty nicely, but how much of a difference from 26 inch wheels and how close to 29 inch wheels will it feel? That's the $64,000 question on everybodies minds these days that is looking at these 650B machines. Time will tell. Like about two weeks or so! Interbike will be pretty interesting this year!

Rawland Cycles Sneek Peek

I was forwarded these images of a new frame coming out soon by Rawland Cycles, a company that will be offering several bike models in the future all based off the 650B wheel size .

Take a look at this cool "bi-plane" fork. I love fork crowns like this and this one is a beauty.







These drop outs are awesome! Dragon up! Looks like a single speed set up here and that lower lip on the dragon should operate just fine as an opener for your favorite adult beverage.












Check out the model name, "Olaf". And the "P" on the seat tube is for Pacenti which is the company owned by Kirk Pacenti that is the main proponent of this whole new 650B mountain bike movement. Kirk also sells frame tubing and lugs, so I'm guessing this frame is made from stuff from Kirk's company.









Interesting extended head tube here. Makes me think "drop bar", baby! Hmm..........as if I need another drop bar single speeder! Dang but this thing looks great! I hate it when I see stuff like this. (Heh heh!)










Disclaimer: I don't sell these, I am not affiliated with this company, nor do I know anything more than I just posted. I do happen to know that these bikes will be shown at Interbike as frame sets and /or complete bikes. I do know one of the guys involved with the project. (Thus the photos I got)

I also expect that soon I will be able to test ride one of these to get a take on what this whole 650B thing might be adding up to in terms of mountain biking. I suspect that it will ride pretty nicely, but how much of a difference from 26 inch wheels and how close to 29 inch wheels will it feel? That's the $64,000 question on everybodies minds these days that is looking at these 650B machines. Time will tell. Like about two weeks or so! Interbike will be pretty interesting this year!