A sad decision today, but due to severe abuse I have decided to disable the tags feature. So much crap has been inserted in tags in the past few days and I don't have the time nor the will to clean it all up. I don't want to bother the moderators with this either.

All people who have abused the tags system (yes everything gets logged) are looking at account blocks for, I don't know, at least a week. I'm pretty ticked off about some of the things I have seen put in the tag system. Not cool.

This is all part of a much larger problem that Pinside is facing at this moment: apparently a (small) group of people who really enjoy trolling, negativity, whatever you like to call it. They use this forum 20% for pinball and 80% for off topic bullshit. This is no longer playful banter between some members. It's infecting the whole forum, and putting a lot people off posting.

Frankly, I'm sick of it. I haven't been on the Pinside much the last couple of months due to more important stuff occupying my spare time but it seems like the negativity has taken a turn for the worse and it's getting progressively worse by the day. This has to stop. Most of you know me as a pretty easy-going and not easily upset, but I hate what I'm seeing happening here these past few weeks. This forum is not a free haven to do anything you please.

This is a site about Pinball - a generally positive hobby (well except for those friggin outlanes), so please take the negativity elsewhere. I have spend an awful lot of time building this site and community and I'm not gonna let a small bunch ruin it for the rest.

I'm not sure what's next for the Pinside (and for tags for that matter) but let this post serve as a heads up that I'm not happy with matters at all. To be continued.

I have been scanning the tags table this morning and some of the stuff I found was definitely not my type of humor. Swearing, racism, name calling, all kinds of crazy stuff in there. I'm sorry but this really was the drop for me after admittedly already being more and more annoyed by a lot of the stuff I had seen from these same people over the past few weeks.

I'm sorry, it's time for a Pinside vacation for some of these guys. And sadly the tag feature is not coming back anytime soon because, like I said, I don't feel like cleaning that mess up (which has to happen manually).

Well I hope I'm in time then because I'm not ready to see that happen to the Pinside. One of the other measures i have take to hopefully put a stop to the negativity around here is (as suggested by the moderator team) lower the number of ban votes needed for a ban from 3 to 2.

Yeah, that's basically what I figured.

Hundreds? Let's hope not! I'm fairly positive that a little bit of housekeeping should put an end to the problems we were seeing. I do hope so.

That's what I wanted to hear. And to the people who think trolling and drama is more fun: please go elsewhere because I've really had enough of it and I know a lot of the less prominent Pinsiders have too.

We are working on the trolls right now. The flippers is another story. I hope that my soon to be added "disclosure" titles (e.g. <Username>, <Stern distributor> or something like that) will help in this respect.

There have been some bans today, and those were mostly in direct response to me being completely ticked of by what I found in the tags system. But that was only the final drop. The Pinside has been under a great deal of negativity lately and some of the people who got banned were already on my radar for their constant negativity, trolling, generally being really unfriendly. People I wouldn't invite in my home gameroom, to be honest. There are more members on that shortlist, but I'm done with the banning for today. Trust me, I don't like this job one bit, I'd much rather be working on new features (and the list of ideas is long). But I postponed this housekeeping for way too long and the site was really headed in a direction I don't want it to go.

I want the Pinside to be fun place. I want it to be generally positive. It doesn't have to be rainbows and butterflies all the time and sure there can be heated discussion which may or may not sometimes need "intervention" by a moderator if it gets too heated. We had this site about a year ago. But as the Pinside grew so did the problems. And when the same list of members shows up in every locked or deleted topic then it's clear that something needs to be done about those members first.

So I kind of applied a "shoot first, ask questions later" move by simply banning those people to see what would happen. Yes it was an unplanned action and yes, I went around the ban vote system. This was a solo move by me, the mods nor any site members have anything to do with this.

Feel free to disagree with my choice. Some people liked the drama. But in the end a decision had to be made, and so I did. As stated earlier, the bans are not necessarily permanent, it really depends on the reaction of those members. Can they participate here without the trolling, negativity and/or constant sarcasm?

That would be a great short term solution, thanks!

Yes I agree on that one, I have seen some pretty crazy things posted over the years and many of it was alcohol-induced

Okay, un-sticky'ing this topic now. Tags might return, but not in their current form. I did get some nice ideas, so I'll think about those for a while.