The Future of Tilt Forums

In March of 2015 I announced the launch of Tilt Forums, with no real intentions other than offering a safer and more welcoming place to discuss pinball. In the 11 years since, much has changed, both in the world and in our community. One of the bigger things is the migration of discussion about pinball, particularly competitive pinball, from online forums to chat applications like Discord or Slack. As this shift happened, traffic and discussion here has slowed, to the point where it is now almost non-existent. Most posts are announcements of some sort, and the only major activity happens in the wiki rulesheets. In the meantime, the (small but not non-existent) costs to host this forum have not done anything but rise.

Therefore I have made the decision to shut down Tilt Forums, effective on September 1 of 2026. So here is what will happen, and what it means for you.

Closing

On 9/1 I will take down the forum software, and in its place put up a static archive of the site. This will ensure that the discussions and information here live on going forward. This archive will also be made available for download in HTML, Markdown, and JSON formats (the latter of which will include a bunch of metadata for each post as well.) Mine the data, train your models. This is a resource that belongs to the community, and I want it to continue to be so.

Your data

At anytime from now until the closing date, you can download an archive of your user data. This will include all your posts and DMs. If you wish to have this archive, here is how you do it.

• Go to your avatar in the top right and click it.
• In the icon list on the right side of the menu, go down to the bottom icon of a person and click it.
• In the menu on the left click Preferences
• Scroll down to the bottom under Export Your Data and click the “Request archive” button.
• You will receive a DM with a link to your download when your archive is ready

The archive will be a zip download which contains a CSV file that you can open in Excel or import into any other spreadsheet / database software. Each row will represent a post you have made or a private message you have sent. Again, this will be available to everyone until 9/1.

Rulesheets

When I first started thinking about shutting down Tilt Forums, the one thing that gave me pause was the rulesheets. These are the only thing that have really remained active over time, and I do believe they provide real value to the community. So I will be migrating the rulesheets to a Github Pages website, where they will be community-editable by anyone with a Github account. For those who are unfamiliar with Github, it is usually used for maintaining code however it works great for pretty much any text format. The rulesheets will be stored as Markdown (which Discourse was using anyways) and the entire collection will be accessible for download by anyone who wishes. I’ll have more on this as the date gets closer, but the main message is that this valuable community resource and the contributions of those who have built them will not be lost.

Thank you all for your participation and support these last 11 years. I am glad I was able to provide something the community found helpful for as long as it did.

Best

Greg

Thanks for the service you provided, Greg. And your willingness to preserve the rulesheets/archives.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion and forum you created for us here.

And the wiki rulesheets are both an invaluable resource, as well as fun to contribute to.

Thanks for everything, Greg. This was just the tool and forum we needed when we needed it. I’ll miss it, but hopefully still see you.

Bob / BMU

Thank you Greg. This forum has meant a lot to me over the years. The decision makes complete sense, and you are handling in a thoughtful way.

The other very active thing is the one streaming tech thread, which I only lerk on, but I will need to find where those discussions move. Anyone have an existing or new discord that becomes the defacto place

Greg- Thanks for creating and maintaining Tiltforums. Incredible service to the community and one I’d check often for rules and non toxic information.

Thank you for this very useful place. Aside from a few posts and lurking in various discussions, I very much enjoyed being able to read and refer others to the rulesheets built by the community here.
Thank you also for finding a way for these to exist in a living format that will benefit players into the future, and the thoughtful way you’ve handled user data portability.

Thank you Greg

Oh the sadness. My last resort. Thanks for running the site and preserving the content. Hosting the rulesheets on GitHub Pages is a great idea for a great price. Hopefully it will find roots and grow there.

If you find a place. Let us know!

I’m actually pretty surprised there isn’t already a Discord dedicated to the streamers and content creators in the pinball community.

There’s the “Pinball Media & Creators” Discord server. @colinize runs it.

I have issues identifying as either media or creator. We need an “Unhinged Pinball Streamers” Discord. No shill and zero structure, but I mostly shriek at Discord to be fair.

I mean, they didn’t kick me out even after I admitted I am neither the former or the latter. Shrieking at Discord is fair though

Sad news, but completely understandable.

Thanks for making this such a fantastic resource for discussing competitive pinball. I wish more people were still here - I vastly prefer this format for discovering and discussing tips and strategies. In particular thanks to all those that contributed to the deep cuts thread which has been a particular favourite.

The discords I have seen stream tech talk are rayday and The Pinball Community, I don’t really follow the conversation on TPC very closely (I have too many discords that I am on, and I waste too much time on the ones I do engage with).

Greg, Thanks for maintaining this for so long. Your dedication to the pinball community has always been appreciated. I will sign up for a Github account because I have enjoyed learning tips from the very in depth rulesheets. Jules

Just to be clear, the rulesheets themselves will be publicly available to anyone without an account or login of any kind. You will only need an account if you wish to edit them or create new ones.

I managed to convince the folks running The Pinball People Discord to host the streaming tech DIY’ers. Direct link to channel: Pinball People or follow the redirect from https://pinballpeople.com

Thanks for the great memories here! Will be moving to Github as soon as the new site launches but I had a great time creating and helping maintain rulesheets here.

Appreciate all the work you did on those rule sheets, @CaptainBZarre !

@gdd
Pinside is willing to host your rulesheets editable. Puts them in the largest pinball community and makes them available easier than github.

Please reach out to Robin, this is a great solution

I just responded over there, but I am pretty committed to my current path. I hope that anyone interested in having the rulesheets be a resource in their own software does so.

I saw. If Robin can integrate via github I think its a great resource to add to pinside and brings a larger audience to it

Pinside is not a fun place to be for a large portion of the pinball community. I’m glad they’re going to be hosted elsewhere.

Thanks so much to @gdd and everyone who contributed to this forum!

This place had the best signal-to-noise ratio of any discussion medium. Even as the output trended towards zero, I still visited nearly every day. The streamer thread, the rulesheets, the semi-useful deep cuts, all legendary threads that will be helpful and awesome even years from now. Discord feels so ephemeral to me in comparison!

if you keep to the owner threads it’s pretty good avoid all the other hype threads then-

I’ve been thinking about the closure here for a few days and just wanted to share a few thoughts before it’s all wrapped up…

Tilt Forums provided space for civil, intelligent discussion at a time when it was severely lacking in the pinball world. As I was getting more involved in competition and running events there really wasn’t a dedicated place for thoughtful pinball discussion about rules, ethics, social issues, etc. I was fed up with Pinside nonsense and RGP2 was already fading out, so this site was perfectly timed for those of us who craved something more substantial. A place to actually communicate without all the noise, easily accessible as a resource for anyone to stumble upon from a search engine without needing an account to view.

It’s a bummer that most of the interesting pinball conversation has shifted to private (or less immediately visible) channels, but I guess that’s just the way it goes as technology changes and people migrate where they feel most comfortable. I’m not particularly interested in staying up on every subchannel or getting notifications all the time, so a lot of that information just ends up getting buried by 100+ posts of inside jokes and goofy gifs by the time I end up looking at it, and I have to rely on friends who are more terminally pinball online to filter it down to me. I know this all sounds very “old man yells at cloud” and I’m not anti-fun, it just stinks that much of the good info gets diluted by a poor signal to noise ratio if you’re not staying up on it 24/7.

Anyway, I’m glad to know TF will be archived because there’s so much deep info here, and of course it’s great that the rulesheets will be publicly available. This is all probably coming off as grouchy, but I totally understand the reasoning to move on. Thanks so much for what you provided here, Greg. I have nothing but respect and appreciation for your efforts. Additional thanks to the moderators who kept shit in check along the way, and to the obsessives who put so much work into the rulesheets.

I’ve always felt solidarity when some bonehead pinbro would sarcastically post something like “can’t wait to see the TF crowd get their pitchforks out…” about a current hot button issue. Kind of like being called “woke” as an insult

I’m at fewer events these days, but always happy to chat if you see me around. I’m friendlier than I look!

I feel obligated to post the WPPR v6.3 update here. I miss the slow burn of people being upset at IFPA for hundreds of posts over the course of months rather than it being the 72 hour burn and churn that it has been since moving to Discord.

I’ll let the team know we need to get this announced before September so we can send Tilt Forums out with a bang!

When I was newly into pinball, I found Pinside first, but very soon discovered how awful it was, and felt discouraged. Then I found Tilt Forums and it became my main home. I learned a lot about the ethos of competitive pinball here and stayed up to date on pinball news. Thanks to being such a devoted follower of Tilt Forums, I often knew more about the latest rumors and gossip than the more experienced players in my local leagues. I owe a lot of my early integration into the hobby to Tilt Forums. This news isn’t a surprise, since this place has been nearly moribund for a while now, but I’m sad because I miss the days of forum-style discussion. I’m a creature of the early Internet and I prefer the slower pace and the ability to read through posts at greater leisure. The more synchronous interaction of Discord is what draws people to it but it’s also what makes it less useful to me, for reasons jdelz has already touched on.

Bummer, but totally understandable. Even a quiet forum is work and non-negligible expense to manage. Thanks for all you put into things over the years, and for making the effort at the end to cleanly transition into archive mode and keep the content alive. Too many places like this just wink out of existence one day and all of that information is lost forever, I’m glad this won’t be one of them.

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I’ll miss it here in so many ways. Thank you to @gdd and the moderators and all the contributors!

There’s absolutely no place like Tilt Forums

Adding my gratitude because I have loved the experience with Tilt Forums all these years. I will miss this! I loved the structure of the threads and appreciated the civil discourse here. Thank you for creating, and planning for a meaningful archive of, this space.

Disappointed to see this great resource change.
But thanks to all who contributed over the years, with a special hat tip to @CaptainBZarre for his phenomenal work on the comprehensive rule sheets.

Well I finally have a reason to GetHub. Invaluable resource. Thanks for hosting as long as you did

Thanks for all your hard work, Greg!!!

today is the last day…

thanks everybody.

I’m reminded of when TV stations signed off the air late at night (yes, of course I’m old enough to have seen those). Many would play the national anthem as their last action with flags flying or other patriotic / American scenic visuals in the background. A few would do the shorter “my country 'tis of thee” instead. In any case, I salute you and everyone who has contributed to making this “station” a great one to “watch” these many years. As Q said to Picard at the end of All Good Things, “See you … out there.”

And now it’s time for us to switch into the PAY TV MODE!

Nearly forgot to say goodbye in time - this site was/is a valuable resource for information. I’ll miss it for sure.

There are few Internet communities that have the track record of kindness that Tilt Forums had. I appreciate everyone on here and I will remember y’all fondly.

Thank you

Thanks to everyone for being part of this community over the past decade or so! It’s been a nice island of tranquility and respect.

Play more pinball!

Thanks so much. This has been a really good place for me, as it helped me learn the ropes of tournament pinball early in my career in a welcoming setting.

Oh noo thank you for all ! Any TF discord ?