Why is the mod (& admin?) team so against having a HP section.
Speaking only for myself as one part of the modmin team who does both CP and HP (albeit mainly CP) here are my thoughts based on my own experiences:
My CP and HP batches use the exact same ingredients and the exact same tools as each other (even my soaping pot), and they produce the same kind of end-product- lye-based bar soap.
I bring my HP batches to trace exactly the same way as I bring my CP batches to trace.
From there, instead of pouring the batter into my mold, I leave it in my pot and stick it in the oven to heat it though the gel stage to zaplessness at 170F. I might have to make adjustments in how I use scent and color in HP, but by the same token, I make all kinds of adjustments with scent and color when only doing CP as well.
By the way, 170F is the same temp that several people actually use for CPOP to force their CP batches to gel, only their soap is in a mold instead of a pot, which then begs the question- should we also have a separate CPOP section?
And what about re-batching? That process has a different beginning point than either HP or CP. Should we also have a separate section for that even though the end result is lye-based bar soap?
But wait- what about milk soaping? Different considerations must be taken into account when using milk whether via CP or HP, and there's more than one type of technique/method of milk soaping whether you CP or HP. Should there be a separate section for that, too, even though the end result is lye-based bar soap?
I really and truly don't mean to sound like a Petulant Patty, but do you see where I'm going with this? Too much 'specialization/compartmentalization ' gets to be...well... much to too much, and it has the potential of causing more problems than it solves. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and after much discussion we modmins decided the best and simplest way was to draw it at lye-based bar soap.
To me, the KISS principal is the way to go with this, because the overlap between CP and HP is just too much to warrant splitting them up into separate sections.
Not only that, but it would be a tremendous amount of work for us to have to go back and sort through 7 of 8 years of threads to separate out all the HP threads from the CP threads to bring them over to an HP section. Relle had to do something similar when the liquid soap forum was created, and let's just say that even if we were paid for our modmin duties here, you couldn't pay me enough to do that task myself, nor pay me enough to request that task be done by any one of the other modmins, especially since I think Relle is still dealing with the migraines from that.
I don't know if y'all have taken a look at the Dish Forum, one of the biggest and longest running soap forums on the web, but they have only one section for lye-based soap, be it CP, HP, or even liquid soap. All 3 of them are lumped together into the one section and it has always been so, and although I love having our separate liquid soap section here at SMF and am happy to defend it because liquid soap is so much different from bar soap that it warrants it's own section, I can see why the Dish organized their categorization scheme the way they did. It just makes things simple and eliminates the potential for confusion that having too much overlap brings.
I don't know if y'all have seen our Stickie here entitled, 'How To Search SMF Like A Pro', but it's awesome. The link included in the Stickie works better than our own forum Search engine. For example, if you have a question about adding colorants to HP, you just click on this link
http://sitecomber.com/ and type in the 'for' box something as simple and generic as
HP colorants add, and then type soapmakingforum.com in the 'within' box an hit enter. It will take you to every specific post in our forum having to do with adding colorants in HP soap.
IrishLass
