It used to be that if your Snapper lawn mower or Chevy truck or obscure brand potato harvester would sputter but only while going up hill while turning left on a humid day (for example) you could ask Dave at the local shop what it could be, and you’d be depending on what Dave knows and Dave’s experience with that one machine and that specific problem.
Today, you can ask on a specifically designated forum and get 35 answers from 35 people with the exact same machine who had the exact same problem and what 25+ of them did to fix it, and what worked and what didn’t. Forums make the average guy today far more capable (with a little time and effort) than what someone with 40 years experience was just a generation ago.
The biggest “pro” (for me) to buy a Shapeoko 5 Pro is the ecosystem of Carbide3D, mainly the support. The machine, the software, the forum, and the YouTube videos- how they are all the same people, and all are very well done. So even if company XYZ has a slightly better feature in some way, overall you’re in better hands because of one thing that you need to keep it all working: support.
Maybe the forum closing topics after 30 days was an easy way to manage certain things when it got up and running, but I really think it (severely) limits the usefulness of the forum. Yes, I realize that something can be submitted to a certain person to get it added to a thread, but most things that would be helpful don’t warrant that extra step and most people won’t bother, but would make the effort to post what helped them if it were just a casual entry.
The learning curve of people getting started with say a Shapeoko 5 Pro is going to be overlapping with new customers for 5+ years easily, and probably far far longer. Even when the Shapeoko 14 Ultra comes out many years from now, I’m betting that nearly all the Shapeoko 5 Pro’s are going to still be in use, and that the conversations about the 5 Pro will be only more useful at that point.
Is there any chance this could be reconsidered? This forum is one of the most attractive and important parts of joining the Shapeoko family (it was the difference-maker for me), and I really think it would be much more useful/helpful if it became more like a library of threads and conversations that evolved over time than a Twitter feed of current questions. Just something I wanted to mention now that I see there’s a category to suggest this in, and hopefully this gets reconsidered.
I respectfully disagree, and only say so because it’s a pretty important issue when it comes to the usefulness of the forum, and this is where I’m going to be spending so much time. The reply sounds more like what someone who manages a forum would say rather than someone who uses one. A “fresh experience” is exactly what users of a forum are trying to avoid- we want to know what the guy with this problem before us went through, how he fixed it, and the input of others along the way. Even if the solutions do change over time, most problems don’t, and having those solutions cataloged within the same thread they were brought up is exactly what makes a forum useful.
I only reply because this will be a huge part of mine and other’s research, and because it’s a huge part of what is attractive about Carbide3D. Nearly no other machinist or similar forum has this limitation and I just want to ask the admins to keep this request in mind (as I’m sure it’s on the mind of MANY users) and that the limitation compromises the usefulness of the forum in the long run.
Anyway, thanks for the consideration and in the big picture I’m still very glad to have found Carbide3D.
Being new to the forum this is the number one thing I have noticed most. It’s especially apparent in the Nomad forum where there’s less activity. There’s a lot of great threads that end up as partial thoughts or are just incomplete. For those not using these machines on a daily basis, one month to troubleshoot, prototype, etc… is a pretty short time frame. Also, having multiples of the same thread b/c others have been closed make it really hard when searching for solutions or answers to questions.
@Orange, I disagree that the 30 day inactivity closing compromises the usefulness of the forums. In my experience those that are closed wouldn’t necessarily benefit from added comments, but are definitely good info and can still be viewed.
As far as your comment regarding that @WillAdams sounds like a manager of a forum rather than a user can’t be farther from the truth. You will find that William is one of the most knowledgeable and helpful people here. So much so that it’s easy to forget he’s an admin.
Hopefully you can find the this forum as useful and insightful as I have. Whether asking questions, reading current content, or brousing past posts it really moves the learning curve fast.
First, it absolutely compromises the usefulness of the forums, without question, and so much so that I am shocked anyone would suggest otherwise. The very purpose of a forum is to be able to find a question and go BACK and see the replies and the contributions forward as all the people interested add their experiences and solutions and long term successes. That’s why forums are the standard resource of the technical world, and why everything hasn’t migrated to FB groups (which focuses on current discussions) as hard as everyone tries. You have no way to know if something useful wasn’t added to a thread once it’s closed, and not even 1% of people who would happen to have something to contribute are going to go that extra step to submit a reply to a mod to add to a specific thread that’s been closed.
Second, being someone who is a “manager of a forum” is not a slight, it’s a perspective. You said yourself, William is one of the most knowledgeable and helpful people here- which is exactly my point. He’s a smart person with a lot of experience who manages a forum (an admin). I on the other hand am completely new to this and depend on every feature and contribution and follow up comment to the forum to navigate every issue I look up. For my day job I use three forums on another subject for at least a few hours per week combined, and have been a member on those since 2005 and 2007.
Now that I’m on here a lot and reading, I see there are other people who have mentioned being disappointed about this limit as well, and I realize there’s probably some reason for the limit that I don’t know about. If it’s related to costs or if they’d prefer to use this as some type of organized tech support thing, whatever it is I’m committed to adjust to it and I have no interest to argue or complain, I just wanted to point out that I along with many others hope changing this one day is on a sticky note on a white board somewhere at Carbide3D. So far anything I’ve asked about I got a quick reply (from William, in fact) so if questions asked are often quickly answered by an admin or someone like him rather than kicked around till a community member has a solution, then that’s an amazing advantage other forums don’t have, and one that’s extremely useful especially for a subject like this.
Anyway, I won’t bring it up again on my own, but I did want to let the powers that be know that it’s significant and that many of us think about it. From my extensive research, this is still the best place to be for these types of machines and learning to use them, and I’m still very glad to have found it.
There is something to be said about capturing the collective mind meld to some sort of rolling permanent set of answers on a given subject.
I have know idea or example to reference. My solution is to bookmark a conversation. That might not work as intended given I am less than 3 months into this and the bookmark may become invalid.