The forum, as many have found by occasional visits here, has been very quiet with very little participation and interaction.  There may be many reasons for the decline in participation.

It saddens me to be writing this message.  Steps are being taken to close the forum to further posting by members, with the goal of creating an archive site for the content of the forum knowledge.  The hope is to create this in such away that it will be easy to access and to be free to readers.

We do not know if this goal is attainable, we are exploring the possibilities. 

With great appreciation for all who contributed to the knowledge contained and freely shared on the forum, I thank you.  You each have given meaning to the work of this admin/owner of the forum over the past 16 years.

Janel

Participation has nearly flat-lined, but I do see that Guests are browsing the pages.  Occasionally someone registers.  Occasionally someone posts and sometimes there are a few responses.  

Will the forum blossom this year?  Will this year be a wake instead?

It is up to the members to encourage one another by participation, posting, asking questions and answering them in helpful ways.  That is why this forum was created so long ago.  There was a need.  

Is there still a need for this forum to be available any longer?

For now, please post any thoughts in "The Way" if you are moved to make comments.

It is up to you.

Janel

The forum Support team is helping me to sort this out.  Some software upgrades and the addition of SSL may have been making logging in troublesome.

1) From forum Support: Please ask them to make certain they are using the new URL which contains https like so:

https://www.thecarvingpath.net/

and not using a link which their browser has "remembered" which might be the old http link.

2) You may need to use your Display Name as the username when logging in.  

3) If you have trouble logging in, please contact me.  Let me know what you are using to log in with unsuccessfully.  

I will work with the forum Support to try to figure this out.

Janel

Very important detail, your login username is now your Display Name. 

If you have difficulty with logging in please send me an email :  admin @ thecarvingpath.net       (In the real email address there are no spaces before and after the @ sign.)

Janel

Recently the forum's system upgrade occurred, but not to the final level. That step requires that I learn how to manage the new operating system. The upgrade should occur in the early part of 2017.

For one reason or another there have been an increasing number of new registrants over the past couple of years who did not send the admin their letter of introduction. I am now contacting all of those who did register but who did not succeed in landing a message in the admin email box. The failure might have been software related, it might have been a choice or an oversight by the registrant. Regardless, I am hopeful that each person will be reached and have the opportunity to respond to my admin email message and then be able to participate as a member on the forum.

The greater hope with my time being spent on upgrading the system for the forum, and for reaching out to a number of new registrants, is that somehow this forum will see a significant increase in membership participation.

The forum used to have members befriending one-another and presenting constructive help from their vast pool of experience that the members combined have to offer.

It takes a community to keep the community alive.

I am laying out the tinder and kindling but it will take all of you to light the fire and keep it going.

Warmest regards to you all, and best wishes to you during this holiday season.

Janel

Janel

Making such a decision has taken a long time to get to this point of writing these words and posting them on the forum. It is a very difficult choice to make.

Within this forum there is such a wealth of information to be found by those who seek it. That has been what has kept me from closing the forum to this point in time. To keep the content safe and accessible, there currently is much need of updating the software, moving the data, requiring more time and expense to be spent on my part.

Without member activity as a forum for interaction and support of one-anothers' needs and interests, I have less and less desire to keep the forum alive and on line.

---

If the forum closes, it won't happen right away. I want to give members a little time to save information that might be in their messages list.

There is also a possibility that forum members and non-members might be able to copy and save topics that they will want to refer to some time in the future, perhaps as PDF documents. Please do so, starting now.

These many years of being the admin and being a part of the relationships formed as a result of your interactions here have been meaningful to me. I have learned a lot from your participation on The Carving Path forum.

My warmest regards to you all,

Janel

- 72 dpi

- JPEG works great

- around 640 x 480 pixel dimension

- and around 50 to 100 K file size

Help the forum members who have slow, land line, computer modems, by posting the above recommended file sizes for your images, and also help the forum by taking less storage space in the forum's file storage area.

Thank you!

Janel

http://webresizer.com/ is a helpful tool for re-sizing your photos.

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Right angle Handpiece ( EIC-300) 267

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I have just been informed that in the next few days there may be some down time for the forum as the brick and mortar location for the data storage transfers our forum data to newer hardware.

Janel

It will take a bit of time for me to be sure that the preferences I have chosen and wish to choose for the forum will be correct. Please bear with me while this process is going on. I am not a techy person, so it will take me a while to be sure that I am doing things correctly.

Janel

When you have a chance, add an avatar of yourself as well. Doing so will be the next closer step to having a face-to-face conversation with you!

Thank you,

Janel

For two days I have grappled with the forum storage capacity being exceeded and am facing the fact that more storage must be made available, at more cost to me. I have reduced the image sizes of the largest ones, but have not gotten close to the established limit.

PLEASE read and follow the image size guidelines posted at the head of each forum area. It is possible.

Thank you for taking the effort to prepare your photos correctly,

Janel

A couple of times in the past few months the admin email has received notices that indicate that certain email address are no longer working.

Please check your member information and update your email address to reflect any changes that you have made.

Thank you for your attention to this!

Janel

Trying to find something specific from the forum's archives is a rather daunting task. I've read each post over the past 6.5 years, but I do not have a photographic memory so I try to find what I might be looking for by using the SEARCH feature. It takes time and patience, and when the reading gets interesting, it can be a time vacuum. I would like to help you learn how to use the forum's SEARCH features, to make your searches productive and informative.

I just tried the SEARCH Feature at the upper right hand corner of the forum's window, and found that it might only check recent posts, or maybe just the posts in the forum topic are that you might be in at the moment.

There are choices of where and how you wish to do your search, at least on my page there appears a drop-down menu for: Forums; Members; Help Files and the Calendar.

There seem to be at least three ways to use the SEARCH feature:

- type your search word in the Search... box and hit the return button on your keyboard

- type your search word in the Search... box and click on the magnifying glass in the green square next to the Search... box

and

- click the icon to the right of the green square magnifying glass, sort of a flower with a dot in the middle. This is a SEARCH feature that can use multiple words in the Find Words box, and you can refine your search also.

I would recommend using the third option for your searches, especially if the other results are not as productive for you.

Happy hunting! There is a wealth of information stored in the archives!

Janel

TCP has a growing membership. The old and new members have come together to learn and to share their work and knowledge with others in an atmosphere that has been one where all members are comfortable and feel safe in contributing their work and knowledge publicly amongst other carvers.

Janel

Janel

If you had not noticed, I have been absent a lot the past few months. This year has been one of great distractions, mostly all good, but time consuming for me. My attention to keeping the flow going here on the forum has been quite reduced, and for that I apologize.

The level of distraction has ramped up considerably as I enter the three week countdown to my first, long awaited, trip to Japan! I seem to be glued to the computer sorting out itinerary, negotiating who, when, where and what, sorts of things with two people who will be helping me with translation and travel. I have never traveled internationally, so this alone is exciting, but the greatest is that I am going to realize a long held wish to be in Japan (36 years of hoping).

I am learning a lot about this planning and preparation, and also about a newly acquired camera. There is much to do yet before my departure, and I am glad that I have three weeks to pull it all together.

Please do keep the forum working for you. What you contribute here helps many others to learn, even though they may not participate actively. It is a great resource for those of us who carve in the small-scale. Put your thinking caps on and start some good threads about what interests you in your work and the work of others.

I will likely not have much internet access while I am away. There might be a withdrawal period for me. I will miss checking in here, though I will try to when I can.

Kindest regards to you,

Janel

Just in case you had not noticed, I have pinned a reminder at the top of each forum area, in hopes that new members and seasoned members will be reminded to process or edit their photos to follow the guidelines recommended by The Carving Path forum.

Doing this by each of you wonderful folks who share their photos with us will be a friendly thing to do for the members who suffer with slow, land line, modems. One unfortunate member of the soda straw connection club is myself, so I feel it every time a huge file is attached to a post. Thus, I am motivated to spread the word every time someone posts a photo with a high file size or large pixel dimension which pushes the browser wide open and takes forever to load. One post in the past month or two took half an hour to load the first time. Each time I revisited that page it took that kind of time again. So to save myself time, I either avoid the page, not a first choice, or I edit the photos to fit within or near the guidelines. I also write to the member who might not have been aware of the guidelines and try to encourage them to learn how to do the edits.

This morning, I was hoping to upload eight photos, and was bogged down by the first one, which was only 60 k. It never went, likely the line condition and perhaps my neighbors on the same line were burning up the phone line at that time. So, I went to town and am using a coffee cafe WiFi connection to do this work. I could not believe it how fast those eight photos loaded. Truly in a blink or two of my eyes. Such technology so possible to achieve nearby, but not possible where I live! I believe that the city would need to be transported to the country near me to make the phone company upgrade the line. Cable is not available where I live, and I fear the trees and the valley rim make satellite impossible, though I am exploring that potential.

I know that doing the photo edits makes work for each of you. With the digital image age, we all must learn to use its potential in our lives and adapt our digital images to suit the needs and end uses when we want to share images with others.

The Photography topic area has some pointers. If anyone knows of newer freeware for folks to down load, please make a note of it up there in the Photo area.

Thanks to you all for your help with keeping this forum a friendly and helpful place for everyone.

Kindest regards,

Janel

- 72 dpi

- JPEG works great

- around 640 x 480 pixel dimension

- and around 50 K file size

Help the forum members who have slow, land line, computer modems, by posting the above recommended file sizes for your images, and also help the forum by taking less storage space in the forum's file storage area.

Thank you!

Janel

Please dig through some of your past projects that still have patterns and drawings available, and post those along with a few recollections of the process, and start the new forum off with a bang!

I just received a notice from our server.

Invision Power Services has purchased their own servers and will be beginning to move existing hosting customers to our new servers. Due to the recent issue that we experienced with our servers, we are migrating servers more quickly than originally anticipated. Your hosting account will be moved to the new server today January 9, 2008 between 11PM and 6AM EST. You can expect to have down time anywhere between the hours of 11PM and 6AM EST Friday morning. There may be some DNS issues until 8AM EST.

I hope this goes smoothly, it should. But, just in case, I thought that you might appreciate this news and not worry if something changes, like no response to your trying to access the forum sometime this week. It may have already happened, since I noticed some non-response time early this morning when I tried to log in and navigate through the forum.

Janel

I have been experiencing a period where my time is being split between a variety of needs from various family members, and I have had little time to think about posting thoughtful questions, or making responses to the many good topics posted here. Also, my computer had a spell of time in the computer hospital, but it is now happily back to work on my desk. Your activity is being monitored and the behind the scene things are being seen to daily, but I just have not taken the time to post very often. Sorry about that.

The family things are all for the good, so no worries there, just time consuming and it takes me away from home for two or more days at a stretch.

I look forward to the members who will post interesting topics for us to consider or learn from. Lately, several of the newest members have remained silent, but among them are people who work in bone, are learning or carving netsuke, work in stone, and others are learning about sword fittings and other things. I do hope the new members will get brave and begin to introduce themselves. Also, one new member may have questions about sperm whale teeth.

We have had many new members join this year, and I hope to hear from them on these pages. When I have the time, I will update the member map. I also wonder about splitting the map into countries so the map could be larger, and the member dots would be more individual, rather than so overlapped. That needs time...

This is a great forum and I am so pleased that it has become a very appreciated resource, with a friendly, respectful atmosphere. It is a long time dream come true. When my web site went on line in the late '90's, I began to receive questions such as we answer here, about netsuke, materials, tools, how to start... and so on. Each inquiry was answered, and many friendships were begun in those early days. This forum brings so much more information to each of those questions now, from the experience of all of our members. My thanks to all of you members, and to Don Fogg and Jim Kelso for helping to make it happen!

Now, off I go to the next weekend away from home.

Kindest regards,

Janel

If you can not log in to The Carving Path forum, you will need to contact me another way. Please try to find my email address and write to me to let me know about your difficulty. I would like to help get you logged in again. Click the link below to my web site, and once there click the Contact Janel button.

Janel

You make this forum a great place! Thank you so much for your participation and contributions.

I would like to remind you to consider the descriptions of the forum areas as you prepare to post a new topic. A couple of recent postings in Photography would be better suited for New Work or Show & Tell. This is not a serious matter at all, but is just a gentle reminder.

Janel