Wood Central forums

[Mike Brady]

Can't seem to locate WoodCentral forum...does anyone know the story? I recall they have been victims of hackers several times in recent years.

[Derek Cohen]

They have been renovating the forums in the hope of pulling in members. The membership is old and no longer post - much like here! But the changes have been endless and, in my opinion, unnecessary and off-putting - it is meaningless to have a pretty website if access to it is changed without warning. I cannot get on it. This is sad - I have been its biggest supporter, but now am ready to give up.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Handplanesandmore]

https://www.woodcentral.com/forkbb/

[CStan]

They let their most active and interesting forum turn into an amateur metallurgy forum, rather than moving threads to a sub-forum, and then made it worse by trying to custom-program the whole thing rather than moving it to a hosting platform.  The last time I logged in there I saw that they had threads that were dedicated to evaluations of basically all the other woodworking forums on the internet of note, and strangely enough all easily better than WoodCentral itself, essentially advertising to leave WC and go to one of these. Apparently a lot of people did just that. Who could blame them?  I've never seen anything so stupid in my life.  Blunder on top of blunder. I wonder if Ellis has had a stroke or something.

[bandit571]

Almost like the end of Fine Wood Working's  Knots forum?

[CStan]

Almost like the end of Fine Wood Working's  Knots forum?

Yep.  A bunch of threads on tool steels have never done any woodworking forum a favor. And oddly enough the people who start those threads vehemently object to having threads moved to a subforum on steels and such. Tells you all you need to know. They for some reason crave being a steel "expert." They even get angrier when you point out that there are blacksmithing and steel forums they could visit, but those forums often have bona fide experts who will call them out for what they actually are: total poseurs.

Woodworking hand tools don't really require super sophisticated mission-critical steel alloys. There just isn't a whole lot of there, there. That's part of the beauty but ruined by the steel crowd that just won't seem to go away. A certain percentage of "woodworkers" just don't seem to be able to resist going down that rabbit hole.

[Derek Cohen]

Almost like the end of Fine Wood Working's  Knots forum?

Well, Steven, Knotts continues, but it is not the same as it was 10/15 years ago when we had rousing debates. A forum is not about technology; a forum is about members. The quality of membership, in particular - those who are willing to share their opinion, ask questions, and discuss perspectives. What has been lost on WoodCentral, as on WoodNet, has been the old brigade. 

The YouTube culture has come to represent for me all that is lost in our craft. What you have are a bunch of inexperienced people who are either posers or seeking to monetise their "channel". They offer nothing original and often copy each others topic. Reviewers reveal an absolute lack of insight, both into the tool or the reason the tool is used. And no one pulls them up for the incompetence (some of the methods are down right dangerous) ... YouTube (and now forums) are becoming filled with voyeurs who just passively seek out entertainment, and they cannot tell the difference between a dado and margarine. 

What Charles wrote about WC is just so, but the decline began earlier. Fewer and fewer were posting - as here - and the management, in anxiousness, allowed the inappropriate (and there were readers who protested when the practice was halted because there was nothing left to read). These posters did not kill the forum, but they contributed to it, with a lack of insight as to the dynamics involved. Now the management are linking to other forum posts, and whatever they can find of interest, because there would otherwise be minimal traffic ... and that would be the death of the website.

We need the people, and their posts, to keep this type of forum alive. 

Regards from Perth

Derek

[CStan]

Knots became A-2 tool steel almost 24/7.  Then WoodCentral became Cap Iron Central, then after that pretty much nothing but a couple of jag-offs 'testing' different tool steels in their crappy garage shops with nobody but themselves and a cheap $20 microscope to interpret the results.  A complete joke. Guys actually admitting to losing entire weekends planing test boards to come up with the scintillating conclusion that O-1 is pretty good steel. The new stuff's pretty good too. Mind-blowingly idiotic.

[Stwood_]

I used to be signed up over there. Didn't realize it still existed.
I'll go peek.