Google Groups and Pinball

[Old Pin Guy]

OK Guys, Paint a newbie Picture on my Forehead!

Where do I begin with Google groups and Pinball?
What are the experiences, people, and integrity here.
Experiences to share?

I feel I should get involved on Google groups, but any involvement is a large time investment. Sometimes an hour or so just or this board!
(I'd rather play then type)

Your input and links and experiences are appreciated.

Negative views are appreciated too, I just don't want to start any problems.

Thank You in Advance,
Art

[scrambled]

You mean this http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.pinball/topics?gvc=2

[TheBatman]

What's the fear?  It's just another forum with a lot more people.  I usually just scan through it daily and see if there's any posts that interest me or pertain to any of my machines.  If so, I can learn a lot.   Lots of good people there who have helped me troubleshoot and fix some issues.  You'll learn quickly who is a guru and who is full of shit.

Stay away from Mike Gallagher (in Dayton/ Beaver Creek Ohio), Creek pinball, aka Tiger, aka, Beaver pin ball, aka Mike G ...aka... a dozen others.  I've dealt with him before and wouldn't trust him for shit.  Do a search on him and you can read flame wars for days on him. That's the only person I personally would steer you away from.  Actually, the first and ONLY person in this hobby I've ever posted such a warning, if that tells you anything.  He posts daily of looking for or selling a ton of games, makes it SOUND like he's a giant op with a huge warehouse, but just screws people from his home.  Makes up various aliases (including imaginary brother when dealing with me) on Ebay and RGP...I guess you'll find people like that anywhere if you look hard enough.  You'll see him sooner or later on RGP, just beware.

RGP...lots of great reading, a daily stop...I'm off to there now!

[number six]

"Google Groups" is actually a gateway to the Usenet, the oldest message system on the Internet (and probably anywhere at this point). The main groups are of course rec.games.pinball and rec.games.video.arcade.collecting.

Here's the breakdown - the Usenet is huge, old and compltely unfiltered. This works both for and against it depending on how you look at it. Because it's old and fairly active you've got a pretty large wordlwide community which means there's a lot of great people on there able to answer questions, provide advice and chat with.

On the downside it's huge and unfiltered - there is no moderation. If somebody just decides to reply to every message you post with 'your a dick' there's pretty much nothing you can do about it other than maybe ignore that person. Along with the really good and knowledgable people there you also get a hoarde of assholes that add nothing to the conversations and simply cause problems.

From time to time this erupts into massive flame wars, battles and other ill-will that can last few hundreds of messages over the span of weeks if not months. This can turn a lot of people off as you sometimes have to sift through a lot of this junk on almost a daily basis.

Since there's also no regulation it's really easy for scam artists to thrive. Usually after a few deals get blown they'll get a reputation but it's almost imperitive to do a 'background' search on somebody before you deal with them just in case. The only time i've ever been really ripped off on the internet was over the Usenet. It's easy pickens for people to make a buck or two because the FBI or whoever won't do a whole lot of investigation on somebody scamming somebody out of $500. They're more concerned with bigger fish. There have been a few cases of scammers being prosecuted eventually but in many cases they steal a bunch of money then just dissappear. On the upside there's plenty of refutable people that post some great deals the only problem of course being location.. but for parts it can be a great resource as long as you trust the seller.

Not to paint a horrible picture of the usenet as it's not a bad spot at all. On the upside if you need technical advice or want a place with a lot of activity it is workable. The reason I started this forum wasn't to "replace" the usenet because I don't think that's possible or even a good idea, but simply to offer a place for florida-centric people to post since it's easy for location specific posts to get lost in a place like the Usenet. However keeping the flame wars, bitching and underhanded dealings out of the mix is an upshot of a forum like this one as we can police ourselves.

Personally I still scan the Usenet every day or so. If i have a technical question i'll usually post it here first since we've grown enough in size where you can usually get an answer quickly. However if its something weird I'll still goto the Usenet as your chances of getting an answer are greatest there. You just have to see the advantages (and disadvantages) in both places and know what to expect from each.

[Miracleman]

Rec Games Pinball is just like this group X 10,000.

Both RGP and Forums like this have their ups and downs.

Here we're big fish in a little pond, on RGP we're little fish in a BIG pond.

Any problems are proportional to the population.

The searchable wealth of info on RGP through google groups is priceless.
If you're having a pin problem you can 'search this group' through google and more than likely find a solution before having to post a question.

If you want to ignore someone on rgp and have firefox as your browser you can use something called greasemonkey to block their posts.
I'm sure there are similar things for IEck.

You don't have to post on rgp, you can just read it.

[TheBatman]

"If you want to ignore someone on rgp and have firefox as your browser you can use something called greasemonkey to block their posts."


I use Firefox but have no clue what or where to find greasemonkey?  Where do I look?

[Miracleman]

http://www.penney.org/ggkiller.html

follow directions, do greasemonkey first, then the killfile thang.
it's not 100% perfect, and you'll still see replies to the doink you block, but cuts out most of a person's crap

[sirmatt]

Yeah man, if you need repair info, search the archives or post on RGP and with a little quality to your questions, you will be hand-held through repair problems of just about any kind. It's other purpose is for the purchase of fine reproduction watches, which was my original reason for going there.

[number six]

The google groups search is an awesome utility. You can find just about anything on there if you have the time to sift through it all.