posted 02-07-2015 05:18 PM            

The domain oldnewburcrafterssilver.com is not live. It is available for purchase but no one has secured it.

I can't recommend theirs or anyone's FB page since at a FB site there is just too much bad stuff running in the background. See my earlier rant, which was inspired by an email from ONC.

posted 02-07-2015 10:29 PM            

Scott -- I just followed Doc's revised link, which is indeed active. Better yet, if you click on the Facebook icon on that site, it will take you to their FB page, which is even more comprehensive. (It seems to be an open public page -- not necessary to have a FB account; I don't.) The FB page has lots of terrific professional photos and images of the patterns and pieces (tho' you have to squint pretty hard to read the price lists).

posted 02-08-2015 07:36 AM            

If you are interested in privacy, my recommendation is to do your best to stay away from sites like FB. When I went only to the first ONC FB page there were 67 java scripts running in the background.

Hopefully ONC will use a true professional web developer, one who understands the privacy/tracking issues (many don't), to build their new ONC web site.

The new ONC site has some third party widgets (and other stuff) which propagates the same privacy issues as FB. For example, on the new ONC site they are using the "addthis toolbox widget". The addthis widgets are "free" tools that many web developers use (to save time & effort in web development). The addthis site claims not to collect personally identifiable info but they do assign an unique identifier to your browser/computer. What they don't explain is how they and the parties they sell the info they collect to can eventually personally id you from the info they collect.

"Free" on the internet just means hard currency/money isn't changing hands. It costs a lot of money to develop & maintain the free things/services the "free" sites provide. Especially when you take into account the scale of the data they are collecting. So ONC visitors are paying whether it is in bandwidth costs and/or personal behavior, habits, location, friends, interests and all sorts of other info collected and sold to make "free" make money for the providers of the "free" stuff.

On the internet, there are fewer and fewer truly free sites. SMP and the Silver Salon Forums are one of the few sites that are not spying/tracking you, nor are we running background tasks that use up your data plan.

I hope ONC's new site also eventually becomes a site that doesn't help others to spy/track you. Right now, by using third party "tools" they are helping others to spy/track visitors to their ONC site.