Nick

I bought 5!

Not what you want to hear but I ended up ordering from Cannondale Spares in 2018. No luck locally. Back then: £7.99 for the top cap. £4.50 for shipping. The bike was sweet after that 👌

Why not ask them yourself? https://www.buycycle.co.za/contact-us/

We used to run promotional competitions using Strava to complete challenges. You might remember the Food Lover's ones. Strava wanted $10,000 in 2016 for API access for such things. So we don't any more.

Ah, the struggles of the common folk.

A very creative marketing idea but the ads violated a number of the Classifieds T&Cs. But watch this space, they'll back in a slightly different form shortly.

Some coverage here:

Sounds like you had a much better group. Maybe I'm the problem 🤔

I did it from 1F but weather was good that year. Laugh it off if the wind is bad. It's was terrible experience but got the job done 🤣 I led the group from the start, mostly because I didn't trust the poor bunch etiquette on display. If you're braver you could sit in that group until Smits where it shatters to pieces. After that it's solo all the way with lots of scavengers from earlier groups happy to draft behind you but never coming to the front when asked to take a turn. There's some camaraderie after Suikers with people happier to help when they know the goal is in sight.

I see that the same photos were on Gumtree at some stage.

For those on the fence; entries were supposed to close today but I see that it has been extended to the end of the week (Friday, 3 February 2023 at 5pm): https://www.capetowncycletour.com

And the IG account 🤔 Easy way to start a follower base? Still trying to figure out if Qhubeka still had a license and whether that was bought by the new owners. PCS seems to suggest so with them seeing it as the same team. But regardless, it's clearly a completely different vibe to Africa's team.

It's the name of the title sponsor: https://www.q36-5.com/ The only continuity, it seems, is that Doug has a job there. And Breitling 🤣

None response for all advert types is an issue we've puzzled over a lot. It's a terrible experience wanting something and then receiving silence back. We would like Bike Hub to be better. BUT it's never going to completely solved and the solutions we've considered are cumbersome without any certainty they'll improve things. Our top candidate is recording response times and displaying that to prospective buyers so they can have an expectation upfront. This only really gives an accurate picture for frequent sellers though. They are usually good at responding already. The majority of sellers on Bike Hub are infrequent sellers who sell a bike every 3 to 5 years. Which means there is very little data to work with (if any), making the system inaccurate. Measuring response time also only works with the chat feature on Bike Hub. Phone or WhatsApp conversations are beyond our reach. Some sort of demotion or punishment for not responding is also tricky. People often have very valid reasons that they can't respond immediately and we don't have the capacity or patience to be making judgement calls on that either. And whether this mechanism is based on automation or user reports is another question not easily answered. We've tried to remind sellers via email to remove their adverts when the item is sold and will be doing more around this in 2023. The item being sold is often a reason for not responding (or they are in the processing of selling and waiting for that to complete and then never reply).

It's not an ideal situation but the reality is that people have different priorities, especially at this time of year. It may be beneficial to let it go. Also, if they were bots to boost activity, we'd do a hell of a lot better than 74 of 5,400 ads 😉

As the seller, you can't contact a lead. They need to contact you. Here's an article explaining what the lead number is reporting: https://help.bikehub.co.za/en/articles/3549389-advert-leads-number

They also still regularly cart out the same old oval ball wrestlers which makes the local news here 🤦‍♂️

The "unofficial signs" are there in partnership with the relevant government authority. On the opposite side to the PPA logo is the City of Cape Town logo.

For the area as a whole, you can only ride on the designated cycling tracks. Not that the specific entrance at which the sign is posted is a designated cycling track or that the whole place is designated as a cycle track (then it'd just be a cyclist without the wording?). The signs on the path being the signs that indicate whether designated or not. Ignore the age of the signs, that's irrelevant. Then it's fairly easy to figure out 😉 Trail Forks seems to have it mapped: https://www.trailforks.com/region/constantia-greenbelt-17002/

The topic starters are the real MVPs too! The commenters need somewhere to post. And here we are really proud of our 2022 Year in Review numbers 🤣

This is exactly what we’ve been saying for years. Our attempts to explain the comments on ads decision comes to mind. It is a silent majority and loud minority situation and has been for many years already. That said, we really do appreciate the value of the Forums and would hate to see it disappear. Although numbers are decreasing, we’re confident that it still has a meaningful place amongst all the other platforms now available.

The increased focus we’ve given the Classifieds has grown that section dramatically but I don’t believe that there’s an attributable link to that focus decreasing the forum activity. We’ve give the forums the focus it needs including updating the platform and removing non-cycling related discussions. The off topic conversations did account for a significant amount of the activity but the downward trend existed before we made those changes. We're also confident that focussing the conversation on cycling and losing the rage engagement of the political off topic conversations has improved the quality. There’s honestly little more to focus on when it comes to the forums. The platform largely runs itself. The article content took the biggest hit when we shifted focus to the Classifieds.

The forums have undergone a number of changes in recent times. Partly in an attempt to focus the conversation on cycling. We've seen a significant drop in certain measures as a result but (from our observations at least) a noticeable increase in quality.

Sorry, we'll add this feature in time for the 2023 list.

And importantly, the most active forum users for 2022 are... 🍿 Top 10 Topic Starters: OVERDRIVE 44 Steady Spin 20 Ruben Hechter 17 The Ouzo 16 love2fly 12 Shebeen 12 JJDT 11 mecheng89 11 Stephan 11 esCape-ist 10 Top 10 Comment Posters: ChrisF 1 929 DieselnDust 1 744 Frosty 1 718 The Ouzo 1 312 'Dale 1 113 Hairy 1 061 Jewbacca 1 050 MORNE 993 Steady Spin 857 Shebeen 825