It’s very curious to me that in the last couple of months we’ve seen the return of something calling itself “PAPA”, “Pinburgh”, and, by all first hand accounts I’ve read, an absolutely disastrous EPC in Poland.
Why is no one discussing these things on the forum dedicated to competitive pinball?
Kinda weird.
I’m not actively participating but I think most ranting about these things have moved to Discord?
Also, rulings arguing had moved to IFPA discord. That was a lot of my posts here 
I’m sad to say the Discord seems to have killed it, which is a shame because I greatly prefer a forum format for actual discussions. I get why people want Discord for time sensitive questions about rulings, but I miss being able to sit down and easily read a big long philosophical discussion about rules or tournament ethics or whatever. I don’t find Discord conducive to a long-running and detailed discussion.
I’m definitely out of the loop when it comes to Discord. I think its just me but I find Discord difficult to use for some reason.
Do we need an invite in order to be able to join the IPFA and other competitive Discord groups?
Yeah it’s very easy to miss out on discussions on discord. I miss the activity here too.
Discord suffers from modernitis, i.e. speed over quality. For live rulings, speed.is useful, but for more serious discussions, it’s counterproductive. Pinside has a similar issue: when a new thread is opened up, the earliest comments end up dominating the discussion, whereas more reasoned ones that appear later are often ignored by users who seem to lapse out of threads after only a day or so. Throughout the web, people who live online and are “rapid commenters” are drowning out people who focus on the real world first and check online more sporadically - - maybe only every couple of days for a given site or thread vs. multiple times a day or even hourly. It’s a lot like merchandise, where the first product of a kind sometimes prevents better products from coming out later (there’s a business phrase for this, but I forget what’s it’s called just now). In the early 80’s, we called the speed issue the “Hans Solo School of Action Before Thinking.” (Shoot first and ask questions later.) That behavior may eventually get us all killed when someone has an emotional reaction to something and pushes the wrong button rather than thinking things through . . . or someone rushes out the Super AI without making sure it’s safe because “being first” is more important.
Discord is still useful, but I’ve found it less so as time goes on. The announcements and basic facts posted there often appear before showing up elsewhere, which is its major benefit now. But the chatter has grown immensely. It’s beginning to suffer from Sturgeon’s Law.
If there’s a discord, can someone post a link?
i think people meant Discord in general but the most active one i am part of is Rayday discord, Ray Day Discord
I do miss the more granular nature of topic/thread-based discussion on Tilt (as mentioned above) vs. Discord’s broader channel-based chatter that can span a wide variety of topics. I enjoy being able to dive into topics I specifically want to read or engage in discussion on Tilt, and ignore those that aren’t as interesting to me. The signal-to-noise ratio on RayDay’s Discord – due to the increasing # of users – has gotten a bit out of whack, resulting in a lot more scrolling past pages of posts.
I never post in here but I use Tilt Forums on a regular basis for rule sheets. Please don’t kill it 
Discord is fantastic IMO, but only for small closed communities where the discussions are easily focused into the correct channels. I’m bummed that tiltforums is so slow these days because it is better, but I’ve personally checked out of most pinball social media as I find it pretty exhausting in general.
The site’s usage has been in decline for a couple years now (it is notable that I myself didn’t see this thread until two weeks after it got posted.) I’ve had several conversations around this with different people in the community in the last year or so on this topic, and everyone agrees that the rise of different real time forms of communication like the IFPA Discord and local Slacks have really eaten away at our user base. I’m not a fan and Discord makes my eyes bleed, but to each their own. I started the site to serve what I saw as a gap in the community, but things change all the time. I’ve been online for 30+ years and have seen the trends swing between synchronous and asynchronous communication tools repeatedly. This is just another part of that.
As pointed out above, I do think that the wiki rulesheets continue to serve a crucial need, especially as rule sets become deeper and more complicated. I hope people continue to create and maintain them. Otherwise the site will still be here to serve those who want it!
also no ssl does turn off some people.
@JoeTheDragon yes definitely! some devices won’t even allow you to access tilt forums because it’s not secured HTTPS
@moderators is there someone who can fix this?
also, this is my go-to for any rule sheets, I find it so helpful in reviewing rule sets, tips and rationale & tournament talk without other “distractions”
I do think anytime a pinball tournament is streamed – the rule sheets from tilt forums should be posted for viewers!
Yeah, you can secure the website for free. Not sure how we did it for Pincinnati, but didn’t cost anything.
install let’s encrypt
I took the liberty of storing daily backups of all 70 rulesheets in OPDB so now they’re also displayed in Match Play (example). Hopefully that’ll make them a easier to discover for new folks. Edit away on Tilt Forums and every night the updates will propagate to OPDB and Match Play (Discourse has a super easy API 
).
I wish I could do the same for rulesheets hosted on IPDB, but…
One impressive (or just nerdy) thing: I had created the database column to store the rulesheets as a TEXT column, but a couple of rulesheets were so long and thorough that they didn’t fit into the 64KB 
Very impressed with the thoroughness
So you’re saying you can store more than 255 characters? 
(this is an inside joke…)