New: A Full Community Forum, and a Full Tools Accuracy Pass
Since the last update, most of the work has gone into one big feature: a real community forum, alongside a pass through the site's SEO fundamentals and a full accuracy audit of every maker tool. Here's what's new.
A Full Forum, Not Just Comments
Every how-to, project, and note now has a comment section — but it grew into something bigger than that. There's now a standalone forum with its own sections, alongside the per-article discussions:
- Nested replies — reply directly to a specific comment, not just the article.
- Admin-manageable sections — each section has its own read/post permissions (public, registered-only, or admin-only posting), so General Discussion, Announcements, and article comments can each behave differently.
- Moderation tools — lock, pin, and delete work forum-wide, on any thread or post.
- Unread tracking — threads you've posted in now show up on the Comms page with an unread-reply count, right alongside your DMs.
- This very post — News & Updates now feeds straight into Announcements, so you can discuss any update without leaving the forum.
It's all logged-in-only to post, but most of it is open to read — browse the forum to see what's there.
A Real Accuracy Pass on Every Tool
Went through all 18 maker tools formula-by-formula against known reference values. Found and fixed a real bug in the Enclosure Fan/Airflow calculator — the CFM formula was inverted, which was undersizing recommended fans by roughly 3x. If you sized a project enclosure with it before today, it's worth a re-check. Also corrected a smaller inaccuracy in the Print Time Estimator's PLA weight conversion. Everything else — Ohm's Law, the stepper driver Vref formulas, all three image dithering algorithms, the AWG wire table, tap drill chart — checked out clean against reference values.
Search & Discovery Improvements
A batch of fixes aimed at making content easier to find, both for people and for search engines:
- Crawler-visible structure — article headings and lists are now visible to search engines site-wide, not just in the browser.
- Better related-content matching — the "Related on 1c3d.com" panel now favors specific tags (like a product or tool name) over generic category tags.
- Tag cleanup — normalized inconsistent tag variants across hundreds of articles, notes, and projects.
As always, if something looks off, drop a note in the discussion — now easier than ever to do right on the page.