ballsofsteel.net retiring
Many moons ago, someone started an FTP site which hosted various pictures of pinball parts. Most were in TIFF format, and the site was dog slow, and of course, being FTP, offered no thumbnails. Since files weren’t always named well, it was a nightmare trying to figure out if they had what you wanted.
8 years ago, that person announced that they were going to stop offering the FTP site. I jumped in, registered ballsofsteel.net and convinced them to allow me to host the archive. I offered all the things the original site didn’t; easy adding of new content, thumbnails, browsing, and fast speeds.
About 3 years ago, I started getting emails from someone in Australia named Wayne Gillard, or presumably, anyhow. This person claimed that I was violating his copyrights, and that I must remove all content that was in violation. Of course, no matter how many times I asked, I was never provided with a list of which material he considered to be infringing. Such is the way of the internet, I suppose.
Last Friday, GoDaddy null routed my domain based on a complain from this same person. It seems that GoDaddy is very quick to act on a copyright claim, but very slow to correct the action after the fact. It’s been 4 days, and they inform me that my site will be restored in a minimum of 10 days.
So I’ve been asking myself, what is it that I get out of this site? I provide a service which the pinball restoration community seems to appreciate, for sure. But that’s about it. I don’t earn any money from the site, and in fact, it costs me several hundred dollars a year to operate, not counting my time. Utilization has been dropping, and downloads of the art (i.e. non-window shoppers) is at an all-time low. It seems with the increasing availability of actual parts, the demand to make home-made parts has dropped sharply. I don’t know anyone who prefers to make their own parts, when professionally manufactured parts are available.
As such, I’ve decided to shut down ballsofsteel.net. I’ll probably reuse the domain for something new and different, and unrelated to pinball. If you have any ideas, feel free to let me know.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.