Do not mess with the bunny, sir. He is extraordinarily well-connected.

The irony of all this is that the pinball world doesn't move that quickly. You're inevitably going to get off-topic posts or conversations that go far afield. I would argue that is part of the site's secret sauce. I learn a lot just by reading/listening to what my fellow inmates are talking about. That said, we can't afford to run off women and children from the hobby. Pinball needs critical mass to stay viable. Pretty soon we'll be sitting around arguing about which denture cream is best and stinking up the place. We need new blood. Who else is gonna move our machines? Ever think of that?

As a die hard capitalist I would encourage Robin to begin accepting advertising on Pinside. This is a great site and he has earned that right.

Those who disagree can go to my web site. For only $19.95 a month you can purchase "Pinside Ad Blocker".

http://bit.ly/4kb77v

....upgrade your mod badge to gold.

I'll see if I can find the thread for you. Check with Robin about it.

Actually, PM stands for "pinside mail"! Fun fact that nobody ever notices, including me, until Robin pointed it out one time.

I just read an eject for someone calling a prominent pinball maker an off key name, but something that could be said over the radio. The reason was basically name calling a pinside member. Maybe that rule shouldn't apply to vendors or manufacturers.

You obtuse pinsider!

...well, I'll see you guys after my thread ejection kicks in.

White bread, conservatives, big black scary guns, Michael Caine....

I might be banned after that last tirade.

Easter bunny is real! I find crap all over my house and the kids swear it was the friggin bunny.

ummmm.....by any chance, was it "Classless boob?"

Fun fact... Robin never pointed it out to me, and therefore I declare it Private Message.

I'm going to see if I can get him to post here just to clarify things, but I think it is like 4 AM in Robinland so we'll have to wait until he's awake and I can catch him long enough. I'm just going to tell you that there's no way that I can access anyone's PMs and never have been able to.

If the other mods can, that is certainly news to me and I will file a discrimination lawsuit.

Fun fact.. If you look at your "My Pinside", it has "Pinside Mail" and below "Private Messages", so in this case everyone's right!!!!

This is a really great idea that kinda got glossed over, seriously should be considered.

Is Pinside having money problems? Are the donations not enough to cover running costs? I'm curious why the need/call for ads.

From Robin's post in this thread:

Thx Skins but I read that. Just not sure why it was brought up or needs changed.

No problem. I'm assuming it was mentioned because this thread was started about why more long time members have gray hearts and don't contribute more. Robin has stated pinside is his fulltime job so I believe those to issues led to him posting about getting a new payment model.

lol makes sense. Don't know why I couldn't connect the dots. Thx again.

Sometimes i feel some people get weird,and they are,but,you have to look past these bad examples!!! As a older pinhead,the advice and council i get is very worth the 10 bucks i give every month!And to be able to view all the related pinball stuff in one place is heaven for me! Its simple...if your not happy,move on,don't bother us!!!Peace, ;

Your little innuendo was not family friendly - there's enough of that junk all over the Internet. I'm not trying to start something here but aren't you kinda biting the hand that feeds you? Your obviously one of the big fish here and publicly threatening to pull support when your feelings are hurt when you were out of line is not cool.

Well said.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not worried about it. I've spoken with Robin. I know who the mod was. I'm sure it will be settled, it's a bad policy to kick people out of threads with no warning or explanation. But if it turns into something that's not fixed then I have issues with it, not the kind of community I feel like spending my time in. There's no "hand that feeds me", this is a hobby, that I do because I enjoy it. If I'm not enjoying it, then I'll leave. I don't have any special status here. I'm just another dude posting his thoughts.

I doubt very much it will come to that.

Communities are balancing acts. This is very much Robin's sandbox that we're playing in. But it's not the sand (however nice) that's the attraction, it's all the other playmates. I have no problem with making this a friendly place for everyone to play in. I'm not sure that I'm particularly on board with that Batman comic being an actual problem, but that's not really my issue. It's the way it was responded to.

There's a vast gulf between setting community standards (no more boob pics) and mods acting like topic cops, demanding that people in a long running thread with no new information somehow stay strictly on topic or they're be booted out without warning. I'm down with the former, not the latter.

I get what you're saying. But let's say you were having a conversation in the real world and someone spoke up and said: "Hey, that makes me a little uncomfortable - can we change the subject?" Can you honestly tell me that your response would be: "Quit being so sensitive and just deal with it?"

No one gets to tell other people how they *should* feel or react to certain comments. They feel how they feel. And really there isn't much difference between you feeling threatened by "PC police" and others feeling threatened by posts that marginalize particular groups of people.

2 cents

I believe you captured the essence of most people's discontent with the recent mod interactions.

Some of those long time members are massive time contributors with their tech knowledge. It can be said many, if not most, New members arrive due to those postings and answers.

We don't read your PMs. Robin doesn't read your PMs. He's not Facebook, and frankly...none of you are interesting enough for me to care what you write in PMs. (Kidding....in all honesty, none of us have the power, nor do we want it).

The confusion appears to be in relation to an incident a long, long time ago.

Story time!

A long time ago, we had a mod that kind of went...."off the rails." He sent some threatening PMs to another user, and basically had a meltdown. The threatened user forwarded those PMs to Robin, to make him aware of the situation. Robin acted.

The mod (still in the middle of a meltdown) started a thread talking about how Robin reads all the PMs...because I mean....how else would anyone know that he was threatening other users??

(Spoiler alert....it's not because Robin was digging through PMs).

So, PMs are private. However, if you want to threaten or harass another user via PM...understand that those PMs could be forwarded to Robin or another Mod. (And that's the only way we ever get to read your PMs).

I'm kind of bummed that because of that incident, history has been rewritten to say that we read your PMs. We don't have those capabilities, and we don't want them.

Hopefully this clears things up.

Pete

Well, I don't have a dog in the fight, but maybe if the mods could come to a three moderator consensus before making a ban or reprimand, it might dampen the process.

I never put 2 and 2 together , how do you donate to PINSIDE???????? I just spent 2 minutes looking at the pages for this website and I see no spot for donations, If I look for 2 minutes and can't find a "link" then it must be free. I just went to IPDB and in under 30 seconds I found out how to support that site, which I do nearly every year or sometimes a reminder in a pinside or RGP post. put a spot up top next to "FORUMS" for donation info. Don't bitch that you can't do it for free"I UNDERSTAND" and then not make it easier to donate.

OK I looked under COMMUNITY and found it and donated, if you need the donation to remain open I would make another LARGE TAB up top for DONATIONS. Some of the cheapest people I have ever meet own pinball machines. They rarely want to pay for anything, your stuff is always overpriced, meanwhile their LW3 with LED"S is worth $3500

IMO.

For others that might be searching...
https://pinside.com/pinball/donate
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://www.Team-EM.com
http://webpages.charter.net/chibler/Pinball/index.htm
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

I have a few items for sale in the market with special Pinside pricing and I will donate $100 to Pinside for each one that sells here.

It took me a long time to find a way to donate too. Only after I discovered it did I find a teeny tiny "donate" link at the bottom of the page, I guess i've just never scrolled down that far.

Don't you have a party to tend to right about now?

Hey Teekee this might be a good time to post "SEND MONEY NOW!!!!"

Sorry I'm late… ahem… SEND MONEY NOW!!!!

I don't think Aurich's comic reference was even close to being too much. I don't mind the site being somewhat family friendly, but Modern Family has more innuendo that that comic and it is prime time TV.

We may not be able to have pics of top 50 pins or quote the call outs if this keeps up.

I think the mod got it wrong. And I think that if you sterilize this site too much it becomes less fun.

We should remove Metallica from all rankings...."Nice fucking shot!" - I just offended myself again....

As a purist I would never buy a game with obscenities in it.

That's a great point to make. There are better places for that, so why complicate pinside with them? Why make things unnecessarily complicated here?

I've said this in another thread, but if you are able to attend a pinball show seminar and sit in the audience and refrain from verbally harassing the speaker and refrain from passing out boob pics to others in the audience, then you already know how to act in public. I know everybody here already knows how to behave well. It's just a matter of willingness. If anyone is threatening to leave pinside because they don't like either their "adult" behavior or their "childish" behavior to be curtailed, then, well, maybe that person really should part ways with pinside. But come back later with their civil self.

Damn, I'm out !

This is true. But the other truth is that while everyone is sitting there waiting for the JJP presentation to start they're swapping Stern rumors. They're talking about Jpop. They're laughing to keep from crying over Predator.

Pinheads are gossipy as a motherf***er. It's what we do. We talk and talk and talk at shows, sometimes hardly even playing the games. It's half the fun of going to the events, swapping all the rumors and stories.

So sure, don't get into fights, and don't pass out porn at shows. (Though Dutch Pinball knows a little something about injecting boobs into shows.) That's fine. I don't have a problem with that.

But when you try and suppress people's natural desire to just *talk pinball* it enters into frustration land. We're not running a newspaper here. It's really okay if the Hobbit thread wanders. WTF else is there to talk about? JJP threw a big event and didn't let slip a single update about Hobbit. Nothing. Not even a hint. Only had one machine there to play. It's not like chatting about Stern going LCD or Full Throttle shipping is derailing people trying to talk about all the exciting new news.

Let people talk. Keep the moderation to when people get nasty, not when they're enjoying each other's company and killing time waiting for the next juicy tidbit to obsess over.

Why have separate threads if off topic banter is allowed to run wild in them? The last thing I want to see in a Heighway thread is stuff about other manufacturers and pictures that have nothing to do with the company or pinball for that matter.

The Hobbit thread is on page 161. Do you really think if there's some big new hot news that it's going to only appear there?

Threads wander. I think it's reasonable to expect them to stay on topic for a while. But after a while you gotta just relax IMHO, and start a new thread for new news. That's better for everyone, because lots of people don't want to keep checking a 160 page thread. They'd rather anything new bubbled back up to the front page.

Edit: And pinball isn't in a vacuum anyways. Full Throttle *as it was being discussed* was on topic. It's okay to compare things. It only came up as an example of how games take a long time to finish, it wasn't positioned against Hobbit in a negative way even.

cry-baby-blog.jpg

I think teekee wins for first ejection of this thread lol.

Wow talk about case and point...

If anyone relies on this site as a source of income; I sure hope they have an alternate source.

I'm pretty much out of the hobby for various reasons. That said, I would probably no longer give Pinside my money. I won't pay someone to edit my thoughts. I never attack people personally, and when I swear it's for comedic, rhythmic or rhetorical emphasis. I'm not in grade school, I'm an adult, and I express myself with "bad" words sometimes.

*shrug*

Have fun everyone!

EDIT: After perusing the whole thread and seeing for what Aurich received an eject, my mind would easily have been made for me. That's fucking absurd.

It is funny you go off topic on a Grey Heart VS Red Heart thread and you have never given so you have no heart.Yet hear you are off topic bitching about people going off topic

Other reason is like off topic for people who they just want to eject