anvilfire Guru page
  • The anvilfire Guru is here to answer your blacksmithing and general metalworking questions. This is one of three forums at anvilfire. This page is reserved for questions and answers.

    We try to answer your questions a best we can and have a number of experts in the field to help. Most questions are answered within hours or minutes so check back soon. Your question and answer may not be together as entries are logged consecutively as they come in on this page. Things move very fast on anvilfire. The page is archived weekly so if you cannot find your question and answer it has probably been archived and you will need to look there. We try to keep these together but occasionally the locations are split.

  • To find YOUR post and answer click on the forum frame. In a frames site like anvilfire you must "set the focus" on the frame you want to know about by clicking on it with your mouse pointer. Then press CTRL-F for FIND (in Netscape and most other browsers) and use your name as a search word. Your post and my answer (as well as some others) will have your name and you should be able to find them that way. If your question was near the end of the archive week the answer may be in the next or current log.

    OR as one user quipped tongue-in-cheek, "read everything!"

  • Anti-Spam System The new guru 3.0 and Hammer-In 3.2 include our new anti-spam system. This system encrypts your email address so that they can only be used from the page it is posted on. Spam "harvester" programs cannot read your e-mail address from the our new forum pages. However, this is not a perfect system, it is a compromise. If someone wants to go through and manually click on each link and copy your address from their mailer then they can get around the system.

    NOTE: Your e-mail address is hidden in your name when posted. It is decoded when clicked on to launch your mail program. If you put your address in plain text in the body of your message spammer harvesting engines can collect it and you have defeated the point of our system.

  • E-Mail privacy We may collect names and e-mail addresses from our forums to contact our users. However, we DO NOT sell our members or users lists. We MAY contact you about anvilfire once or twice, but will not SPAM you. See our privacy policy for details.

  • Too small a view? This is one of the few pages where we use resizable frames. If you are just browsing, you can use your mouse to slide the middle divider down so that just messages show. Position your mouse on the dividing bar, when the mouse cursor changes to an UP/DOWN arrow, click, hold and drag the bar.
  • Refresh: After posting your message the page will now automatically refresh and will go to the last posting. This will display your entry unless someone else made a post before you did. Please DO NOT double click the POST button, and then wait for the refresh.

    There will be a black screen with "DON'T PANIC" on it (borrowed from Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe). If you see this screen, your post has gone through! Do not repost! If you do not see your post near the bottom of the message area then you have a browser refresh problem. MS-IE is infamous for this up to and including the 5.0 version. In Netscape OR IE you need your browser set to "check for new file version every time" for our guest book style forums to work.

  • Javascript: This page makes heavy use of Javascript for navigation and the new anti-spam system requires Javascript 1.2 to operate. Our standard test platform has been 4.0 browsers for several years but we supported Netscape 3.0. We now require at least a 4.0 browser (about 3-4 years old as of this writing).

  • anvilfire is written in HTML requiring Frames (Netscape 2.x UP) and Javascript (Netscape 3.x, IE 4.0). This newest version may require Netscape 4.0 and Javascript 1.2. If you are having trouble viewing some of anvilfire's pages this may be the problem.

  • anvilfire may be viewed full screen (maximized) on a 640 x 480 monitor under Win 3.1 and works fine as a reduced window at higher resolutions. On 600 x 900 monitors under Win 95 up you may need to turn off a browser menu due to the screen overhead of the windows menu bar.

  • Error 404 URL not found. If you ever receive this error it is because we have made a mistake in our links or an outside link has moved or disappeared. PLEASE, report this error or any other errors to the anvilfire webmaster and describe what you did as best as you can.

  • Have you read our DISCLAIMER, Copyright or Privacy Policy? Here they are.
Copyright © 1998, 2001 by Jock Dempsey, DEMPSEY'S FORGE