Seeking recommendations on how to improve the FOG.

[Charimon]

Maybe I am missing something
but i didint see anycheck box on the profile section to display your location
and only 2 of the folks who have posted on this thread didnt have it contained in their profiles.
what is it that you want

Shane,
   I have one thing to add: continue to try to get all members to show their address.

Craig

[Peter Halle]

Craig,

If you look at my post and look over to the left you will see where I am located.  For instance, I don't see that for you.  If you were to be asking for a good source for materials, wouldn't it be a lot easier to get an answer if we knew where you were located?

I went and looked at my profile and where I was located was under the location section.  It would be helpful - that's all. 

Peter

CORRECTION:  Mine was entered under the personal text section.  Otherwise it won't show up in a post.

[Charimon]

CORRECTION:  Mine was entered under the personal text section.  Otherwise it won't show up in a post.

That was my question,  how do you "Show" your location
 
Shane,
could you make a check box that when checked would display location (as intered in the profile) in the post under the avatar?

Craig

[Alex]

Shane,
   I have one thing to add: continue to try to get all members to show their address.

Depends on what you mean exactly by 'address'. I'm fine with telling you what country I'm from, and what city. But I'm not going to post my home address ANYWHERE on the net. It's too easy for people with malicious intent to give you problems. If people need my address for something specific like a visit or a mailing, then I will assure myself that I can trust them before I give it out to them via a private channel like a pm or an email.

[ForumMFG]

CORRECTION:  Mine was entered under the personal text section.  Otherwise it won't show up in a post.

That was my question,  how do you "Show" your location
 
Shane,
could you make a check box that when checked would display location (as intered in the profile) in the post under the avatar?

Craig

To add your City and State:
    1.) Click on "Profile" at the top in the menu bar
    2.) Once on the profile screen, click on the "Forum Profile Information" link on the left side menu
    3.)  Then enter your address under "personal text" and hit save

Hope this helps.

Alex,

I don't think Peter was asking for your street address or GPS coordinates but only for your City and State for reference.  I just added mine because I think it will help with some of the responses to my questions.  Thats why I added it.

-Dave

[justinmcf]

i would like to clear my point i made earlier.
i am not interested in knowing what house number you live in, nor do i want to know what the name of your street is.
i would like to know which country you reside in, and maybe which state/county you come from.

i am from county tyrone, northern ireland.
i now live in the gold coast, australia.
i certainly dont see this as an invasion of my privacy.

i do have trouble with some addresses i can see on the left side of the screen below a members name.
a few examples would be....Littleton, CO and Powhatan, VA.
i assume the former is the town and the latter is the county, but i am only guessing, i certainly have no idea what CO and VA mean.
sorry, i dont mean to offend anyone, i only want to show my point of view.

maybe the administration needs to make this an easier process when signing up as a new member.

regards, justin.

[Peter Halle]

Justin,

You are correct, even my location would be difficult for someone outside the US to understand.  I have made adjustments.  I assure you that in no way do I advocate giving out detailed personal information on the internet.  In no instances would I even suggest that someone give detailed address information.

I myself try to stay as far under the radar as possible, but in the last few years that has proven to be more difficult.

A city, town, state, or country would help out because different Festool products are available in different countries, different materials are available in different countries, and even words have different meanings in different regions or countries.  We are here to provide help to each other thats all

Hope that this clears up any misunderstandings that my previous posts created.

Peter

[ForumMFG]

Justin,

I don't think you offended anyone.  I fully understand what you were tryingh to get at and I like the Idea.

[bill-e]

i certainly dont see this as an invasion of my privacy.

Justin, it's not your privacy people are worried about, it is their own and only they can determine what that means to them.  In this age of identify theft many people are worried about the information they make available on the internet and rightly so.

While I'm a proponent of real names and wouldn't mind seeing where someone is from I would never insist on it.  Having a real name  and location requirement might just be providing too much information, though I'm not worried about it myself.  After all if you really wanted to know you could PM the user.

[Shane Holland]

I realize, based on requests for location information many times in the past, that this has been something members have been interested in.  I had placed a provision in the member guidelines that we reserve the right to enter a members country only based on their IP address.  My hope was to take care of the need for location information while not infringing on privacy.  Listing only the country would be broad enough that I would suspect members would not feel like their privacy is being compromised.  I should be able to modify the forum's code to show location information beside a member's posts from their profile.  I will add that as time permits.

Of course, I urge members to provide their feedback in the guidelines thread if they are for or against this provision.  Here is the actual verbiage...

Country of Origin
This forum serves an international community of members.  Because products, services, terms and conditions vary from location to location, please provide your country of origin in your profile.  The FOG reserves the right to add the country of origin to your member profile based on your internet IP address.  This will help other members understand whether a post is applicable in their region.

[GreenGA]

Shane,

Could someone add

Systainers/systainers <- plural

to the spellchecker?

Thanks.

[bill-e]

Country of Origin
This forum serves an international community of members.  Because products, services, terms and conditions vary from location to location, please provide your country of origin in your profile.  The FOG reserves the right to add the country of origin to your member profile based on your internet IP address.  This will help other members understand whether a post is applicable in their region.

Using this method would show my country of origin as the UK right now

[Shane Holland]

Using this method would show my country of origin as the UK right now

Indeed it would.  I should have mentioned, we would only update locations for profiles that did not already have a location entered.  Granted, there is a potential for erroneous information as pointed out by Bill.  But, I think this would very much be the exception to the rule.  And, in the case of Bill, his location is already filled in so it would be left as-is.

[Brice Burrell]

Warning, slightly off topic:

................i do have trouble with some addresses i can see on the left side of the screen below a members name.
a few examples would be....Littleton, CO and Powhatan, VA.
i assume the former is the town and the latter is the county, but i am only guessing, i certainly have no idea what CO and VA mean.
sorry, i dont mean to offend anyone, i only want to show my point of view.

maybe the administration needs to make this an easier process when signing up as a new member.

regards, justin.

Justin, I know the US locations can be confusing with the abbreviations, maybe I can shed some light on the matter. The first part is the city (Pittsburgh in my case) followed by the abbreviation for the state (PA stands for Pennsylvania) I then have the country (USA). We in the US tend include the state when telling some where we live since people know approximately when each state is located. And as must people already know, the (50) states make up the United States of America.

I understand Gold Coast is a beautiful place, I hope to visit some day.  

[Alex]

A few little things I'd like to see changed.

First, when you post a reply to a thread, after hitting the 'Post' button, it takes you to the general page of the forum category. I would think it's much more convenient if the browser would take you directly to your new post in the thread so you can read it back and if necessary make corrections. It's what most other forums do.

Second, I'd like to see the ? Last Edit: Today at 11:34 PM by Alex ? message be removed from a post if you edited it. I don't think it adds anything to the thread to notify people the post has been edited. Again, most forums I visit never mention it either.

[justinmcf]

thank you peter, forummfg, bill-e and brice.
i have copied your format and shown the city (gold coast), state (queensland) and the country (australia).
i think this is the way forward.
now i can easily see what part of the USA you guys are from.

regards, justin.

[Brice Burrell]

A few little things I'd like to see changed.

First, when you post a reply to a thread, after hitting the 'Post' button, it takes you to the general page of the forum category. I would think it's much more convenient if the browser would take you directly to your new post in the thread so you can read it back and if necessary make corrections. It's what most other forums do.

Second, I'd like to see the ? Last Edit: Today at 11:34 PM by Alex ? message be removed from a post if you edited it. I don't think it adds anything to the thread to notify people the post has been edited. Again, most forums I visit never mention it either.

Alex, you can setup your account to send you back to your new post, by editing your profile. Click on "Profile" at the top of the page, then "Look and Layout" on the left side, check the box "Return to topics after posting by default." then click the "Change Profile" button on the bottom of the page.

The editing time stamp at the bottom of your edited posts can be a useful to some degree. I wouldn't care much if it was removed but it serve a function on rare occasions.  

[Alex]

Alex, you can setup your account to send you back to your new post, by editing your profile.

Aha, thanks for the tip. I should spend some more time checking out all profile options. One thing this board does have more than any other forum I visit is the customizability. I'm not used to that. 

[ForumMFG]

Here's another idea about the "Ask Festool" feature.  What if whenever a person asks a question Festool can just chime in if a member has posted a incorrect answer?  Or just confirm what the correct answer is if members respond to a question?  I know there have been so many times where I wish Festool would of chimed in and just confirmed the answer by the members. 

[Shane Holland]

To be honest, the purpose of an Ask Festool section would be so that employees would not have to monitor all of the posts which can be time consuming.  With a dedicated section, it would be easy to check for new topics that need to be answered.  If anyone ever needs an answer confirmed, you can email us at service@festoolusa.com or call the toll free number in my signature.

[ForumMFG]

Shane,

I searched for the spell checker thread where you were asking us to let you know which words to add and I couldn't find it.  Add the word "Forstner" to the list.

-Dave

[Tezzer]

Shane,

I searched for the spell checker thread where you were asking us to let you know which words to add and I couldn't find it.  Add the word "Forstner" to the list.

-Dave

Add "Collingwood" to the banned spell checker.

[ForumMFG]

?

[Rob McGilp]

Add "Collingwood" to the banned spell checker.

  Too funny!!

[ForumMFG]

Shane,

You know how you use the quoting symbol to quote something and then when you post it, it shows up as a question mark?  Do you think we can fix that as well?

[Shane Holland]

Shane,

You know how you use the quoting symbol to quote something and then when you post it, it shows up as a question mark?  Do you think we can fix that as well?

This appears to be an issue with the encoding used by the forum software when text is copied and pasted.  It only appears to effect certain special characters.  If this happens, just edit your post and make the necessary corrections.  Without doing research, I don't know if there is an alternative fix with the forum software.

[Tom Bellemare]

Shane:

Try the following in your .htaccess file if it's a UNIX server:

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1


If that's not the correct character set, a little googling might turn up the one you need.


Tom

[Shane Holland]

Thanks, Tom.  I looked at the header in the HTML and it's already using ISO-8859-1.

If members think it's a real issue, then I'll try to allocate some time to hunting down a remedy including trying your recommendation.  If it just a minor nuisance, then I think we should consider just living with it.  While I very much enjoy supporting and participating in the forum, I have a lot of responsibilities and have to be mindful of how I spend my time.

[ForumMFG]

I don't think it is a big deal.  You can leave it as is.  I experienced this problem and thought "what the heck is going on".  You asked for suggestions, so I gave you suggestions

[BC6738F5BCE98B4]

My thought(s) on how Festool could improve the fog . . .

1.  Create a "reference" section for manuals, flyers and other unchanging "things."
2.  Talk to your customer service people (who I have found enormously helpful) about the 10 or 15 most commonly asked about problems and then put a short video together (post on youtube for that matter) with a link here on how to solve it.  An example that I had (and continue to have fits with) is putting things back into the black plastic inserts in such a way that everything fits neatly in its assigned place.
3.  Think about the fact that over the last three years Festool has enormously broadened its market from only people who really knew what they were doing (like many of the people in this forum) to include many people who don't (like me) and who do not want to bother really knowledgeable people with trivial problems.  Throughout my experience with this group people have posted questions as "a newbie" and while a lot of people have taken the time and effort to deal with those questions, the question could frequently have been eliminated by Festool putting together a short video on the tool(s) which went through a) the setup (from opening the box to putting things back into the box) and b) addressing the questions/problems that people have had over years. 

On the subject of locations of Fog members, I for one have lots of privacy/security "issues" as indicated by the name I have used here for a long time.  Despite that "high concern" I have no problem with a) using the ISP address, b) zip code, c) City or State as an additional identifier as long as the additional identifier does not address a population of roughly smaller than a zip code area.    It wasn't until relatively recently that I discovered that one of the long standing members of this group, who has been of great help to me, actually lived in the same part of Arizona as I do. 

4.  Over the years I have come to recognize the names of some people (like John Lucas, Bruce Burrell and Daviddubya) as people who have surely forgotten more than I will ever learn on the subject of using Festool equipment.  There are others, like me, who are at best described as hobbyists who are still trying to figure out the most basic things about working with wood.  Sometimes I can make a guess as to how experienced a person is by the length of their being a member in this group or by the quality of their answers. 
     I would find it very useful if there was a subgroup of the owner's group comprised of and focused on those of us who are still trying to figure out how to make the tool(s) work properly and well.  I would anticipate such an area being "moderated" (or in old fashioned parlance - supervised) by someone who knew (or could find out) the answers to the "usual" beginning questions. 
     One of the things that I have frequently blessed Messrs. Lucas, Burrell and Daviddubya for is their talent for posting things which I can a) read and b) understand (even if sometimes I have to reread it to make sure).  Some of the threads here are fare beyond my understanding and I am perfectly willing to say that. 

That's my thought.