Digitalfire Plainsman Dispute Timeline
Events June 10-26, 2026.
June 10: A letter from Wilson Laycraft was received. It required the transfer of PlainsmanClays.ca and PlainsmanPotterySupply.com (with offer of $1000) in order not to seek damages for losses associated with catalog unavailability June 3-5, goodwill and reputation. It revoked from Digitalfire "any license or permission express or implied for the use of its trade names, registered trademarks, logos, images, and all other intellectual property, and is no longer authorized to use any Plainsman content or represent Plainsman in any capacity on any platform."
June 12: I notified Plainsman lawyer that Digitalfire billing had been in error (the entire $1500 should have been for their Insight-live.com managed account). I clarified that the outage at PlainsmanClays.ca was a product of their redirecting the home URL without notice, that customer support requests have not been directed to me since 2021 (see WaybackMachine contact page), asked for details of the June 3-5 outage, and acknowledged Plainsman's request that I not represent myself as acting on behalf of them.
June 13: I removed all but one post from a Plainsman Clay page made on my personal Facebook account in 2014.
June 15: I put a banner on Digitalfire.com that it would shut down June 26 because I was unable to comply in the short time frame.
June 16: Letter from Wilson Laycraft adding request for the Plainsman Facebook and YouTube accounts.
June 17: I posted that a GoFundMe had been set up by a supporter and reported on its status.
June 17-22: Made posts asking people to please stop bashing Plainsman and answered all emails with the same request.
June 18: In answer to "Plainsman further requires that DigitalFire remove any documentation or data of DigitalFire from Plainsman’s premises; and that all documentation and data of Plainsman in the possession and control of DigitalFire be downloaded to Plainsman" I made a post that Digitalfire source material was in danger of being lost.
June 18: Plainsman confirmed, through a lawyer, that they had secured the domain names, that I had ceased operating on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and considered the matter complete. And said “Plainsman wishes to clarify that, contrary to the statement posted on Digitalfire.com, it has not requested the shutdown of the website Digitalfire.com. Plainsman agrees that Digitalfire.com is a valuable resource to the pottery community that should remain available. Plainsman is not seeking the removal of any of the articles or blogs from the DigitalFire.com web site. Mentions of Plainsman Clays in blogs or articles, for example noting that a project was made using a Plainsman product, is a reasonable use of Plainsman’s name and Plainsman is not seeking to remove all such mentions of its name.”
June 18: I made a post that PlainsmanClays.ca product documentation site had gone down.
June 26: I helped them recover login to a Google account registered to the now invalid email tony@plainsmanclays.com.
June 27: I messaged GoFundMe donors that if I do not transfer the money they will get a full refund and succession plans will continue.
June 29: Refund initiated and the process completed July 11 (by the person who set it up).
Prior Events:
I have not been an employee or had a contract with Plainsman since 2003.
For the past decade, Digitalfire billed them $1500/month for my full-time services to them and thousands of customers. For the previous remote work decade, $500/month.
I did not sell the pottery I produced in the lab/studio for the past 4 decades; I gave away or smashed thousands of pieces.
April 2024: The manager fired my wife and me as the plant and office janitors, a job we held for many years (because of ongoing objections to being surveilled).
May 2024: The manager asked for my key and gave me 5 minutes to leave the building (for refusal to separate the lab from production).
Mar 1, 2025: I shared, with edit privileges, a GoogleDocs Insight-live MSP agreement (as a result of a meeting with the chairman of the board). No response.
Jan 12, 2026: I shared a GoogleDoc titled “Plainsman/Digitalfire Overlap”, clearly outlining overlaps to resolve and offers to help. No response.
Related Information
GoFundMe refund process complete:
People should receive 100% by mid-July
This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.
Thanks again to the potter who set this up and stopped it. This is my first exposure to a fundraiser; it is amazing what is possible. I was obviously excited about how it could accelerate my succession plan, but realized that Digitalfire has to remain completely a volunteer labour of love. I was worried about his reaction to cancelling this, but he is on board. The refund process began on June 27.
The succession plan is unchanged, click to see more
It is a code-museum (because I started around 1982 using dBase II). That being said, about 5 years ago I converted Digitalfire to an API fronted database that endpoint code calls to create pages on the fly. This is coupled with a backend custom content management system that interacts directly with the database; thus, no pages are edited, only DB records. But a lot of old code is still there. Here are the current priorities:
- The code is only partially on GitHub (required for team development and code analysis). I am refactoring it to adhere to PSR-4 coding standards (this is a rote process that I have been working on for about 6 months). As soon as I am ready, or before, I'll need help to write or improve the unit testing.
- Document and publish the API to enable coders to create products that use the data from the API (e.g. machine translation). Explore refactoring in Python or JS/Typescript.
- An MCP server, in Typescript or Python, to respond to queries from answer engines, thus supporting AEO.
- Front the content management system in a secure way so that multiple people can start contributing and error checking. Convert to API access.
Other priorities that recent events indicate:
- Implement a hashtagging system in the people database (for the newsletter) so that any who offer help can be classified and not forgotten.
- Adopt Creative Commons licensing to enable students and teachers to quote and use without fear of copyright issues.
- Document testimonials well to be able to demonstrate harm if the service is ever threatened.
As noted above, at the beginning of Covid, I redesigned Digitalfire as a client/server page generation system. An API, fronting the database, can run on one server while the page-generator can run on another server (by querying the API). There is a lot of caching. The content management system is custom-written for the information hierarchy; it runs on the same server as the API.
Please don’t believe twisted interpretations of the events during the latter part of June. You have seen me share freely for well over 4 decades. Please rely on my record rather than misinformed recent postings. I don’t rebut or flame people on social. But it does hurt when they say things that are totally against my character. As soon as I learned a GoFundMe had been started, I posted the succession plan. But it was behind a disclosure triangle and people were not opening it (see above). I have been working on item 1 for a year already; hopefully, 6 more months will do it. It shocks me how big and complex Digitalfire has become!
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