Updates to Putter Talk for the last 7 days.

Week one of the beta: everything that changed

Last week I posted that we were moving to a public beta. A week later, this doesn't feel like a test site anymore. There are handles in here I haven't seen in six years, real gamers on the feed, and conversations happening without me starting them. Thank you for that. You were the missing feature.

I promised to keep you posted on what's happening behind the curtain, so here's week one, all of it. Pour a coffee; it was a busy week.

The Community came alive

The waitlist started moving this week. If you filled out the form at the front door, or you're a returning member from the old forum, invitations are going out in batches. The first returning members are already in and posting, which is exactly the trickle I hoped for: enough new faces to feel alive, few enough that nobody gets lost in the crowd.

Your invites work too. Every member has a pocketful on the Invitations page, and the people you bring in are the people this place gets built around. Choose well.

Your old links work again

Two decades of forum threads got linked, bookmarked, and cited all over the internet, and for six years every one of those links has been dead. This week we stood up the redirect map: old forum URLs now land on the new Putter Talk instead of a void. Alongside that came a full pass on speed and accessibility, proper preview cards when you share a link, and structured data so search engines understand putter pages the way putter people do. The old address book finally points at the new house.

Caddie started earning the green

This was the big one for me. Ask Caddie about a putter now and you'll see certain specs framed in green. Green means house-verified: that number was checked against the maker's own published records, often across multiple independent sources, before we let it wear the color. As of this week there are over 2,200 verified facts across more than 500 putters, and that number grows weekly. If a spec is disputed between sources, we don't guess and we don't verify it. A confident wrong answer is worse than an honest gap, and that rule is structural here.

Two more Caddie notes worth your time:

• It knows some first-hand history now. I've started teaching Caddie stories that until this week only lived in my head, corrected details included, cited as exactly what they are: my account. Ask it about the TeI3 sometime and you'll see what I mean.
• It won't appraise your putter. Caddie deliberately refuses to quote prices or market values, by design, not limitation. Valuation belongs to people, in the open, in the rooms.

The archive project is underway

I said getting the archive stood up was my priority, and it's moving. We've recovered over 200,000 pages of putter history, including maker archives going back to the mid-nineties, with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine doing the time travel. The first extraction pass has already pulled sixteen thousand spec facts from one maker's own model-year archive alone: 190 models across 363 model-years, dated from the maker's own taxonomy. That's the raw material for release timelines and era histories, and it's what will make Caddie the straightest putter reference anywhere. More on this as it lands.

Email that respects you

The site can now reach you when it matters, and only when it matters:

• Message alerts. If someone DMs you while you're away, you get one short email pointing you back here. Never the message contents, never a flood: one email per conversation until you've read it, with a hard daily cap.
• The digest. Subscribe to a daily or weekly summary of new posts from the rooms and people you follow. It's off until you ask for it, and a digest with nothing worth saying simply doesn't send.
• Every email has a one-tap unsubscribe, all of it is configurable in Settings, and they finally look like Putter Talk instead of a fax from 2004.

Editing got real, because you asked

A returning member asked why editing a post only let him change the words when what he wanted was to fix which photo led. Fair. The Edit menu now opens your entire post: add photos, remove them, drag your best shot up front, swap a video clip, fix the caption. Every edit keeps an honest record, and edited posts say so.

He asked in the evening. It was live before midnight. That's the pace I want this place to run at, and the fastest way to steer it is to ask for things.

Memberships: built, tested, waiting for launch

The Supporting Member machinery got built and tested end to end this week: checkout, identity verification, and cancellation that works the way it should. When it opens with the public launch, the deal is what the membership page already says: this Community stays free to participate in, forever. Supporters keep the lights on, wear the mark, and unlock Marketplace dealing, with real identity verification on both sides of every deal. We take no cut of any sale, ever.

And the terms got written like I'd want them written for me: cancel anytime, what you bought stays yours to the last day, no partial-period games, no hoops.

The boring important stuff

• A help center. Twenty short guides at /help: invites, posting, messages, the Marketplace, all of it.
• Security. Multiple independent security reviews ran against this platform over the past two weeks, probing everything from sign-in to the message system to Caddie itself. Every finding was fixed and re-verified, and there are zero open issues. Trust is the whole product here; it gets tested like it.
• The seals got their colors sorted. Blue for members, pink for admins. If a handle wears pink, that's the house talking.
• A real support address. [email protected] reaches a human.

What's next

• The move to puttertalk.com. The production move I mentioned last week is the next step. You'll have to log back in once, and your current links will redirect. I'll give you a heads-up before it happens.
• Deeper Caddie. The archive extraction continues: release timelines, era histories, and a lot more green.
• More seats. Invitations keep going out in batches as the house proves it can hold them.
• Membership signup and the Marketplace, opening with the public launch.

Ask for things in the replies. Last week's asks are this week's features.

See you on the feed.