UK Tiling Forum
There’s a UK Tiling Forum knocking about that has a bit of competition from Tilers Forums.
Pre-2006 there was only a couple of tiling advice forums online, and one was TileForums.com, owned by a training centre called Professional Independent Training Techniques who ran tiling courses and sold tiling tools.
The other one was John Bridge’s Ceramic Tile Advice Board, based in Canada but covering the USA too. Their tilers are called ’tile setters’. And their tile adhesive is called ‘mud’. Other than that, it’s pretty much all the same stuff.
Schluter are out there, Kerdi are out there. Some tool names are out there too. So it’s sort of okay. But there needed to be a good UK one that wasn’t biased towards any one training centre or brand name. BAL adhesives tried to setup one and it failed miserably.
UK Tiling Forum for All Types of Wall and Floor Tilers
No matter what your skill level, there’s a UK Tiling Forum out there for you. You can try them all but you’ll only find one reliable enough to stay with. TilersForums.com.
Starting out in 2006, Tilers Forums quickly became the focus point for the UK Tile Industry.
Tiling Advice was sought by many types of wall and floor tilers, tile shop owners, adhesive representatives, underfloor heating installers etc etc.
TilersForums.co.uk was the forum online after TileForums.com.
Owned by myself, Dan, again. This time I had a chance to create a forum that was not connected to any training centre, not connected to any brand, and people could speak freely about anything they wanted to.
Some problems with this:-
- Companies selling tiling tools would provide them for free to members who would then leave reviews on them – problem is they wanted more free ones so the reviews were always awesome ones. But fake. Not real world reviews from somebody who has paid for the tool.
- Companies selling adhesives would sign up and pretend to be a tiler, leave replies to threads recommended the brand they worked for, and rendering all of their posts biased.
- Moderators would eventually assume that rather than doing the volunteering to give back to the website and community which was the reason they always wanted the role, they then had some sort of ‘power’ that nobody had given them, and expected special treatment from everybody at all levels.
- Cliques would appear. Tags would be wanted by “mates” so “mates” would vote on who got the new tags. If a very good tiler had fallen out with one of the regular forum members, they would never get the tag or be part of the clique.
- The forum grew so popular and big that it required special hosting on dedicated servers using speciality services such as those offered by huge protection companies that banks use, such as CloudFlare.com, to root out bad traffic – this is where costs start to mount up.
