Quoted from pezpunk:man, tons of actual women have posted long, detailed posts here dozens of times about why certain aspects of Pinside and/or the pinball community make them feel unwelcome. why are you ignoring them? Robin is not some uptight poindexter making arbitrary rules just because he and the mods hate fun. he's responding to complaints and comments from lots of real people who would otherwise like to be hanging out here.
also it really has been a lot better around here over the last few months. far less drama, far more pinball discussion. kudos to Robin and the moderator team, i think you guys are doing a great job.
To play devil's advocate, because often times they don't care. There is this prevailing attitude that as a hobbyist we are supposed to be envoys spreading the word. Mind you I don't care for sexiest attitudes and find some of what gets posted a bit childish. At the same time I don't see the need to be kid friendly which is why I see their side. I don't have kids and the notion of a website dedicated to collectors of multi thousand dollar machines excludes kids by nature.
That side being that by forcing people to act within a certain context as not to offend a specific group removes some of their enjoyment of it. They didn't ask to have this expectation placed on them. Parts of the community is trying to do that. Now, this is at the end of the day Robin's sandbox and he does as he likes. However there is an interesting side effect.
This goes for pinside and the hobby in general. What I have noticed is that the notion of everyone needs to get a long and be nice ends up having the opposite effect. Online not so much, you only have a few online communities and this is the largest. In person though? It certainly ends up pushing many collectors away and prevents local communities from ever really forming. Something to think about next time you run across a group of collectors and the subject of including women / children / non collectors.
