I got a nastygram from someone who appears to be from Thingiverse asking me to remove one of my CNC designs. Message:
Dear jeffeb3, We have received reports indicating that some of your Things are misleading our visitors by not being uploaded as 3D printable files. We kindly request that you: Remove or edit any misleading images and models from your account. Failure to address this issue within 48 hours may result in account deletion, as per our Terms of Service, but we want to give you a chance to correct it because we really like your content. You are not the only designer who decided to set up their things like this. In case you haven’t noticed, we have been actively improving Thingiverse over the last few months and would love to see your models show up again. If you want to see what the development team has been improving on Thingiverse you can check our changelog here, and if you have any requests on what to improve on Thingiverse to make you feel more welcome, you can let me know and I’ll forward your request to the team. Hopefully, it’s within our power to resolve this.
Feel free to reply to this message for assistance or clarification. We appreciate your work within our 3D printing community and hope to resolve this issue promptly. Best regards, Chris
It has the dxf files for one of my project. It isn’t a terribly popular project. But it bothers me for a few reasons:
What is wrong with CNC projects on TV? I suppose it is within their right to choose what content they want. But it is off putting to me.
How is that misleading?
How do I know this came from a TV admin? It came through the DM system. The user that sent it has a T over their avatar, but I don’t see any title lile Thingiverse Admin.
I was wondering if maybe they “received reports” from grouchy users and might trigger a notice, but this looks unlikely because these are the reasons available, plus a threat of ban from bad faith reports:
More likely, they have a script that scans for absence of stl files and that triggers a notice. Maybe there are spammers that advertise by just uploading jpegs or something and links to another site.
Specifically this:
That suggests to me a pattern where people are posting links and hosting elsewhere. Maybe not even spammers, but people who are not sharing the models “correctly”.
I would say reply to their message and see what they say. With new ownership I am guessing they are trying to do the right thing and swept up some false positives by mistake.
On this same note, I kinda stopped paying any attention to thingiverse, turns out their traffic is an order of magnitude higher than both printables and thangs (I don’t even have a thangs account should do that now). I don’t rember who but a there was a twitter post about it, blew my mind.
I think the proof of that is in the user stats (which some would say are not accurate). Traffic may be higher, but how are your downloads compared to the other sites? One of my friends who is a long time TV user reckons he gets thousands of downloads for every model - given that he never has a “make” or comment logged I just don’t see how those download stats are believable. (Traffic and downloads are different things IMHO)
I made a decision at the beginning to run with one site only as I don’t monetise anything and don’t want to duplicate or triplicate what through my choice, is a lot of work, but if I were doing this commercially I’d certainly run with them all.
There really are!
Is there a repositry anywhere to share laser or cnc projects?
When I actually go searching for things, thingiverse is still one of my stops. But the results are usually much older, and worse “production value”. Printables seems to get fewer results, but there are still more usable models in the results than thingiverse.
I can imagine people just not knowing about printables. But I can’t imagine anyone preferring that once they have seen any of the competitors.
My guess is that it is like the spokes of a wheel. Thingiverse is the middle, and thangs and printables and myminifactory are all spokes. Different communities of users hang out on one of the spokes, and everyone hangs out at TV. Or maybe TV lies in their traffic counts. IDK.
Or counts bots as traffic? I can’t imagine a deliberate lie what would be the point?
I think you’ve summed it up nicely, I rarely visit TV any more, but I rarely look for stuff either, which is a shame because I do waste a bit of time modelling things that are already there!
Hello Jeffeb3,
I discussed the situation with the team and they told me that people are allowed to have CNC designs. Apologies for the inconvenience. I wish you to have a great summer!
I politely pushed back a little, and they changed their mind.
I think they probably did have some automatic search for things without stls and my CNC design got caught up in it. Problem solved.
