Roll call

[Dave Peebles]

Good evening everyone,

Tonight I was thinking about my first Woodturning forum.

It was the usenet forum rec.crafts.woodturning. It was a real eye opener for me. I never realized there were others that shared the love of woodturning as I did. I spent several wonderful years there learning from some very talented woodturners. They were free with their advise and always happy to help. I made some life long friends there.

But sadly it was killed by spammers and one very nasty dude. (And yes Al. I know who you are now) I have not been there for a few years, but it is still a good memory for me.

I was just wondering how many here, were members at the old forum.

Just curious I guess,

Thanks,

Dave

 

[Bill Boehme]

Gee Dave, I had almost forgotten about those things which actually predated the world wide web by a few years. Do they still exist? If so, I don't think that I even have any kind of software that can connect to that service. Many ISP's don't even provide access to those old news groups. The last that I remember about any of them is that they seemed to always be erupting in flame wars and profanity. That, along with the spammers is probably why they have faded away (I presume that they are all but gone).

I did participate in a couple aviation news groups, but this predated my woodturning interests by quite a few years.

 

[Mark Mandell]

Memory Lane

And do we have any other Ponders still around?

I actually tried rec.crafts . . for a short while. Unfortunately, by the time I got there the M-D's had pretty much renamed it . ."wreck.crafts" . . and I got nothing of value beyond reinforcement of the principal that giving people the ability to say anything anonymously tends to bring out the worst in their nature.

 

[Steve Worcester]

You know, I had forgotten about Al Kaida, or however it was spelled.

We actually met and formed the Dallas Area Woodturners through rec.crafts.

 

[James E Gaydos]

Yep, I remember the rec group before it became a wreck. It was the only turning forum I could find. I was using Web TV at that time. Pre-computer days
for me.
It was a very good group at one time, met a lot of really nice and helpful turners. I found connections there to buy lathe accessories that were not yet available on the open market. Word of mouth stuff.
That was a long time ago.
Jim

 

[robo hippy]

I was there as well. It was just getting into the spamming era. Too bad because that killed it. I was on the woodworking part as well. Met Mac Davis there and got to meet him once in Davis, CA at a show I did. Also met Leo Van Deloo there as well. It was great for my newbie days.

robo hippy

 

[John Jordan]

So who was it, Dave? Things could get awfully ugly from time to time, but I was a semi-regular.

John

 

[mfoster]

I was there

It was a great forum till the flamers arrived. It was through that site that I got my first Carpe Lignum, Torne Lignum T shirt from Ruth Niles and started to learn of the turning world. It was especially good for me as I was living in a fairly remote part of Alaska and was the only turner in Sitka. Nice to connect with othes that share your interest.

 

[Mike Brazeau]

I was never able to get to it as a Newsgroup but was active once Google took it over. It was my first real connection to the wired world of turners and still have notes in my Turning Resource Binder. Through R.C.WT connected with Herm Devries and WoW in December of 2001. Also used to visit BP and Wood Mag site before WC became site of choice and visits here a couple of times a week.

 

[Donna Banfield]

I, too visited that site when I first started turning in early 2002, but it wasn't for long. The flamers (the moniker was Al Kyder) killed it, and I moved to better places, like WC, WoW and AAW.

 

[Wally Dickerman]

Yeah, I was there too but as others have said the spammers had already arrived along with Nasty Al.

I was also on Badger Pond. No spammers there. They didn't stand a chance. I was new to computers then so it was a new experience for me.

 

[Barbara Gill]

I never did the rec. thing as I had heard so many negatives. My first experience was The Oak. Any IRC Friday Night Trivia folks here?

 

[Gynia]

Badger Pond and the Wreck. Those two forums were about as different as they could be. The pond had an owner, Wayne Miller, who didn't put up with anything. Wayne was fair and he let folks violate his code of conduct. But your message would be eliminated and you would receive an e-mail telling you what you did "wrong". In the 3 years I was a member of badger pond I got one of those e-mails.

The Wreck had a charter which had a list of rules and guidelines which folks posting to that newsgroup were obliged to follow. The problem was that the wreck may of had rules but no one was in control. So when folks started acting as though there were no rules there wasn't anyone to enforce the rules.

Wayne at the Pond was rather draconian in herding the cats at the pond but we were all sad when Wayne drained the pond. I also recall how offended many folks were when Wayne told us that the Pond was a social experiment and that he had gotten all he wanted out of the experiment. I know that Wayne work hard at the pond and beyond the cost of running the pond was the considerable effort keeping the pond from going out of control.

American Woodworker had a forum at that time which had Jim Cummings and Ellis Walentime running that show. The also ran an IRC channel which had several devotees. But American Woodworker sold the magazine and the new owners closed down the forum. Out of a job they started WoodCentral. The AW forum was a strange place with a strange interface. But the interaction was good. One thing that forum had was a vendors area where folks could ask manufactures about products or problems they might be having with products. The manufactures could respond... This was a sidelight to the forum and had very little action.

Wood magazine also had a nice turning forum. At one time the moderator for that forum was the yet to be elected AAW president, Phil Brennion.

 

[hockenbery]

Dave,
I was on that site
I'd about forgotten it.
Too many mean spirited posters.

Different Al

 

[Bill Boehme]

Was anybody on in the late 80's and early 90's. I dialed up my Apple ][ through a 1200 baud modem (whoo-hoo, blazing fast compared to 300 baud). Of course, everything was text based and I used a program called "Pine" to access e-mail and newsgroups. In the early days the newsgroups were very civil, but it did not take many years before that was no longer the case. My newspaper provided free dial-up connections to this service for annual subscribers. They also ran and moderated some newsgroups, but eventually the newspaper decided that was a waste of resources and later they decided to get out of the online business when the world wide web part of the Internet started to grow by leaps and bounds.

 

[Dave Peebles]

So who was it, Dave? Things could get awfully ugly from time to time, but I was a semi-regular.

John

Hi John,

I kind of wish I had left that out of my original post. The person that figured it out asked me to keep it to myself. And I am honor bound to do so as I gave him my word.

But I am still amazed that he thought it was funny to drive so many away from such a great resource. Guess he was bored with his life. Sad... But it did lead to some other great forums that filled the void.

Good to see so many names that I remember from the newsgroup.

If anyone wants to see what it has become these days, you can check it out through Google groups.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.crafts.woodturning/topics?hl=en&lnk

Seems to be about 50/50 between woodturning and..... ahh other stuff.

Best wishes,

Dave

 

[Donna Banfield]

Dave P., thanks for reminding me why ---so many reasons why--- I left that group!

 

[Owen Lowe]

Yup, I was there, along with Lyn Mangiameli, Fred Holder, Ruth (CLTL), Herm, and many others.

Interesting how it's morphed into popular sites like WoW (rec.crafts.wt) and OWWM (from the wreck.woodworking side).

 

[Dick Hines]

You old spammer buddy killed it for me. I had forgoten all about the rec. sight.

 

[john lucas]

I also visited the site but was turned off by all the flamming. As soon as other sites started up I dropped it like a hot pancake.
I also bought one of Ruth's T shirts during that phase.