Shopsmith Forums

Paul and Nick were discussing this on another thread so i thought I'd start a thread to banter about any ideas that the membership and admin. might have, since I've seen this brought up before.

We could start a "sticky thread" in the community forum where each member who wanted to participate could sign in with their location.

Even better would be a seperate forum where it could be divided into seperate states as the member initiates a thread theirs would be the first for the state they live in. Other members witin that state would fall in line after the originator.
Here is an example from another website that I belong to. (no competition, it is a motorcycle forum)
http://www.zzrbikes.com/modules.php?nam ... forum&f=10
Just a couple of ideas since this could help some of us out who would like to entertain the thought of getting together, and maybe help the traveling academy to know where the clusters of active membership reside.
Pinkster

I am continuously asking members that do not "show" where they are from, just that. Usually I get a reply, but no one close to me. How exactly do you start a "sticky" anyway?

It must be done by a site administrator or forum moderator.

It seems like admin is the only person that has the rights to perform such an action... But it would be kind of cool to have a stickied post about people, their location, and possibly their back story.

Tim, guvnah4 is correct. The forum admin. or a Moderator usually have the ability to make a thread sticky.
For some that may not know, a sticky thread stays at the top of a forum, instead of falling down the list as it is replaced by recent activity.
It makes looking for a thread sooooo much easier because it stays on top.
We have several on the site already.
Now, creating a forum would take the people in charge of the web site construction or possibly an administrator to pull off. It would create another segment like the four we have now. (Beginning woodworking, general woodworking, product/tool review, and community).

Lumberjocks is organizing member picnics all over the country, the members are doing the work but the forum owners send out a monthly email to all members telling them about the picnics and providing a link to each geographies details.

I assume the Shopsmith mailing list is larger than the people on the forum, so having them send out a monthly newsletter, pointing to interesting forum topics could help get more members.

Also if everyone would add their state to their signature that would be a start in building a map, adding city gets extra points.

It would be very useful to know if a Shopsmith user lived in your area.

Paul, I like the picnic idea. On the motorcycle forum I belong to we hold "rallys" where we meet (either at someone's house, or at a place with lodging) and ride. They have been a huge success
Picnics where we could bring pictures of our projects and tools and share tall tales about "the dove tail that got away", would be alot of fun.

markfive510 wrote:It would be very useful to know if a Shopsmith user lived in your area.

Then please tell the rest of us your area? Mine is in my signature.

John’s (a.k.a. Pinkie) location is shown in the upper right hand corner of each post that he makes. If your User CP is complete, all post have a the join date and the member’s location shown. John is in far northern California Eureka area.

This forum has a data base of all members that is open to a search by any member. If you click on the “Member List”on the top of each page, this will bring you to the first page of 106 pages of a list of all members User Names that are registered with this forum. Only 3177 members out of how many 100's of thousands of machines? From here you can do a “Search Members” and an advance search where you can search any field in this data base including “Location” or any one of about a dozen other fields or combination of fields if you wish.

The big flaw to searching the member list is that not all members give their location. Also, even those that do may not use a two letter abbreviation for their state or may spell the state out. Lots of ways to make a search difficult or incomplete. As with any database, the information you get out is only as good as the information entered.

That was a good point Tom. I changed it so that Ca. is abbreviated correctly and the first part of my location.