Not sure if serious?

I know web developers who run e-commerce sites full time that are an order of magnitude less complex than Pinside. Frankly I'm amazed that Robin has been able to take the site this far in a spare-time capacity. The recent responsive re-design blew me away. Anyone who has any understanding or visibility into web development will understand how damn impressive this website is and how lucky we are to have a pinhead make it and run it for us.

Ads ruin websites for all users — particularly on mobile. Except those that block them, of course, which defeats the purpose of implementing ads in the first place. And ads bring in very little money especially on niche sites like this. Paid premium features targeted at the hardcore users won't do anything to stymie growth of new users if implemented in the way that Robin is indicating. The money from these subscriptions will only serve to fund further improvements to the site that everyone can benefit from.

The monetiziation ideas are all a win-win from my perspective. I've gained so much from being part of Pinside. It is truly gutsy move for Robin and Martijn to make Pinside their day jobs. We can only benefit from the increased effort spent on this shared resource. If this is how far Robin took it part-time, I can't wait to see how much better it gets in the future with two talented individuals working on it full-time. Good luck guys!

Every website that employs ads wishes to god that they didn't have to. They aren't controlled by the websites they're plastered all over, they dramatically increase data usage, they take up screen real estate, they slow the performance, they waste battery, they invade privacy. They're truly horrendous. There's a reason why people have been clamouring to block ads, particularly on mobile, since Apple added the Content Blocker API to iOS.

http://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were-doing-about-it

The best ads are native ads. Charging for marketplace listings and marketplace forum posts is effectively charging for native advertising.

You'd be right if the premium service included a separate forum but Robin didn't describe a separate forum. He said "Accounts that offer the same Pinside experience, but also add some additional perks and features for the paying subscriber."

This is a fresh challenge for Robin and Martijn, for sure. I don't think there's any reason to assume they'll make poor decisions in this regard. Hold negative prognosticating about a changed fundamental experience until it actually happens.

Part of Robin's reasoning for burying all the OT crap into The Basement by default is that it won't be indexed by Google.

I guess it remains to be seen whether or not your prediction that regular pinball threads will suffer from more OT garbage. If it does, and it annoys people, then I'd expect to see a change to the posting rules and moderation, not a back-pedalling on The Basement.

I, for one, think The Basement is an awesome idea. While all the Pinside drama might be great popcorn for the handful of diehards who make this place the centre of their online social life, it clutters the frontpage for all the regular folk who come here to read and talk Pinball (especially unregistered readers who have no preference setting options) and it works against the public image and goals of Pinside when surfaced to everybody and indexed by Google.

Between a rock and a hard place on this one. Typical mouse-over behaviour on mobile is for it to be: tap to reveal mouse-over and tap again to make selection. All buttons of this kind on Pinside have behaved like this since the responsive update some time ago.

You could equally claim that it would be bad design to have a tap result in an immediate effect on any of the buttons on a post. How is a new user, or an existing user that doesn't use the features that often, and using a mobile device, supposed to know what the icons to if they can't tap it to reveal the hover-over info before committing the action? IMO this would be worse design than the current state.

I have to defend Robin here because this reads like you're assuming they simply saw the opportunity to cash in on Pinside.

In reality their decision to go in on this full time takes balls and Pinside will only benefit in the long run from the dramatically increased attention. Some folk may not like some decisions but guess what, unlike faceless corporations running web services, Robin and Martijn are actually one of us, they care what we all think and they want to try to please everybody (which is frankly remarkable because it creates a ton more work).

It's okay to be pessimistic, but comments like this unfairly ignore everything Robin has done so far and betray an understanding of how much care and attention has gone into Pinside.

I think it's safe to assume he's busy working on the site, don't you?

My goodness. What's with all the negative assumptions around here, hasn't Robin earned enough goodwill that we give him the benefit of the doubt? I can't stand so many people taking his work for granted.

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 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.

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.

I just discovered that you can. Go to Forum > Activity tab. On any screen in this view you can use the 'Batch Edit' option at the top right to select all and mark as un-viewed (no longer green). If you want to clear literally everything then you'll want to do this on the 'Topics Which YOU VIEWED' tab here.

Just curious if you're using this as a method of getting to the most recent unread post in the thread? Because you can get there by tapping/clicking the green 'unread count' number to the left of any threads in a list. That's always the fastest way to the most recent unread post (or last post if all read) in a given thread.

Happy to help!