Shopsmith Forums

So there has been a marked drop in activity on this forum for say the past few months. Assuming this is because everyone is busy in their shops which is a good thing. One possibility is a drop in new forum member sign ups, as mentioned in another thread, which hopefully has been resolved now. I just wanted to point out something that could explain it. Did you know that there is a time limit on the "New Posts" function on the forum? If you use "Quick links -> New Posts" to check for new postings it has a flaw which is it times out after a certain number of hours. Don't assume that if you check "New Posts" only that it shows you ALL new posts since you were last logged in. I have noticed on multiple occasions where if I am away for say half a day or a day then come back to check in that it shows nothing available as a new post, but then if I go to "Board Index" and look I don't recognize a few of the posts that have come in while I was away. So, "New Posts" under Quick Links is NOT a reliable way to see what has been added to the forum, unless you check it like every 2 hours. I just wanted to point this out in case anyone is not aware that it times out and resets after several hours. I don't know when it resets, but it does...

Unread posts seems reliable.

Perhaps the reduction is posts is due to reduced spam.

I don't post every day but I do read every day
Bill V

Part of the problem is brought about by threads like the one that HeathMajors is active in.

Do a search on heathmajors and tell yourself which of these posts you consider to be spam.

dusty wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 9:54 am Do a search on heathmajors and tell yourself which of these posts you consider to be spam.

I either can't or don't know how to do that since the software change. Tried that this morning when I was looking for something based on I knew who wrote it but not where it was.

I think a lot of the reduction is the new member thing. Seems like there are a lot less newbie questions under Maintenance and Repair and Beginning Woodworking. No statistics as far as I know.

I've noticed that at any given time there are way less folks looking at the forum, both registered and guests, compared to the previous SW. I have no idea why that is or what it means, but I'm thinking it is in the range of 10% compared to previous.

- David

Click on the wheel in the far upper right hand corner of the main page and follow the instructions to search on an author.

An alternate way to get to search is click on Quick Links on the upper left side.

Thanks. Maybe I am the only one that checks for new posts this way, but I use "New Posts". I used "Unread Posts" in the past and it works well, but my problem with it is you have to manually scan through the list to see what is new AND of interest. New Posts just takes less brain power because it is a shorter list. With regard to spam it has been greatly reduced (thanks to MODERATORS and any changes to the forum sign up process), but I too sometimes see an occasional post that looks suspicious. I have grown to ignore them because it is difficult to identify them. I mean how do you tell a newbie woodworker apart from a savvy marketing person trying to gain trust on the forum before advertising/promoting their website/tool? Sometimes they look very similar in content and sentence structure.

I imagine part of the reduction in activity is the drift of younger people to different platforms. This forum format is great as far as I'm concerned, but it's definitely old-school.