thewoodwhisperer

Advantages are...supposedly: single coat application and zero VOC. As we know, most of them look better with two coats even though you can get away with one. I talked with Osmo about their new 2-part product and told them that I sensed some apprehension on their part. They couldn't speak negatively about their product, of course, but it was clear to me that they only developed the 2-part product so they could have a competing zero-VOC product on the market. But in the end, they believe their regular Polyx Oil is the better product.

Forum spam is certainly nothing new. But it's interesting to see how spam floods ebb and flow and recently we've been getting hammered. The forum has numerous safeguards against spammers but it's always a catch-22. Anything that helps block spammers also generally makes things inhospitable for legitimate new members. And without a crap-ton of moderators, it's hard to manually keep things clean. I spent some time digging into the forum's current feature set and found a setting that allows user reports to be more effective. Previously, a user report of a spammer was just a flag that told a moderator to take a look. Now, your reports truly matter. If two legitimate members report a post, the post is hidden until a moderator can take action. This should really improve the experience and puts more control in the hands of the users. So if you see spam, please report it immediately. We're keeping an eye on things and hopefully this change will help curtail some of the spam BS. Thanks for your patience.

That exists in almost every forum software out there including this one and there is a restriction in place. But it's not anywhere near 25 posts. The trick is, putting restrictions in place to stop spammers but at the same time trying not to annoy new members.

Yup it's a scam. We know about it, but Youtube doesn't give us much in the way of tools to prevent it or stop it. It's out of control and has been that way for a couple of years. Learn more here: https://www.verified.org/articles/scams/youtube-comment-scams-and-fake-prize-giveaways But yeah, if it's not from my official verified account, it's not me.

We had to update to the latest software today. Looks like they made a lot of changes, even to the Admin area. When the dust settles, let me know if things are broken or missing and I’ll see if there are new settings I need to mess with to get the functionality back to normal.

Most of our properties pretty much exist on their own at this point. The main TWW website has become so cluttered with options and navigation that with this new design, we're simplifying things tremendously to refocus on our videos. What we will most likely do is link to related properties in the footer. So that's where you'll find links to the Wood Talk Online Forum as well as the Wood Talk Podcast.

The advantage would, in theory, be that it encourages more activity since there's nothing stopping them from posting.

Guests see New Topic and Reply buttons and they are even allowed to type something up. But when they go to submit, the system asks them to register.

Give it time. Even with the registration process and security features in place we occasionally get spammers. Imagine what happens when the barrier to entry is zero. It will very likely increase moderation for you guys.

I can set up a poll. This is something I've never been in favor of simply because of the workload in managing guests. I always felt that the registration process in and of itself is a small barrier to entry that keeps the BS at a minimum. But, I'm not spending much time here anymore and the moderation tasks fall on Kev and the mods. So if they don't mind the additional work and the majority are in favor of the change, I can make it happen. Shall I open up a poll?

Unfortunately they are explicit and distinct settings for group permissions. It's literally a checkbox. The only two people with the ability to do it are me and Kev. And if we didn't do it, it was the server gremlins.

This should not be the case. Guests have never had posting permissions at all. They should be set to read only. I looked at the settings and somehow they were given posting permission. If the forum community feels strongly that it wants guest posts, I can keep it enabled. Aside from some of the frustrations mentioned here, guest posts will bring a great deal of spam with them, which is why we force people to register if they want to post. Besides that, it's a little concerning that forum permissions are changing on their own, lol.

Just a checkbox I failed to check. Should be good now.

Thanks Kev. And you're right you definitely didn't need to do that. Forum admins, mods and mentors should never see ads.

Sorry for the influx of ads guys. I'll explain. Every year, we take a look at the forum's performance, how much it costs to run and how much revenue it generates. Without going into details, I can say that forum traffic is steady (no major growth or loss) but expenses continue to go up. I looked at our options for ad placements and decided to try something new. While I don't seem to be seeing what some of you are seeing, it's obviously a much more aggressive display set. But in the couple of days this new system has been active, the daily revenue has more than tripled. It's too soon to tell if that's a fluke or if that's accurate but it is noteworthy. I have no desire to ruin the experience for our regular users and I know ads of any kind can really spoil the fun, so I'm going to bring back the Supporter program. A little history on that. The reason I stopped the program previously was two-fold. First, we didn't have that many people taking advantage of it. And second, we had some challenges with credit card processing that made the setup a huge hassle. Looking into it now (a couple years later), it seems many of those obstacles have been resolved. So if you look at the navbar at the top of the site and click on Subscriptions, you should see the Supporter Ad-Free option. The first few people who try this will have to be test subjects. Please let me know if everything works as expected. The cost of the supporter package used to be $20/yr. I have lowered that to $10/yr. Again, I literally just set this up so let me know if it works.