This thread needs a sticky.

Yes, they absolutely suck. Eventually, it'll be as bad as Facebook ads.

Gotta get that cash homie!

It's obnoxious garbage shit of course; which begs the question can the higher donation levels turn them off?

What ads? Can you post a screenshot? I have ad block so I think they're being blocked on my screen.

Well, you'll be glad to know that in the classifieds section, it's now up to 9 ads that show up as "sticky" on the top.

Kinda makes you wish for the days when there were only 3 or 4 (or as you may know it, two days ago).

Get this shit outta here or don't expect any more money Robin.

The natives are getting restless!!!

(I honestly have zero idea what you people are talking about, I haven't noticed anything.)

You can pay a fee to have your ad as a "sticky" for 3 days...

So yes, that's what's happening.

Why is this a problem? I learned that $$$ trumps everything in this hobby back when I got my Twilight Zone in 2000. It even yells “Greeeeeeeed” when you push the buy in button!!!

It’s the only place in the net that I know where you have to donate (or ask someone) before you are allowed to post in popular threads LOL

Can I pay extra to remove someone's sticky ad?

Actually, KLOV, the main board for arcade game related stuff, has been like this for.....probably around a decade?

There is an arrow on the top right corner of the top ad.

Click on it and shrink all those sticky ads

Yeah, that helps, but you have to click it EVERY time you go there. It doesn't stay with the sticky ads minimized.

Oh! I didn’t know. The only sites that I know that charge $ are various news sites, which never have enough exclusive content for me to bother.

I personally don’t think that paid for sticky ads suuuuck. Just like the paid for class system for posting here, it’s a way to make money.

If one wants to sell their game quickly for top $, they just have to pay to make the ad sticky. If everyone does this, then there’s no sticky anymore but the owners of this site get their fair share.

The only thing that I find questionable is the way the money making is presented. If “sticky ad” is advertised like verification as “free and quick” with the free part having to know someone who vouches for you personally in a typically anonymous world wide internet forum, then it does have a one U suck factor LOL.

I don't think pinside makes enough money
Most of the people that sell pins on this site don't pay the fee after the sale.
They use the sight to find buyers, then say they sold it off pinside.
This is especially true for some of the dealers and flippers
You can look at their profiles,market ads, archived ads and see if they contributed
The " Honesty policy " only applies to Honest people. You know who you are
Pinside should charge the fee upfront and a monthly subscription fee

Pinside is a thriving community. Forcing it to become a paid subscription service will kill it. Whether someone wants to pay to participate should be up to them.

If you feel this way, I'm sure you could skip buying the next Stern and mail robin a check for $10k and he would be fine with it.

It just started popping up for me now. Must have not seen them before due to my distance setting. This is not a good feature.

It’s up to 11 ads stickied in the classifieds today. Great feature!

.....and the item picture has shrunk by 30-40% and sticky images are larger.
Can we hit the drop arrow and have a permission to always do this, opt out of Sticky?

Thanks for the feedback. As always, I appreciate it.

Stickies are a concept and (as with mostly everything I do) they are in beta. This means I can adjust, cancel or improve the idea as I'm trying out several variations. The idea behind the Sticky Ads concept was based on a request I kept getting from Pinsiders that they wanted to get their ad back to the top of the classifieds list, without re-listing it (as that would be bad for their sales stats). Clearly there's a lot of demand for this so I will need to come up with an alternative idea that's less obtrusive / scroll hungry / screen space demanding.

Sticky Ads are limited to a maximum of 10 running at any time, but I can definitely see how all of these are annoying at the the top of the classifieds page when you don't have any search parameters set and all of them are showing. And, to be honest, I was not expecting to sell 10 sticky ads in one day.

I'm always trying to find a balance between offering value to the pinball community while at the same time keeping the site sustainable/profitable for the long term. In other words, this is not just about making money. If that were the case, trust me, I get a gazillion offers every week from sites wanting to place all kinds of banner crap and adwords on Pinside. It's not a direction I'm willing to go.

For now, I will further limited the # of sticky ads, to keep it acceptable. See how that goes. Re-evaluate etc. I will also be experimenting with flexible pricing.

Then you probably haven't been around long enough to remember how it was before we required verification on Pinside: duplicates/trolls and spammers posting their messages/spam in the popular topics all day. Our constant battle to quickly remove that crap from the site (and along with it also all the response posts they would generate). This has now been reduced to (nearly) zero. And most new Pinsiders know someone to vouch for them, meaning their verification is free.

Actually, the item picture (thumbnail) size is flexible and depends on the size of the content to the right. For featured ads, this content is larger due to the displayed image thumbnails. Hence, for featured ads with pictures, the thumbnail is also bigger.

Pinside will never go behind a paywall. It is my view that the information on Pinside should be accessible freely for all, with the ultimate goal of promoting this amazing game we all love. Look around you, the hobby is indeed thriving. People are finding games to play, to purchase, repairing them with the help of the community, meeting other pinheads, making friends. Pinside plays a part in all that. That's my motivation. And yes, of course, I also need to make a living as Pinside is my full time job.

robin - A simple solution is just create a second side scroll window (similar to the CLASSIFIEDS FEATURED ADS) for the sticky ads. That would be far less intrusive IMO.

I totally get the want to "bump" an ad up. How about bumping when there is a price drop?

Also not to just drop more stuff on you, but there seems to be an increase in ads of with $12345 or make me an offer (read auction) style posts. Combining those with some sort of sticky/constantly bumped ad seems like a bad idea.