CycleChat is a friendly and lively online community for people with an interest in cycling.

What’s unique about CycleChat is the membership. Their friendly and welcoming nature make it a great place to start chatting about your cycling life.

Whether you’re returning to cycling after years out of the saddle, wanting to get fitter and lose a few pounds, or just fancy commuting on two wheels for a change – there’s something for everyone in the forums.

If you’re enjoying reading the blog, why not register at the forums and join in the fun!

Here’s how it all got started:

I finally managed to quit smoking in October 2004 (after swearing blind, at the birth of my daughter a year earlier, that I would give up!).By the end of the first month I’d saved enough to buy a bike (I was on 40 a day, so it added up to quite a few quid!). I popped along to the nearest bike shop and got a stealthy looking mountain bike, and started cycling to work.I soon got bitten by the cycling bug (I’d cycled a lot as a young boy and teenager, but that went by the wayside when I discovered women and beer!) and before long I was changing my knobbly MTB tyres to slicks and surfing the web for cycling and fitness advice. That’s when I stumbled across Cycling Plus (C+).

I enjoyed using the C+ forums and got a lot of useful advice from it, so I thought it might be good to have my own forums. I already owned a web server, so I bought the CycleChat domain and installed some free forum software. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to develop the idea further and CC sat on my web server not growing very much at all (after two years I think there were about 75 members, and very few posts.)

Then in July 2007 the company that owned the C+ forums (Future Publishing) merged them with other cycling forums they owned to create the BikeRadar brand. Some C+ forumers didn’t like the new site, so I mentioned CycleChat as an alternative and a whole bunch of people signed-up (around 500 of them in just a few short weeks!).

The forum software wasn’t really up to handling lots of users so I bought vBulletin, tweaked things around to make it easy to use, then recruited about 20 moderators from the new membership to lend a hand (without whose constant and invaluable help I couldn’t manage CycleChat).

CC has been steadily growing ever since and we now have our own cycling kit, international jersey relay, and of course our slinky new blog.

In December 2009 we reached the milestone of 1 million posts, and in February 2010 we topped 10,000 members. 

I hope you enjoy reading the blog, and if you decide to register at the forums I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Cheers,
Shaun