Glad I never joined Facebook

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Carlos,

Maybe click on an ad to support a website like SMC.

Just because you and others don't necessarily agree with or understand Keith's business model, doesn't mean it isn't real or justified. It just means he has a different idea and method of operating his website to keep it open for both financial contributors and those who for one reason or another don't want to or can't contribute financially. Keeping the website open to everybody provides for a greater wealth of information on woodworking. A closed forum limits input.

For example, you would not be posting here expressing your opinion if it was a closed forum. How would you know you'd want to join if it was open to contributing members only? Rumors? Opinions of others?

[Carlos Alvarez]

Carlos,

Maybe click on an ad to support a website like SMC.

Just because you and others don't necessarily agree with or understand Keith's business model, doesn't mean it isn't real or justified. It just means he has a different idea and method of operating his website to keep it open for both financial contributors and those who for one reason or another don't want to or can't contribute financially. Keeping the website open to everybody provides for a greater wealth of information on woodworking. A closed forum limits input.

For example, you would not be posting here expressing your opinion if it was a closed forum. How would you know you'd want to join if it was open to contributing members only? Rumors? Opinions of others?

Reasonable points, but I will never click on an ad, and I won't stop running ad blockers. I understand it changes the existing model, and so be it. Advancements in tech always involve pain and pressure. Keith makes his decisions, I make mine, and we see if they meet up. The market will decide what models are successful.

[Chris Parks]

A couple of questions and a few observations....

Can I use FB through a VPN, if so is any functionality lost

Ad blockers are starting to be put into browsers or at least one and turned on by default, Opera is the first and there may be others. Users who do not explore setting and customise browsers would not even be aware of it.

[Rich Engelhardt]

How is Sawmillcreek different from facebook?

They don't have.....drum roll please....... FARMVILLE!!!

(a couple of my co-workers made this from a picture of my brother in law & me in our "Farm gear" - the bibs)

[Ole Anderson]

I run an ad blocker, not because of ads on SMC, but because of the predatory and sometimes overwhelming number of ads on most every other site, particularly news sites. So far in less than two years I have had 525,000 ads blocked. While typing this post, I just realized that AdBlock has the easy ability to allow ads to run on selected sites. Just click on the red button in the upper corner of your screen (PC version anyway) to open up the drop down screen and choose "Don't run on pages on this site". SMC is now on that list. I am a contributor. You can tell who supports the Creek by looking under their name on each post. Member? No. Contributor? Yes. Is it worth the cost of one Starbucks fancy coffee to support SMC for a year? You better believe it. $6 a year folks. Do it. Please.

[Tom Stenzel]

Years ago in '84 or '85 I passed a yard sale and ended up buying an old hand plane because it seemed like a good idea to have one. It ended up in a box only to be found a couple decades later. Yeah, I should clean out my garage more often.

Finding my priceless relic of a bygone era I figured I could look it up on the 'net and see what it was worth. It wasn't long I found my plane shaped object was a steaming pile and worth it's value as a doorstop. But I found that out here. That's how I discovered Sawmillcreek. I stayed because my woodworking skills were never all that hot and I really could step it up a bit. I've learned a lot here. I doubt if anybody learned that much from me other than there's one crazy person in Livonia. But had the Creek been closed to visitors I would have never found it. Closing it to visitors would be a mistake IMHO.

I run two browsers, Palemoon and Firefox. Firefox is ad blocked, tracker blocked and all that. Palemoon isn't. I use what's appropriate. I normally don't try to block the ads here. I wouldn't mind the Robust lathe that's on the top of my page now.

- Tom

[Mike Cutler]

I don't understand how ads can make any sense for anyone. I've never clicked one in my life, and can't imagine why anyone ever would.

I don't quite understand this.
Ads, as long as they don't end up being a re-direct to data mine, on the internet are no different than the stuff that comes into my mailbox on the street. A lot I look at as I'm walking to the recycle bin to toss them, but sometimes I keep them for a bit.
The same is here. Sometimes I see an ad and just wonder what it is. I don't click on a lot of them, but every once in awhile something interests me.

FB is vastly different than SawmillCreek. I have yet to see ads tailored to me on Sawmill Creek.
FB is data mining your browser and cache files in real time and tailoring the content to you. It is what it is, and always has been that way.If you want to do a test to prove it, start searching a subject you have zero interest in, and watch what happens on your FB page.
If you're on FB, or it's loaded on your computer, your info is being harvested. Period. Try to remove all the Facebook content from your computer sometime just for fun. If you want it all off, you're wiping your hard drive, and OS, and then doing a re-install from ground zero. It makes removing AOL look easy.

Keith
If you make it a user pay site, could you please give us a mechanism to pay other than PayPal. I do not have, nor will I have, a PayPal account.

[Jim Becker]

Can I use FB through a VPN, if so is any functionality lost

Should work fine. But you should also make sure your privacy settings are what you want them to be. A VPN only "gets you there" in a more discrete manner. It doesn't protect you from information you divulge at the other end of the pipe. The VPN may provide some "locational privacy". However, what you say and do would affect what becomes known about you.

[Harry Hagan]

What's Facebook?

[Carlos Alvarez]

I've never met anyone outside of tech who actually understands what a VPN does. I'm not sure how, but people generally seem to think it provides some kind of privacy, and it really doesn't.

[Keith Outten]

Mike,

We have always provided an address so people can send us a check even before we had a PayPal account. My sign company doesn't have a Merchants account, the fees are just to high for our type of service. Currently when people use PayPal it gets a percentage of the 50 cent per month donation and then we pay federal and state taxes so there isn't much left of the two quarters When people send checks we still pay the taxes but it saves the PayPal fees and that adds up over a year.

What saves us is the people who generously donate between two to ten dollars per month.

Concerning Visitors we host between 40 to 60 thousand people per day, obviously the vast majority are visitors. Its safe to say that almost all of our unregistered Visitors are using blocking software now so there is no advantage from hosting them anymore other than a small number of people will register when they visit. Visitors are consuming probably 90% of our bandwidth and that is a big part of our monthly budget. When they were viewing our advertisers banners they were a valuable resource but that is not the case today. I honestly hope that sometime in the future we will be able to open the doors and allow free limited access again should the Internet take another turn in a different direction. We may provide access to just one forum for Visitors so they can at least get an idea of what our Community is like and get access to some numbers that might help to decide to join us.

[Keith Outten]

I should probably explain that all of the banner advertisements here except two are local on our server. They are direct sponsors of SawMill Creek. The two Google ads are served from Google's network and they rotate so we never know what banners you might see from those two banners. In the past our income from Google was a fare percentage of our funding but these days its almost non-existent. It really hurt to lose so much of our income from Google.

Our operating costs can't be decreased much other then adjusting our bandwidth, all of our other operating costs are fixed. Eliminating Visitor access will increase the life of our server to a degree but it won't be significant. We still have bookkeeping, banking and a few other services to support and we must have a server administrator because I'm not capable of wearing that hat.

Once again these are just a few more of the things behind the scenes that are different between SawMill Creek and FaceBook.

[roger wiegand]

Keith, what would the "contributor" fee need to be to support the site? I've thought that the requested $6 per year is absurdly cheap, and wouldn't have particularly blinked had you asked for $6 a month. I've made the seemingly incorrect assumption that you ask for what you need. I'm a member on several sites that ask for $20-30 a year to be exempted from ads, and this seems completely reasonable.

I'd be very concerned that if the site disappeared behind a paywall that new members would quickly dry up and the site soon dwindle. While only a small percentage of "visitors" are even actual people, where would new users come from if the site were hidden? I found it because it frequently came up in search results with sensible answers to things I was looking for. I don't know how I would have found it otherwise.

[Chris Parks]

I've never met anyone outside of tech who actually understands what a VPN does. I'm not sure how, but people generally seem to think it provides some kind of privacy, and it really doesn't.

I have never understood it did anything else, can you please explain your view on VPN's for this naive user. Thanks.

[Jim Becker]

I have never understood it did anything else, can you please explain your view on VPN's for this naive user. Thanks.

A VPN can mask your physical location, depending on how it's setup, but it doesn't protect you from yourself...IE, your browser, etc. In the business world, it's generally used to tunnel between, say...a home office and the business network by segregating the traffic through an encrypted stream as it passes from the home through the Internet to the "office". That helps protect confidential business data in that specific stream, but doesn't affect other data if the user in turn accesses the Internet "from" the office network. In the personal world, folks quite often use VPNs to do things like make certain services think they are somewhere else so they can access them. Some content services are limited to certain geographies, for example, so by using a VPN from one's home to some remote location that's within the geography that the content service, um...services...one can gain access. But as Carlos stated, VPNs are not really focused on data privacy. That's still on the individual user.