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Website Update - User System

March 6, 2017 [news]

Big Update: Pinball Map User System

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve added a user system to the site! This is something we’ve talked about implementing since very early on. And after nine years of chatting and over a year of developing, we’ve finally done it!

Now you can track your map contributions! Usernames are automatically attached to comments, high scores, and the like. Basically, if you edit a location, the location detail will note, in some form, that you made that edit. There are other little things, too: like, if you contact your regional admin you won’t have to input your name/email.

You can see an overview of your contributions on your Profile page. The Profile page displays:

profile image

In the future, we’ll add more user-based features. But we think this is a great start. We’ve started a list of future ideas here. Some ideas include a points system, favoriting locations, and rankings of each region’s top contributors. If you have ideas, please leave them on that page, or comment here.

With this user system, the site/app is read-only for non-logged in users. When you log in, you can then add/remove machines to/from locations, leave comments, leave high scores, submit locations, etc.

To create an account, go here.

We hope you like it!!

The update for the Android and iOS apps will come out this weekend Thanks for your patience.

How the user system benefits our admins

In the past we had very little control over abusive behavior. This was by design: 1) the site is designed to be very simple, with very few hurdles to jump; 2) we knew that people who love pinball are generally really NICE! Being nice, and given that the site exists as a helpful tool, we were hopeful that people wouldn’t mess with the data. By and large, this has been very true. We put a lot of power in your hands, and in the 9 years we’ve been doing this there has been just a handful of abuse. But when it does happen, we have very little control over it. So, with this new system each action is tied to a user that we can contact or ban.

Another first for us: we added a donate page. We don’t have ads on the site, and the apps are free. In the past there were low costs to operate everything. But those costs have risen as the site has grown. So, rather than include ads to help us pay the infrastructure costs, we’re soliciting donations.

Here are the costs, and thus our annual donation goals:

To donate, visit our Donate page. Thank you!!!

Update Overview

We began working on this update over a year ago. During this process we knocked out lots of bugs, tweaked things, added new features, and redesigned the entire website. On the website alone (e.g. not including the android and iOS apps) we committed code more than 450 times! So, what follows is a brief overview of the updates that we’ve unleashed this week. We might be forgetting some things.

If you find a bug or something, please let us know!

Website Changes

For a more nerdly look at the code, you can see all the issues we’ve recently closed.

This is a big update, though we tried to keep this post pretty simple. If you want any more details about any of this, leave a comment!

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Website Update - User System - March 6, 2017 - Pinball Map