Robin has a very very good personal reason not to be here right now, and I'll leave that up to him to post about or not. But believe me, despite all that, he's still reworking and testing the system with a few changes based on the feedback and complaints here. He has not disappeared or abandoned us, despite some of the comments that have been posted after he worked his ass off for months behind the scenes trying to implement changes that many people have been begging for.

You are wrong in your assumption that I'm implying they saw the opp to "cash in". I am not saying they did it for the money. I don't think that at all. I am simply saying that they saw an opportunity to work full time on something that they are very passionate about and may have jumped the gun. Who wouldn't want to work full time on their favorite hobby? I would! I'm just saying that they may have had blinders on, and not thought about the implications of their decision. Just look around. Is pinside a better place since all of these changes? IMO it is not. I have nothing but respect for Robin, I love pinside...I just prefer the old pinside.

Please don't assume that I am assuming

How about having some regard for why these suggestions may not be a good idea and what cost (development time, server load) it takes to implement?

App: absolutely no need for it. Would require enormous development resources to develop and maintain two codebases. The recent responsive site redesign is the right solution here.

Email attachments: Robin mentioned a desire to build a PM file attachment feature but stated that the storage space and bandwidth requirements are too much to bear with the site's current funding and time resources (hence the desire to make a paid service that covers the costs of this feature for those that want to use it).

Thread notifications via email: would bother the heck out of most people and would definitely see little use. Simply use pinside.com/pinball/community/pinsiders/docrotcod to see what threads you're participating in have responses.

I'm not demanding or even expecting more admin attention -- Robin's not suddenly our employee just because he's looking for ways to make some money off of a popular website that he happens to own.

At the end of the day if the site works well do I care whether Robin and his brother are working 40 hours a week or 4 hours a week on it? Nope, not a bit. And do I care if they collect money from me in the form of a "fee" on any game I happen to sell or an annual membership fee to avoid ads (if they decide to go that way someday) instead of my small voluntary annual donation? Nope, not really. Won't change much financially for me, or for most Pinside users.

Saw this on another forum and relates to what I was mentioning earlier. Imagine this:

Thumbs up / down go into net total score like it did prior to this update.

- threshold in your settings for a number where below that it's treated like ignored user posts. Believe this would cut back on 'piling' on as less people even see the things that are inflammatory.

- in each thread a 'Summarize' button where its a filter the other way (maybe also using a personal threshold, or universal shared threshold) where only the >threshold positive scores are shown which lets you catch up quickly vs plowing through the 3000 posts.

This would also cut back on the joined late, don't know what's going on but a post on page 3 pissed me off' posts that I'm going to add on page 15.

Anyways, my 2 cents.

Need to go find a cash machine to update my stone cold heart.

It's called 'responsive design' where the web adapts to mobile sized displays. Apps for a discussion forums are dead. Maybe if they built an app for their other features.. like selling, buying, research, etc.

Not necessarily. If they are forced to monetize in order to supplement their lack of a day job they can just as easily ruin pinside. Have you noticed how few for sale threads there have been since the update? Not a good sign.

Family always comes first! I think things will work out fine, you're always really good about responding to feedback. Better than me really, I tend to just tell people to suck it up and get used to it, you actually listen and make things the way people ask.

Change gets people riled up, money gets people riled up, it will take some adjusting and fixing and explaining and then I'm sure everything will settle down.

I don't dispute the possibility of detrimental design decisions arising from a need to generate income. My argument is that Robin is a pinhead, Pinside is his baby, he doesn't want to ruin it any more than we want it ruined, and he and Martijn being in the position to focus their energies on the site full time will mean they can improve it at a far greater rate than before, ultimately making it better.

Robin's post above confirms my argument. If anything, the prior status quo was more likely to result in Robin having some kind of breakdown/burnout which would truly have resulted in a worse Pinside. Any situation that leads to more hours for Robin to spend working on the site, and a stable sustainable environment in which to do so, is ultimately the best outcome and I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise.

Just took a quick peek in the marketplace. I saw 16 machines posted yesterday, 10 posted on Nov. 2 (the day before the site change was rolled out). I'm not invested enough to do a full-blown survey, but at least from this anecdotal evidence it doesn't appear that marketplace postings have fallen off a cliff.

Thanks for the update Robin. Best wishes with whatever it is that currently has your attention. I'm sure if it's anything the community can help out with, there will be more than enough folks willing to help.

What would the app do that the website doesn't already do? Personally, I thought that the responsive design update pretty much eliminated the need for an app.

PM attachments would be nice, as would email notifications. However, email services aren't cheap when sending in email bulk, so I doubt that will be coming anytime soon. I'd guess there would be tens of thousands of emails every day between the number of new posts and the number of users watching/replying to those posts.

How about either of these ideas?

Idea 1) Bring back the thumbs down, and as long as users are signed in, they can do a thumbs down, but, no one, not even the one who downvotes, sees any thumbs down totals on ANY post while signed-in. Only those who are NOT signed into the site will see the thumbs down tally in each post.

This satisfies the signed-in user who wants to downvote a comment to get his/her need to disagree met, conveniently.
This satisfies the signed-in user who does not want to see the downvotes and get agitated by them.
This allows the newbies who have not yet become registered members, and also the lurkers who chance by the site, and anyone else who is not signed-in, to see the downvotes, as a way to satisfy those downvote advocates who say that their downvotes help those who do not yet know better in what they read here.

Because signed-in users do not see the tallies, this should placate those users who believe that some users give thumbs-down not based on personal integrity but for lesser reasons such as they see a high-count of negative votes and want to join the smack-down, or just want to feel they belong, or like to game the system, or are just jerks, or see that their buddy gave a downvote so they want to as well, making the downvote into a popularity contest, or have a compulsive need to make themselves known, or any of those less-than-noble reasons that are disliked by those who would not have those reasons and would not want to see them quantified.

Advocates of downvoting say they do it because they disagree with the post. They don't say that they do it because they were influenced by the existing downvote count that they saw in the post. Therefore these advocates should not insist that they need to see these tallies prior to casting their downvote. Right? Good. For those downvoters who still want to see who else downvoted, for those downvoters who give social meaning to their downvote, for those downvoters who essentially are human beings with these legitimate desires, they can sign-off and take a look anytime. In exchange for having been given this convenient wordless way to express their opinion, their possibly contentious opinion, they can sign-off and take a look, knowing that a few extra keystrokes on their part to meet their own extra needs serves a greater good than what we had before. They are big enough to do that much. Keep in mind, all registered users would have to be as big, if they were as curious.

For those remaining downvoters and any upvoters who read the above and believe they would have to sign-in, sign-off, sign-in, sign-off, just to get through a thread, well that is elective behavior and if you really follow the downvoting to that degree then now we are talking about something obsessive perhaps, people who are living a side life inside this downvoting thing, a choice outside of giving feedback.

Idea 2) Bring back the thumbs down but forget Idea 1 and just have a toggle button in your profile to globally suppress the downvote count so that each user can decide if he/she wants to see them or not.

Double good news sounds like twins

I m not a big fan of thumbs down, up is handy for people to approve a design which has been helpful in the past, but if the masses want it just keep it simple - have a "Rate" box with 3 small boxes underneath in the top rhs corner. The centre box is the overall rating colour and either side is a thumbs down and thumbs up button.

Centre box -
no colour / neutral colour - means no vote has been cast as yet
Overall negative voted - red in colour
Overall positive voted - green in colour

don't show a tally of votes, nor show who has voted

only the moderators see a rating alert if a post and / or thread has hit a certain negative counter or sent a alert.

I think this gives people a chance to vote but when totals are not shown some people may stop voting for the sake of them having fun, Not knowing who voted might save on some of the bickering and pay back voting.

Coming from Bangerjay, I can't believe he didn't accompany this quote with a picture of the top half of Kate Upton.

Pinside is still the GREATEST site on the planet !
We all love it, or we wouldn't be here. I just want my top corner back. If possible, I'd also like to be able to thumbs down myself, and save people some time.
Just please dont ever mess with our emojii's...
Best wishes with your family stuff Robin...we love ya man !!

There are two expenses with email. One, is the heavy tax on disk I/O - but, compared to other aspects of Pinside, aren't really an issue. The other is with dealing with complaints of non-delivery; and dealing with actual non-delivery. Dealing with people marking mail as spam, and having that ISP eventually start blocking Pinside entirely. This is the sort of stuff that eventually pushed me out of hosting mailing lists.

If I *were* Robin, I'd send every notification with a trackable "SMTP FROM" (mail envelope from) address, that is tied back to the pinside user. And any non-delivery reports get bubbled back as feedback to the user when visiting the site. A dashboard to say "Btw, we had 75% of the email this week to you get rejected.". I'd also make it so that undeliverable (deferred) mail possibly give up quickly - hours, not the default of 5 days - and get the reject feedback to the user interface.

That said, people will complain - and I don't know that I'd want Robin wasting dev cycles.. doing postal work. I'd hope he'd create an admin role for 1 or more unix/mail clueful people to be "postmaster" to deal with the headaches that mail delivery inevitably brings.

[All that said: Yeah, I'd love it if Pinside had email notifications on threads, and @mentions!]

Indeed, managing a mail server can be a full time job in and of itself. There are email services, like amazon's could service which tends to handle a bulk of the issues, though, so you don have to fight with the blacklisting services and spam.

What do you do when people complain about not getting mail? Tell them to file a ticket with Amazon?

BTW: For just *sending* mail out, you have to deal with other people doing anti-spam. But you don't have to accept incoming messages, don't have to deal with incoming filtering. That cuts the problem down significantly - but you'd still want some poor gullible sod to take on the postmaster role.

Oh, I see what you're getting at. Yeah, sure, you're going to have to deal with some end-user stuff as with anything, but you can kick most of the more technical issues to the service provider.

But since it's only outgoing mail from pinside, you won't have a lot of the normal end user complaints and questions like you would with an actual email service (like gmail, yahoo, etc).

We love you Robin, seriously. Don't let us Pinsiders get you down. This is the best pinball site ever, bar none.

Robin,

Will I be able to ask for Pinside this Christmas this year? Ref https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/i-want-pinside-for-christmas from last year.

-Rob
-visit http://www.kahr.us to get my daughterboard that helps fix WPC pinball resets or for my Pinball 2000 H+V video sync combiner kit

Please also consider leaving it turned off as it is now. Some of the people that are defending it here are the very reasons I'm guessing it went away. If someone posts the same thought over and over they get hammered for being a broken record, so how is someone going through an entire thread and down-voting half the posts any less of a problem? You have basically taken the same bad behavior and simplified it with a check box. Your instinct to get rid of this was right.

If only having thumbs up is now an issue get rid of that as well. Force folks to talk with their words and not their mouse buttons.

it's funny how the the poll favors the thumbs down almost 4-1.

Robin I LOVE this idea, but possibly only because I'm looking forward to the complaints from the frustrated folks that can't thumbs down me when they desperately want/need to. Like this post for example.

How about a little more simple - if you leave a thumbs down, you must also comment on the thread. Weren't people just thumbs-downing every post of a person they disagreed with? By forcing a comment, they would be "out-ed" for doing it for no valuable reason on the topic. It might add to the conversation - I disagree with you because...

Over thinking it. In your summary, I don't understand the purpose anymore at all.

To me, the best benefit is to serve a function beyond popularity. Either by helping the moderators or by implementing a moderation scheme itself (I.e., negative threshold for hiding the content and/or positive threshold for summarizing content).

The people that get offended by a lot of thumbs down on their posts are, by definition, creating inflammatory material. So the question I guess is, is that something you want to preserve or curb.

I love the idea to make it completely optional.

Then what's the use in having a thumbs down feature if you have to post anyway? It's a quick way to disagree with someone or mark bad advice without spending time making a post about it. If someone posts bad or snarky comments and instead of 30 thumbs down we get 30 posts all saying the same thing, it would just get messy and would discourage legitimate users from taking advantage of it. In my opinion.

Pinside has a bad reputation for being pro-everythinganybodywantstosell to the masses here. And historically anyone that asks critical questions of such companies/projects gets the troll label and is eventually shouted out of the room. Recent history has demonstrated that blind faith in everyone that is trying to sell something here is not necessarily in everyone's best interests. The real problem is that "inflammatory" should only be folks breaking the forum rules and attacking members, not folks that don't agree with the pro-everything sunshine opinion.

I think it's funny that the people who don't like thumbs down are the ones giving thumbs down to it in the poll.

Ok so maybe I'm wrong but this post comes off like you are personally stinging from getting thumbs downed for saying negative things about jpop or predator or MMR or something. I don't think that is a problem with the thumbs down system, that's just human nature. You would have received a lot of negative feedback whether there was a thumbs down feature or not.

I usually know I'm going to get thumbs downed as I'm writing a post. If something is controversial or offensive, it's to be expected. But I don't give a shit, and neither should anybody else. If you get butthurt over a thumbs down, just write boring vanilla posts that nobody will read anyway.

I think there's a fairly broad spectrum of posts that get negative feedback - there are posts with incorrect information, there are snarky trolly mean spirited posts, posts that are overly aggressive or threatening, and finally posts that people simply disagree with for a variety of possible reasons (and yeah, viper, sometimes the disagreement is because it's something they don't want to hear). I actually think it is fine for "thumbs down" to encompass all these functions. People, both the people reading the post and the person who wrote it (as Beelzeboob pointed out) generally understand why a post is getting down votes. A more granular system adds complexity without adding any value, in my opinion.

or be clear, thoughtful and nail your point home and get lots of thumbs up! Most people have a point behind their inflammatory bombastic BS that is never made clear cause they get more pleasure out of stirring the pot.

Let me clear the air by letting you know that thumbs down never personally bothered me at all. It does seem to demonstrate who on the forums is trying to control the conversations and steer it in their direction. I am adult enough to listen and consider people's words on a subject, even people that aren't currently on my "side". Such discussions have at times caused me to switch my opinion on a particular subject, whereas I don't see a voting system ever doing that.

The only real product this site offers is discussion, if folks aren't up for that there is no reason to dumb it down with needless check boxes.

This is for the forum owners to decide on, and the official moderators. Hence the reason it went away. I can see a point for rules violations but you pretty much summed up what is wrong with it here: It was being abused.

No...my point was that sometimes I have an opinion that I'm pretty sure won't be popular. It wasn't about stirring the pot. There are some people who like to agree with everybody, even when their hypocrisy is blatant.

The way I'm understanding it, the big bitch about thumbs down is some people are abusing it. Why not put a button for suspected abuse, then Robin and/or mods can have a look or monitor the reported abuser. Then if true, have that person's thumbs (broken) turned off. But that too can be abused which causes more work.

I may be in the minority, but I value the negative feedback I occasionally get (usually when posting while drinking). I don't need 8 different people telling me I'm being a jerk; 8 thumbs down sends a strong enough message.

I like the idea of letting people opt out of the thumbs-down feature. Seems like a good compromise.

I think trailing someone around and reflexively thumbs-downing their posts is abusing the system. Thumbs-downing your MMR posts (even if they were perfectly rational and ended up being correct) was not necessarily "abuse" - the thumbs-downs mostly represent disagreement and lots of people in those threads disagreed with you at the time.

I'm on the fence about thumbs down, I agree that it can cut down on a lengthy string of short responses to dumb (or even unpopular) opinions, but I can see that it also breeds a certain amount of negativity here. Having made the change already, maybe Robin should leave it gone for a few months to see how things shake out.

I miss the thumbs down because now I don't know if Rarehero is reading my posts anymore.

Thank God. I thought it was just me.

This is very true and why I think thumbs down should never go away. It is sort of a slap in the face to keep a normally OK person from being a keyboard commando. This sort of reminds me of a funny comedy bit I heard recently. Listen to the whole thing because I think it does apply here and also because it is damn funny:

I think the latest quality rating system could be simplified to please everybody by including common positive and negative responses. Have three possible ratings that cover the range of reasons why someone might thumb up or down a post:

1) Agree (i.e. agreeing with point or tech advice)
2) Like (i.e. cool photo, idea, suggestion, show of support)
3) Disagree (i.e. disagreeing with point or tech advice)
4) Off-topic (i.e. stupid meme image, unhelpful joke response, flame bait)

There are two positive and two negative ones so they could still equally combine to form an overall score like the old system did.

A generic thumbs down is too open to interpretation and abuse and gets used simply to jab at someone people dislike regardless of the merit of their post (i.e. Kaneda). So having two negative options, disagree and off-topic, neuter the kind of misuse that the thumbs down got. All someone could do to a person they dislike would be to disagree or label posts as off-topic. And they'd look stupid for it if the comment is genuinely helpful and on topic.