The problem in my opinion is honestly the "maturing" of the hobby. This isn't meant as an insult to anyone in particular, so if anyone takes offense to this, I think it's more your problem than mine, but...

For years, the people that were into pinball were highly technical people. The majority of the talk was about ways to fix the machines, get them going again, where to find them, where to find parts for them, and so on. People expected that their machines would lose value when they had them. If you put in $1000 worth of parts, it was expected to raise the value of your machine $400 or so, not $1400 or so. When new parts showed up, people were extremely grateful if they could get them. When Big Bang Bar went through TONS of delays, no one went nuts.

If you showed up on RGP and didn't have some sort of idea about what was going on, you'd be either ignored or shouted down until you watched and learned what was going on. I read RGP for over a year, just sucking up the information, before I worked up the nerve to post anything.

What has changed is that the hobby became flush with 'new blood' that has a different expectation. It is not hard to find people posting on these boards that Stern is a failure because most NIB machines have not gone up in price, or quoting the highest of the high end prices for machines, and then demanding that games are ridiculously perfect when they get them. No one 10 years ago complained that a playfield got dimples, and we have that conversation seemingly weekly now. I would bet the vast majority of people on here do not know how to repair things on their machines beyond the most minimal tweaks.

The new dogs outnumber the old dogs by probably 10 to 1 or more, and the level of conversation has been brought down because of it.

I miss that segment of the hobby. I wish there was still a place where you could go to and get the same sort of help that you could on RGP ten years ago, but I fear that time has passed. I still stop by to try to lend some help to people, but I have slowly discovered that a lot of them don't want it.

It seems like Stu has discovered the same thing. And that sucks. I was hoping to hear that Space Station backglass was up next, but it looks like at least for today, that isn't going to happen

There are two things that I find very telling about this site - the first is the karma crap definitely makes people build it up stupidly for no reason. I don't care if you've made 5,000 posts if they were all "GLWS!" or "Wish I was closer!" If that's what is going on, you're ultimately just wasting my time. But it seems that a lot of people take that to heart, and it creates a TON of junk posts. And, if you tell people to post something of substance, they blame you of being all uptight like RGP.

The second thing is that according to this site, I only "own" two pinball machines. You "own" zero. I know of multiple other collectors on here that won't list them because listing the stuff that you *own* leads to drama and people accusing you of stuff. It's downright silly.

People who know me know that I don't own two pinball machines.

RGP unfortunately had two major issues, the first was that Google changed Groups to suck big time which was the way SO many people accessed it, and the second was that with the new blood pouring in you had some GIANT idiots who were completely unmoderated, and sadly you couldn't shout them down enough to leave or ignore them enough for them to lose interest. The unmoderated nature that made RGP so awesome also led to it's downfall. I almost never check in there any more.

I don't claim to know how to fix it, but I wish that there was a way to section off the people that wanted a higher level of conversation into one part. If I never hear about playfield dimples again, it will be too soon.

Funny, I was working on your ex-unlisted Pinbot last night Good to know that you are having a positive experience with it and maybe I'll try it, but. I've both had people comment in threads that my opinions aren't valid because look at your puny collection and people make me unsolicited offers on just the machines I have up regularly.

I'm not selling. If I was, there is this "marketplace" for such a thing. Besides, I like not having enough machines to have developed "good taste", so I have an excuse for liking things like Viper as much as I do

I'm guessing that you started reading RGP maybe two years ago, as that would be true of RGP two years ago. Three, four, five years ago there was almost no political or personal crap on there.

One of the people who you name were there before that, but you could ignore his posts just as easily as you can ignore the "GLWS! Wish you were closer!" garbage that shows up every three seconds here. Two years ago was when that started to be harder and harder to ignore.

Yes, and both of those were easily ignorable back then. There was FAR more actual talk going on and less noise, and it was FAR easier to ignore the garbage threads. A lot of that garbage was limited to certain topics that once you figured them out, you would just avoid them.

If you could snapshot an actual day from, say, 2007 and list the thread topics and look at the replies, unless you go cherry picking, there would be WAY less drama posted there then. I managed to be there for all of those people, and while I remember Gary and Mars Needs Women, I very VERY rarely read threads they posted in. Frank on the other hand was impossible to ignore, but was recent.

You'd have to define drama (for instance, I don't think price policing equates to "drama" but some would disagree), but we've been constantly losing the signal for the noise it seems.