clubroadie

The Skinny on www.MTB.com

I have been trying to get more cyclists to use or at least check out www.MTB.com. Very few have even accepted my invitation to check it out. I supposed it could be because they see it as joining a "competitive" or another club. Others may not have checked it out for fear of getting more spam. Perhaps they don’t understand that it is free (Not any more!!). Whatever the reasons let me tell you what I know about clubroadie.

It was started by a MTB’r who happened to be an auto salesman. One day when he was speaking with a client they found out that they both had a love of MTB’ing. They started dreaming about a method to post ride and allow others to RSVP to that ride. A few weeks later www.club.mtb was born. It is/was not a profit center or a way to collect addresses to be sold to spammers. I have belonged to clubmtb for years and never gotten on piece of spam. Part of the reason is that the email address can only be looked at by other members of the particular club. To answer another question, "Is it free?". Yes it’s 100% free. Recently they started asking for donations through paypal.com but that’s a voluntary thing.

So, what do you get when you sign up?

	A place to post rides, invitations are sent to everyone in your club
	An RSVP system so you can see if anyone is gonna show up
	You can respond to the invite with
	Accept + Tentative + Declined + On route o You get a place to post pictures o An area to post your profile and picture (If you wish) o You can unsign-up yourself if you don’t like it o Nice ride calendar to see all of the scheduled rides o Web access makes it convenient

The main reason to signup are that you can post a ride a day or week or hour before you are going to ride. That way you don’t have to commit to a doing a ride a month in advance as might be required in a bike club newsletter. It’s better than sending out mail to a list serve since it’s got a build in RSVP system so everyone can see who’s coming. Bottom line is that it’s a great system.

Currently it’s being used world wide by hundreds of clubs and thousands of indivduals are using it. The "Riding the HP way club" uses this quite successfully. I would encourage the members of the FCCC club to check this out and consider starting a page there of sharing the one with the "Riding the HP way group"

The last thing I want to say is at the very least your club should check it out.

Any questions, you can contact me at mutant325@comcast.net