During the last years of Thingiverse with all its problems and changes I stood by and said "well, it is a free service, what do you expect?".
Then they took the old site with its problems, crashed a significant portion of the working bits that were left and stuffed in ads instead. I said to myself "well, they need to pay the servers and the jerk who f*cked up the new design may have a family to feed, so...".
But today I'd finally like to speak up. During the last months, they almost completely stopped curating anything. And even without that, some designs stood out so significantly that they entered the front page just by being so incredibly popular. One of those designs, that popped up front regularly in the last months was the Sliding Legolini, a repeating crossbow and an ingenious design that not only is fun to make but also to use! It actually got quite a bit of coverage, even beyond the 3D printing community.
The Legolini has been online on thingiverse for months and the creator never got any notice that it could be a problem. But this week it has been deleted from thingiverse without even one prior warning to the creator, so that he could maybe move his work off-site.
Hey Thingiverse, such a way of handling users is a really, really BAD THING[tm].
Why should I keep taking the time and effort to publish my work here if I can never be sure it will still be there next day? Do you really think after all those f*ckups in coding and design, the ad plastering and the slomo site response you still have the standing that you had and can afford treating not only the community but your most creative users like that?
After all these years of shrugging, this is the point at which I seriously have begun to look for alternatives. Sorry. Enough. Is. Enough.
UPDATE: The Sliding Legolini does now live on its own website, thanks to jaaanik. :-)
During the last years of Thingiverse with all its problems and changes I stood by and said "well, it is a free service, what do you expect?".
Then they took the old site with its problems, crashed a significant portion of the working bits that were left and stuffed in ads instead. I said to myself "well, they need to pay the servers and the jerk who f*cked up the new design may have a family to feed, so...".
But today I'd finally like to speak up. During the last months, they almost completely stopped curating anything. And even without that, some designs stood out so significantly that they entered the front page just by being so incredibly popular. One of those designs, that popped up front regularly in the last months was the Sliding Legolini, a repeating crossbow and an ingenious design that not only is fun to make but also to use! It actually got quite a bit of coverage, even beyond the 3D printing community.
The Legolini has been online on thingiverse for months and the creator never got any notice that it could be a problem. But this week it has been deleted from thingiverse without even one prior warning to the creator, so that he could maybe move his work off-site.
Hey Thingiverse, such a way of handling users is a really, really BAD THING[tm].
Why should I keep taking the time and effort to publish my work here if I can never be sure it will still be there next day? Do you really think after all those f*ckups in coding and design, the ad plastering and the slomo site response you still have the standing that you had and can afford treating not only the community but your most creative users like that?
After all these years of shrugging, this is the point at which I seriously have begun to look for alternatives. Sorry. Enough. Is. Enough.
UPDATE: The Sliding Legolini does now live on its own website, thanks to jaaanik. :-)