Most people will probably have already heard it, if not they've probably noticed it by now: most of the game-specific repair guides that were at www.pinrepair.com are gone.
A new site has been launched to replace its role: www.pinwiki.com
Feel free to contribute to articles if you have specific information to contribute..
I intend to finish some technical/basics articles that I started a while ago for my site. Up to now I focused on the basic things and never wrote anything more technical/documenting specific repairs and troubleshooting, as everything you had to know was available on pinrepair. That will change now.
I'll also document more repairs I do to my own games - sort of like the pinballninja blog was, as that blog is also gone.
Just don't expect me to document 500 repairs a year.. :-)
Readers of this blog that do interesting repairs may also submit them to me so I can add them..
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wow. That's a terrific idea. Although, as far as I can tell pinrepair.com is still intact. I have thought a couple of times that even I could add some info on a couple of unique issues I have ran into and how I repaired it.
ReplyDeleteI guess the announcement was made on RGP? There is too much volume for me to keep up with there, so I stopped trying a while back.
Please don't comment with links to illegal mirror sites of the pinrepair site.
ReplyDeleteI know they are out there. There's a torrent with the repairguides and pinballninja blog, some people posted zip's with word and pdf files, and there are at least 5 sites with an illegal copy of the site online.
If people really need the repair info and didn't save a local copy, they can search for them themselves. I will not link to them.
My view: although the repair information (the facts on how to repair something) is public domain, the whole repair guide itself is copyrighted by Clay. He wrote it, (most of it) are his words, he put a lot of time and effort compiling all the material.
It clearly says copyright Clay Harrall on top of every page - something which all of these sites just copy too..
Respect his time end effort he put into the guides for so many years.
So like it or not that the guides are not online anymore - it is not your content, it's not your right to host them online yourself.
If you want to contribute to the pinball repair world - take a part of Clays guide, re-write it in your own words, re-order the information (not everything is optimally structured), try to improve it, .. and add that to the pinwiki site.
I know some people don't like Clay for what he did. If that's your opinion, then at least be consistent and don't put a mirror of his site online. Promote and help the pinwiki.com site, so we can all forget about pinrepair.com
One of the reason why the guides are taken down was because people who contributed to the guides didn't get credit for their contributions. By putting illegal mirrors online and promoting them, you are also violating the rights of these people who contributed - and as those sites are hosted anonymous, these people can't complain to anyone.
So - just try to forget and ignore pinrepair.com. Pinwiki.com is here now to stay (and another site is also under development), use your time and effort to promote and help this new site.