All Pictures

Plainsman Clays post inaccurate

But it does contain hope

This all started with me getting a takedown demand letter from their lawyer. So I resolved to comply and put a banner on Digitalfire about having to shut down by June 26 and hoped for support. I initially did not name Plainsman. The support flooded in. If I posted the letter from the lawyer, which I know I should not do, you would well understand my alarm. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. It seemed like a clear threat to Digitalfire and my ownership over my own information. And they are calling me "a bully"?

I am heartened by some of the things in the post. But dismayed by others, because it appears Plainsman staff have been given misleading information that has alienated them. I don't have time to answer every point. But I am hoping that people will judge me by my history. Do I charge a lot of money for Insight-live? Did I ever paywall even a single page on Digitalfire? Did I ever accept when you offered to pay me for solving a problem? Even thousands of dollars? Did I ever ask for money in a monthly tech-tip email? Did I go above and beyond in helping you with every problem? Did you see the times my emails were most often sent (e.g. midnight, 10 pm). I worked for you night and day, and I still regard that as having been a privilege. Yesterday I helped two Plainsman customers who contacted me at tony@digitalfire.com. So far today, three or four. I handled these in the usual way. Two of them gave me content to build digitalfire.com further (one especially has info Plainsman users need to know). Yesterday, I offered Plainsman an inside track on importing clays from China, at a fraction of the current cost (an associate is going there this month to set up a pipeline). I have not done this with other suppliers.

Did I try to sell Digitalfire to Plainsman? You have all known me for 40 years; I deserve to be heard on this. Of course, I did seek acknowledgement for my contribution to the company through Digitalfire. I even told them of the advantage of having a sign on the building for tourists that pass, because it is so much better known than Plainsman. However, the claim about trying to sell it to them: That never took place. It is software. Only a coder, or a team of them, could even hope to take it over. The current manager has not offered to purchase; that idea is outrageous. How could I consider that if I have never even met him? Is he a coder? Our communication has been very limited (only by email). There is no way to even begin to set a price for Digitalfire. By its very nature, it demands being non-profit. It has to be turned over to a responsible entity at no cost. I don't need support, just need not to be threatened. This being said, I am an optimist; I am always expressing aspirations that a local entity might be interested in Digitalfire. I even tell my grandson he should take it over. But he is not a coder either.

I did not leave of my own accord; I could not agree to move the lab to the new building, so the manager wanted my key and gave me 5 minutes to get out. I could not even imagine how to move the lab, my heart was there, I did I want to separate it from production (of course, one's demeanour when put into such a situation cannot be expected to be perfect; mine wasn't, but neither was his). I used this event to voice my firm conviction that the company should focus on its own quarries and new grinding equipment rather than relentlessly importing more and more American clays for making the bodies.

I have never prevented the company from getting access to its own platforms and data, I enable that. I hosted and coded its website free, free or a nominal cost, from the 1990s until they took over the .com URL about ten years ago. Since then, a nominal charge has been paid at times, even though I had to hire programmers to help with the coding at time (in one case about 3 years ago, a full-time guy for months). I did the live backup site for free. Yesterday, I helped them recover passwords (that they should have known by checking their password manager, which I am guessing they lost the password for) and discovered that the two accounts in discussion were there's all along. The third account, plainsmanclays.ca was always mine from 2021, at no time did they own anything related to it, I bought the name as a development/backup for the main site (when you code, people don't take excuses for things not working, a functional backup is thus essential). There was nothing to "return". I developed the Plainsman site (and backup) as an information source, in the style of Digitalfire, but focused on Plainsman products.

Plainsman has paid Insight-live, for the past two years, for a managed account (although I see the billing did not itemize it correctly; that can be fixed). At no time have my efforts been against Plainsman; I support them and any customer that emails me directly. I have been messaging people all day telling them this is not about bashing Plainsman, but about removing impediments to Digitalfire. I even texted them the prepared response I was sending to the hundreds of emails I was getting yesterday (so they would know what I was saying). And I am telling people that I will try to restore the reference information that has been lost with the shutdown of PlainsmanClays.ca (that happened during the URL transfer yesterday). They offered to pay $1000 for it, I gave it free. The Facebook Plainsman account they claim rights to turns out NOT TO BE an account; it was a page on my personal account. I simply duplicated posts there from my Insight-live and personal pages. There is no way to turn that over; why didn't they just make their own? Or was one created, and are its credentials in their Bitwarden?

I was terrified by the letter from the lawyer last week; I would not dream of launching a campaign against them. I simply put a compliance notice on Digitalfire and informed people of the shutdown date. Since then I have been telling customers to focus on why they need Digitalfire, not bashing Plainsman. I told the Plainsman PR person that I would create a "survival guide" site, the best name I could think of at the time, to continue helping customers deal with the idiosyncracies of the products in Digitalfire style (that is basically what PlainsmanClays.com and more recently PlainsmanClays.ca have been, it is now gone but needs to continue).

I did not work at Plainsman. I was not an employee. Digitalfire billed them for $1500/mth (the recent billing itemization error traces back to that). I incurred higher costs than that to be there, so I viewed the arrangement as simply what was necessary to have a studio to work in. So they classify that as "supporting me for 35 years"? How much did other staff get paid? I now realize I was a resident artist/tech. My wife and I were the janitors, that generated some extra cash. I cleaned the plant. I cleaned the manager's toilet, it was something I did there that actually made a little money for us. I was there at nights, weekends, on holidays. Alone. When he started mounting cameras watching me and I objected, he fired my wife as the janitor after a confrontation over it. I reached out to him to have a meeting in the time leading up to the 5 minute dismissal, he said "why do we need that?". If he would have just listened rather than being in his office all the time behind closed doors, this could have been avoided. I even made web pages to try to get him to listen. And set up a Slack and Discord. I had 12 other managers and never felt threatened.

Communication has been the issue, for sure. Misunderstandings. Plenty. But I was the one who got the threatening letter from the lawyer, not them. They have to get it through their heads that PlainsmanClays.ca was never theirs; I voluntarily ran it as a backup on my servers. PlainsmanPotterySupply.com was always there's, it is managed at GoDaddy (I don't use GoDaddy). Plainsman staff simply did not know how to get into either of these accounts and thus assumed I owned them. I created a Bitwarden account 3 year ago and religiously put credentials there; I was always pushing its use to them. But I don't have its password, so I don't think they are in to this day. They also did not know how to get into their Gmail account, which was needed for 2-factor. I don't use that either. But I worked the whole morning yesterday helping them, it was like a Sherlock Holmes story and we got into everything. It was luck, an old browser that auto-filled a password and an old phone that still had a Plainsman account on it (for the 2Factor logins Google needed).

So let's make a test. I will remove the banner on Digitalfire.com right now. Let's see if Plainsman responds by having the lawyer withdraw that letter? If that happens, although I cannot control what everyone is doing, I will ask people to stop and take a breather. And I will put out some of the Plainsman promotional posts I have ready to go. There is no denying that no company in North America is better positioned to be able to supply large quantities of pottery clay at reasonable prices to weather the coming storm of skyrocketing costs. But they have to focus on their key strength: The quarries, their raw materials. "Branding" can wait. To the manager I have never met: Please look at my post about the loss of plainsmanclays.ca, that shows the projects that could disappear. The engobe ones, especially, are just so valuable for Plainsman clay bodies.

PayPal	No tracking, No ads, No paywall, No transient content! Just organized, concise information constantly updated and improved. Was this helpful? Consider supporting me.

Got a Question?

Buy me a coffee and we can talk