Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Pinball Map - Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023)·video·46m 26s·analyzed·Oct 21, 2023
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.034

TL;DR

Pinball Map founders detail 15-year evolution of community-driven global pinball locator platform.

Summary

Scott Weinstock, Ryan Gratzer, and Beth Poore present the history and architecture of Pinball Map at Pinball Expo 2023, explaining how the crowdsourced pinball machine locator evolved from a 2008 Portland hobby project into a global platform with 97+ regional administrators, 100+ volunteer moderators, and ~8,500 monthly edits. They discuss the philosophy of community-driven data management, open-source development, API partnerships with Stern, MatchPlay, and other tools, and invitation for further community contributions.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Map started in 2008 as a hobby project by Scott Weinstock and Ryan Gratzer who were roommates in Portland, Oregon

    high confidence · Direct statement from Scott and Ryan during presentation; confirmed founding date and location

  • The map has 97 regional administrators managing locations globally with approximately 100 volunteer moderators processing submissions

    high confidence · Scott explicitly states: 'we have 97 of them or so' regions 'And they're still there. And we still have administrators managing them, 100 or so administrators'

  • Since 2008, Pinball Map has had almost 12,000 locations removed, indicating high churn as businesses close or discontinue machines

    high confidence · Scott references stat on slide: 'locations removed, almost 12,000'

  • Pinball Rebel was the dominant pinball locator in 2008, predating Pinside (which launched 2011)

    high confidence · Scott: 'The winner in 2008, the main was Pinball Rebel... Pinside started in 2011'

  • Stern Pinball uses Pinball Map's API for their official machine locator on Stern's website

    high confidence · Ryan: 'That is what Stern uses. If you go to Stern's website, there's a link at the top that says locator... they have another map. And it just directly makes a query to the Pinball Map API'

  • MatchPlay tournaments use Pinball Map's API to automatically populate tournament machine lists without manual entry

    high confidence · Ryan: 'Match play uses it if you want to start a tournament... it will query our database and it can populate all the machines at that location'

  • Only five people total have contributed code to the Pinball Map mobile app, and nine to the website

    high confidence · Scott: 'five people have contributed code, including us, us three, to the app, nine to the website'

  • The platform has gone through three iterations of iOS app development by different volunteer developers (Isaac, Frank Michael, Beth Poore)

Notable Quotes

  • “without updating the map, there's really no map. We're just three schmoes here on the stage.”

    Scott Weinstock@ 4:07 — Core philosophy: community contribution is essential; without user updates the tool is meaningless

  • “we didn't want to go to every bar in Portland to try to find where the pinball machines were... we thought there has to be a better way.”

    Scott Weinstock@ 5:27 — Explains the genuine problem that inspired the founding of Pinball Map

  • “my great-grandfather was part of the birth of the pinball video game age.”

    Award presenter@ 1:23 — Acknowledges significance of Ryan Gratzer's contributions to pinball community infrastructure

  • “We didn't want to start a business though. We just wanted a hobby and we wanted to make a tool.”

    Scott Weinstock@ 22:48 — Clarifies that Pinball Map was never intended as commercial venture; remains community-focused

  • “There was a huge amount of opportunities to tamper with the data, to mass delete things, to anonymously comment with bad words... and it just didn't really happen.”

    Scott Weinstock@ 14:58 — Highlights the integrity and civility of the pinball community

  • “Every color is intentional. It's great.”

    Scott Weinstock@ 16:47 — Recognizes Ryan's design attention to detail

Entities

Scott WeinstockpersonRyan GratzerpersonBeth PoorepersonPinball MapproductStern PinballcompanyMatchPlayproductPinsideproductPinball RebelproductInternet Pinball Database (IPDB)

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball integrates Pinball Map data via API into official locator tool on Stern website, with weekly flag updates for Stern Army locations—deep partnership indicates industry acceptance

    high · Ryan: 'Stern uses [the API]. If you go to Stern's website, there's a link at the top that says locator... they have another map. And it just directly makes a query to the Pinball Map API'

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball Map explicitly rejects commercialization and business model expansion; maintains hobby/community-first approach with Patreon-only funding and no advertisements

    high · Scott: 'We didn't want to start a business though. We just wanted a hobby and we wanted to make a tool... We just want it to be something on the side that was community run'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Map's strategy to lower contribution barriers by accepting contributions through GitHub, contact forms, Discord, and email; team actively mentors first-time code contributors

    high · Beth: 'I remember Scott especially being really helpful in telling me some of the things that I should do to get going to make contributions.'

  • ?

    event_signal: Ryan Gratzer honored with commemorative trading card at Pinball Expo 2023 for foundational contributions to pinball community infrastructure

    high · Award presenter: 'your great-grandfather was part of the birth of the pinball video game age' in reference to Pinball Map's importance to the community

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball community demonstrates strong ethical norms and self-governance: despite being able to anonymously vandalize data, users maintain high integrity; only a couple mass-delete incidents prompted user authentication system

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.139

0:00
Okay. All right. Hey, thanks for coming, everybody. Nervous. It's hard to go after Colin. We're not master storytellers. And Walter Day is in here.
0:25
That's Ryan. Oh, my God. Sorry to do it this way, but this is the best way it works. So all three of you clearly have accomplishments that are worthy of being honored. But Rob picks out individuals at a time and does them in cycles, you know, year after year. So, Ryan, this is your day. You're getting a trading card. Wow. so this this is a personal gift from rob and bridget we've been giving out you know cards and many of the sessions during this weekend and uh you're today's uh honoree and you have this special award to hang on the wall and i personally think these awards you know you're going to hang this on your wall and your great-grandchildren are going to have it hanging on their wall and people are going to come and say, what the heck is this? And they're going to proudly say, my great-grandfather was part of the birth of the pinball video game age. So stand up here so we can get a photograph. Thank you.
1:37
Appreciate it. Thank you. Is he talking to me? No, I wasn't expecting that. And, you know, it's always, it's a group effort, of course. We all work on PimbleMap. I'm sure Rob has plans for you people. Yeah.
2:02
I was the main point of contact, I guess, so there you go. All right. Awesome. All right, that's our time. Thanks, everybody. I don't know why we keep talking. Hope you learned a lot. This is incredible.

high confidence · Ryan: 'we've had three iterations of the iOS app, first made by Isaac... then we had Frank Michael... then Beth came in'

  • Pinball Map operates entirely on donations via Patreon with no advertisements to maintain user experience

    high confidence · Scott: 'We have a Patreon account... we wanted it to be a very clean, non-pop-up-y thing'

  • The Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) is closed-source and does not provide an API, contrasting with Pinball Map's open approach

    high confidence · Ryan: 'The Internet Pinball Database should have an API, IPDB. They don't though. They're very closed off and they don't allow people to pull their data'

    • “We're just kind of managing it. You're all updating it. And with the API that Scott mentioned, you can then pull down the data and use it in a variety of ways.”

    Ryan Gratzer@ 24:18 — Explains democratized data philosophy—community owns the data, not the platform

  • “I remember Scott especially being really helpful in telling me some of the things that I should do to get going to make contributions.”

    Beth Poore@ 36:13 — Demonstrates mentorship culture and accessibility of contributing code to the project

    • product
    OPDBproduct
    Kineticistorganization
    Scorbitproduct
    Pindigoproduct
    Pintipsproduct
    Isaacperson
    Frank Michaelperson
    Andreasperson
    Pinball Expo 2023event
    Colinperson
    Rob Burkeperson

    high · Scott: 'Anybody could just pull up a website and anonymously delete everything. Nobody ever did... a couple did [later]... so we needed to make users so we could then ban you'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Map founders emphasize community integrity: despite massive opportunities for data tampering (anonymous deletion, mass edits), the community did not abuse the system, demonstrating unusual civility

    high · Scott: 'There was a huge amount of opportunities to tamper with the data, to mass delete things, to anonymously comment with bad words... and it just didn't really happen.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Early Pinball Map mobile app versions had friction (manual region switching when traveling) that were resolved through app redesign; ongoing cross-platform device compatibility issues require community feedback to debug

    high · Beth: 'you'd have to go in and manually change your region within the app' in old version; Scott: 'we can't always [recreate issues]... if you're seeing something weird on an Android device, there's a good chance that we're not seeing that'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Map transitioned from regional maps to global unified map around 2018-2019 due to unsustainable demand; shifted from constrained regional approach to open global data model

    high · Scott: 'eventually it just became too many. There was too much demand for people to add locations all over the world that we couldn't stick to the regional plan forever.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Backend architecture evolution: moved from self-contained Perl application to Ruby on Rails framework specifically to enable API development for third-party integrations

    high · Ryan: 'we moved to Ruby on Rails at one point. And the reason we did that is because that framework lends itself really well to APIs.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Mobile app evolution from separate native Android/iOS apps to unified React Native codebase under Beth Poore's direction, reducing development burden and increasing platform consistency

    high · Ryan: 'when we went to React Native, that combined both of our Android and iOS apps into a single app now. So there's just the one code base for our mobile platforms.'

    • 2:17
    Okay. Pretty cool. All right. My daughter took that photo when she was three years old, too, of me. Wow. Okay. All right.
    2:28
    Reset. So thanks for coming to Mapping Around with the Pinball Map. My name is Scott Weinstock from Portland, Oregon, war-torn Portland, Oregon.
    2:42
    And I'm one of the three contributing members of the map. I'm Ryan Gratzer. I started with Scott in 2008. I'm an urban planner and I help with the design and the data management and some of the programming. I'm Beth Poore. I'm from Portland, Oregon as well. I got involved with Pinball Map I suppose around the year 2015 or so, but I've been more involved in the most recent years doing the rewrite of the mobile apps. So that's what I primarily contribute to myself. All right, here we are.
    3:33
    So, oh, yeah, an agenda. Set expectations here. So we're going to walk through the history of the pinball map. It started quite a while ago. it's gone through a few iterations along the way, kind of talk you through our philosophy. There are some things that we decided very early on with the pinball map, what we wanted to accomplish. We stuck with those along the way. And our approach to distributing this information and taking it in from the community because the theme here is going to be without updating the map, there's really no map. We're just three schmoes here on the stage. Maybe we should explain our sassy moves today. That was our production company that we made. Yeah, Ryan and I made a series of skateboarding videos.
    4:24
    And this is actually my cat, Sassy, rest in peace. For those who are, I don't know why you would pay that close attention, but a lot of our cats show up on the various iterations of the maps. Sassy was special. Yeah, so our accomplishments with the production company were skateboard videos and then pinball map. And it's a fake company, of course. It's not anything. Right. Yeah, you'll see more of Sassy. All right, and then we'll have some Q&A if you have any questions for us. So I guess the first question is, how many people in here use the pinball map? That's so weird. Because, so it started in 2008, Ryan and I were roommates. And I actually didn't play pinball at all before I met Ryan. I probably played it here and there, but I was an arcade guy. Donkey Kong and Galaga, that was my game. And then Ryan showed up and he had a Paragon machine. And, you know, who doesn't want a roommate with a Paragon machine? So that went into the basement. Ryan and I are not huge drinkers. We like to party, but we didn't want to go to every bar in Portland to try to find where the pinball machines were. We also didn't have cars, so every destination was a journey, and we thought there has to be a better way. So does anyone have a guess in 2008 what the most popular per peer reviewed statistics pinball locator was? Any guesses? It wasn't us, we didn't exist. Yeah, there it is. Pinside started in 2011. So Pinside did not have a locator in 2008. The winner in 2008, the main was Pinball Rebel. Does anyone know Pinball Rebel website? It's still around actually and but, you know, it was not very user friendly for updating and so we're... It's got the robot with the gun on it though. It was a really good image. I remember that. Okay, so anyway, what the heck is a pinball map? It seems like we know but there's a website And then application, mobile phones application. It's entirely user updated. We source information from the community.
    6:52
    It's totally open source. You can go download it right now. You can send us new features. You can do whatever you want with it within reason. And it's just a hobby project. Like, to be honest, for me, it was a portfolio piece at the time. I was a computer programmer, but I wasn't a very good one. So I decided to get better at it. And what better way than to have a project? So you'll see the layers of the pinball map follow my programming career progression. With Ryan always at the helm the whole way through. If this was a movie, I guess you would be Steve Jobs. and I would be Wozniak and you would be a hotshot programmer who swoops in at the end and saves the whole thing. I don't know any Apple people today. Anyway, that's who we are.
    7:52
    So it was just a hobby the whole way through, and today remains a hobby. You see a lot of people probably know Ryan, just know that this is like a labor of love for this guy. So it's impressive. And maybe it's worth going through some of the stats that are on here. Like, because, you know, one of the goals is to have an up-to-date map where people are always updating it, which sadly means that places get removed from the map when they no longer have machines. And this stat, I think the locations removed, almost 12,000 is testament to that, where since 2008 there's been a lot of places added. and sadly, you know, some businesses close or they just no longer have machines anymore. And while it is sad every time a machine is removed from a place, to us it's also a good thing because it means that people are updating the map and, you know, it demonstrates that people are managing the data and updating it, which is a good sign. Cool. Yeah, it's a great sign. So there's various tools on the site to aid operators. They can, basically it's a database table, an operator, and you can be tagged at a location saying operator Ace Music, or Ace Games is the operator at this site. And the tool is basically that we wanted to make it so that they can quickly update their own sites, so they can search their own locations and bring up all the Ace Games locations and quickly add and remove all the machines to and from them. And we offer other tools, too. They can opt in to getting notifications about comments made on their machines. So once a day, if they opt in to that, they'll get an email saying that someone left a comment saying, you know, the left flipper's broken, and then they can be notified, basically, when things go wrong, based on whatever people are inputting in there. So right now, and we, yeah, yeah, and, you know, we've just built that up over the years of getting more operators on board. They just have to message us if they want on it.
    10:14
    Okay, and I guess the last point here is we don't have ads. We have a Patreon account, because after a while it, you know, it was costing some money, So I appreciate everybody who pitches into that, but we wanted it to be a very clean, non-pop-up-y thing. So the history of this thing. Like I said, Ryan and I were roommates in beautiful Portland, Oregon, hanging out in a basement with laptops and Paragon.
    10:44
    At the time in Portland, there was a map, but it wasn't searchable, and it was kind of updated by just a few folks. So what we did is we, I don't know, we rolled up our sleeves, I guess, and started making a framework to take Google Docs and make them searchable. I think that was the first goal.
    11:08
    From there, we started to get some attention from operators because they were seeing people update machines, and they didn't necessarily agree with the updates. They wanted a little more visibility.
    11:22
    of what was going on at the spots. So we started building tools for them. But the whole time, this was still just Portland. We saw other cities had their own maps We didn want to step on toes Yeah you know there was often leagues in other areas that would maintain their own list of machines Sometimes these would be Google Docs or, you know, whatever. Often not like a robust map that you could search. And that's when they started, people started contacting us and saying, hey, why can't you expand to our area? Right. And I think like, you know, Ryan with his poster here, geez, he can't be everywhere. He's not the United States of everything. So we started building a concept of actual regions so that we could find the Ryans in the other areas, the people who know the locations, they know the machines, they know what looks fishy, just to make sure that there was a little bit of oversight. So we built new regions. I think we started in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, Seattle maybe and Bay Area and Los Angeles also were some of the first ones. But the idea was we wanted to make distinct maps for each area. And it sounds crazy maybe now, like, talking about it like that. Why don't you just make a global map that anyone can edit? But we were really, really fixated on the idea of having high-quality data. and we only wanted to expand to areas where we knew there was an audience of people that were telling us that they were going to administer the data and they had a league or groups that were going to help them maintain the data. So we basically just grew very slowly, region at a time with these distinct areas in order to get people on board in using it. because one of the issues with Pinball Rebel was there were, you know, sites out in South Dakota in the middle of nowhere that someone had updated in 2002 and no one had touched in six years, and the site was filled with that really, really stale data, and we wanted to not do that. And so we had no goals to have a global map or anything. We just wanted to make here's your L.A. map, here's your Seattle map, have fun with it, And, yeah. So then something happened and everyone had cell phones and people weren't necessarily wanting to look at their laptops or, I don't know, desktops before they left the house. So we started building apps. I also wanted to make a career out of making apps, which never happened. So we had a, what is it, Android, Android native app, which means built directly and only for the Android. And then we had an iOS app, which was built directly and only for iOS. If anyone used those early versions, sorry.
    14:27
    That was really hard to keep everything in sync, and that's why Beth needs a card too, because Beth has really turned that whole thing around. But we knew we needed apps, so we pivoted to that. Like Ryan mentioned, well, maybe he didn't mention this. We didn't have users at first. Anybody could just pull up a website and anonymously delete everything. Nobody ever did, but they could have. Yeah, maybe a shout-out to how nice the pinball community is, is that there was not much tampering and a huge amount of opportunities to tamper with the data, to mass delete things, to anonymously comment with bad words, you know, and it just didn't really happen. We had backups. We've never really had to use them.
    15:18
    But we added users because people had preferences after a while and people wanted to put high scores and people wanted to gamify it. Like, oh, I added 10 machines last week. Thank you. We'll get you a card. And there ended up being a couple people that did mass delete. I mean, so the caveat is that a couple did, and then we're like, okay, we need to make users so we could then ban you.
    15:41
    So, okay, this is what Ryan talked about. We eventually became a global map, the thing that you know today. It became too hard to say, like, sorry, Scotland, you can't have a map because you don't have 20 machines. So we just said, you can put your machine there, and we'll come visit. All right, I'm going to go a little quicker through these next ones because it's going faster than I thought. They're sassy again, and you may notice her head is buried deep into the orbit of Paragon. So this is what the site looked like at launch in 2008. Except this is from the Wayback Machine, so the JavaScript isn't loading correctly. My high school girlfriend put together the HTML and the CSS for us as a portfolio piece. She's now a designer at Google, so...
    16:30
    And you see at the bottom the high scores were there. We had an idea, but we weren't quite there yet. So then Ryan, one of Ryan's many superpowers, is he does all the layout and design for the site. And let me tell you, Ryan never stops thinking about this stuff. Every color is intentional.
    16:50
    It's great. So you see it's starting to evolve to include more features, but still is just the Portland pinball man. Yeah, and I'm not a designer. so that's probably very apparent when you look at some of this too. Maybe not by trade, but I would argue you are a designer. You've got a card now. False modesty can disappear. No, but you'll see in a moment that there was wild decisions over the years. This is a colorful one. I like this one.
    17:18
    It's got some earth tones are starting to come in, and you see the pastels, I suppose, and the different regions are here now. Yeah, so back in the day, the landing page was essentially these regions. And then you click into a region that's near you. And we had to make these little graphics and all that stuff for every region we added. And I think now we have 97 of them or so. And they're still there. And we still have administrators managing them, 100 or so administrators that are behind the scenes helping moderate submissions that come in, essentially, because people make lots of mistakes, and those include submitting duplicate locations. There just has to be a filter between non-administrators and what everyone sees on the site. And then for every new location, there is human intervention at some point to confirm that the new location is accurate and exists and is also a public location that people can come to. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's another thing. We're only listing public locations, public venues. That is a somewhat hard to define metric, I think, because places sometimes have entry fees. Sometimes places are clubs to some degree, but if they're an exclusive club that can turn down applicants, then that probably isn't public. But if it's a club that will let anyone join, then that is public. So it takes a lot of work to figure out what counts as public. People generally, in our opinion, don't want a big map showing places they can't go to.
    19:07
    So that's why we try to stick to the public venues. This is the Wild Years. Lots of people. Our house that we shared was really close to this bar. and this bar is the only place I've ever been to where I got free drinks because we went there so much.
    19:25
    Then they knew us, but I have no memory of playing any of those games. Maybe this is it. Exactly. What are we seeing here, Ryan? Just more of the same, just showing that you can, you know, just showing the evolution of the design essentially over the years. And we don't go to now. We're just showing kind of the past to see what it looked like. trying crazy fonts. Everyone loves crazy fonts that you can barely read. Wow. Yeah, that was maybe a couple months. Then I was like, eh. Lower left, you see another cat, Solomon. Yeah, that was my cat, Solomon. Rest in peace.
    20:04
    Oh, and then here's the first attempt at mobile apps. Again, apologies for anyone who used these things. And Beth, do you want to talk about what was problematic to some degree about this mobile app scheme? I'm right here, Beth.
    20:21
    Sure, I'll tell you what was wrong with it. Personally for myself, when I started using the app, I started getting into pinball myself not until closer to 2013 or so, and at that time I was traveling between Portland and Seattle a lot. So back then in the mobile app, you'd have to realize that you've left your current region and change your region in order to actually access the locations for where you currently were. So the app was still one of my favorite apps, absolutely, and this is what drew me into contributing in the first place because it was an excellent app, but that step where if you left your current location or wanted to look at what machines were in another state, you'd have to go in and manually change your region within the app. So that was just like an extra step that we don't have anymore. Yeah, it's a point of friction to have these regions and have things constrained to different regions. And eventually it just became too many. There was too much demand for people to add locations all over the world that we couldn't stick to the regional plan forever. And so that brings us to like 2018 or something like that maybe. Is that when you started, 2019? I think we released the new version in 2019 and we started building it in 2018. Yeah, but then prior to that you made the the regionless map that just has everything all together. Oh, did I do that? Yeah.
    21:54
    It's all a blur. I mean for those who care, like the whole thing started as a big Perl application, which is very self-contained. There was no way of getting at the data in the database. It was Perl, which I still think is a pretty decent language. But we moved to Ruby on Rails at one point. And the reason we did that is because that framework lends itself really well to APIs. And we knew that if we were going to build mobile apps, we needed a way for those mobile apps to get at the core database instead of, like, shipping everything off every time it loaded, which is just silly. So that kind of feeds into, like, the general philosophy of what it is we're doing here. Yeah, and one thing that Expo is a good example of is how businesses related to pinball are thriving right now. There's so many niche businesses and then so many manufacturers right now. And we didn't want to start a business though. We just wanted a hobby and we wanted to make a tool. And so we, you know, I guess I could maybe say that we're just not entrepreneurs maybe. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah we not entrepreneurs We don want a business We don want to quit our jobs and just do this and pursue it and sell ads or something We just want it to be something on the side that was community run
    23:20
    And so we focused on open source software, and it's been on GitHub, which is a site where the code is posted since 2010. Anyone can, like Scott said, create a development environment, pull down the code, run it locally. make a modification. You could change a color. You could change a pink to a blue and submit that back to us if you wanted to change that color and have everyone see that. It's, you know, there's power like that in your hands. And we thought that was a fun way to run all this. We also feel a great amount of debt to all of you who edit the site. And we thought it would be unfair to monetize based on all the work that you all have done. And we'd rather have you all consider the data to be yours as well as ours. We're just kind of managing it. You're all updating it. And with the API that Scott mentioned, you can then pull down the data and use it in a variety of ways that are not via our website or not via our app. You could make your own tools. On that point, then, I thought it would be interesting to share who uses our API because it is used by a lot of folks. And here's an example if no one knows really what an API is. And it's just essentially someone making a query. In this case, you could make that query, it's a URL basically where you're saying, And I'll do a brief walkthrough of what's happening in that example.
    25:04
    That is what Stern uses. If you go to Stern's website, there's a link at the top that says locator. I'm not talking about the insider-connected one. They have another map. And it just directly makes a query to the Pinball Map API and then spits out results every time someone loads that. And that is them saying, well, first when you load the site, we have a flag that is all Stern Army locations. So when you load the locator, there's pins already on a map, and that is another flag we have that we communicate with Stern. Every week they tell us, hey, add this site as a Stern Army one, and it's just a little button we click, and it's tagged as Stern Army, and it shows up on their locator.
    25:49
    Then when someone wants to make a query on that Stern locator site, They basically put in a zip code or a city, which is what you see at the end there, address Chicago. So this is doing just a radius search around the geolocation of Chicago or the distance of 50 miles. It includes all locations that have at least one Stern machine, manufacturer Stern. No details equals one means it just kind of filters out some of the data that they might not need in that request, such as like machine comments and stuff, so it's a quicker request. That's it. So that's and then the background right there is essentially what the request looks like when it comes in. And they just grab those keys in the JSON output and show it on their own website. And so it's a free thing that we just allow anyone to do. You don't need an API key to do it. And others use it too. Match play uses it if you want to start a tournament. You can say what location your tournament is at and it will query our database and it can populate all the machines at that location and so you don't have to manually put in, okay, this tournament is going to have these 12 machines. It just uses our data. And others, Scorbit, Pindigo, Pintips, Kineticist, as we saw, uses it. And that's a really good example of someone who pulls the data and, you know, adds to it and augments what we have. And, you know, we don't want to say this is the only way to access it. It's through our site with only these images and only this description. People can build upon it. And similarly, the Pinball Map app is just an app that anyone can make that just accesses our API. There's no vessel magic going behind the scenes or anything. So anyone could have made that, but we happen to be the ones that made it. And I thought it would be interesting to look at and anyone here could probably chime in too because we might be missing something but, you know, are there any other sites that are tools, pinball-related tools that are open source? The only one we could think of was the IFPA companion app, which pulls down data using the IFPA's API and makes, you know, a new interface where you can interact and track your IFPA scores. You know, it augments the interface from the IFPA website. And, you know, there's a lot of, there's other tools that are not open source, but they do have an accessible API, which is wonderful. It means that other people can use that data, such as we saw in the last presentation from Kinetisist, OPDB, which is essentially, I would say this helps answer the question of who should have an API. And I will say the The Internet Pinball Database should have an API, IPDB. They don't though. They're very closed off and they don't allow people to pull their data. They have, they're a tremendous resource but you have to access it only on their site and no one else can tap into that list of machines and use it on theirs. So as a counter to that, Andreas who makes MatchPlay they created OPDB and we help manage that data. And it's a big list of machines that SCORBIT and Kinetasys and Pindigo, I think, and others and us use where we're all speaking the same language of what machines, what the proper name of the machine is, what the year and manufacturer are and all that stuff. And we could, you know, cross-communicate with each other because we're using a shared ID for that machine and it's something that, you know, IPDB probably should have done. But I think we had maybe like questions throughout that we haven't been asking too. I think that's okay. Yeah. You're doing great. That's you. Okay. Well, here's a question then. Has anyone here contributed code to Pinball Map? All right. Ben? Yeah. Okay. So not a lot of people, so I could just make a guess very quickly. And so, you know, five people have contributed code, including us, us three, to the app, nine to the website, which, you know, it's helpful that we, I think, provide access to it, but there's barriers to that, which Beth will get into in a minute. But as Scott alluded to when he said that it's a, you know, was something of an example app, what is it, a portfolio piece, is that that's what happens sometimes too is, like, we had students that want to make a little student project for the end. That's honestly most of the people that use and contribute back to it is, you know, they get credits at their school if they say they issued a pull request or something like that to an open source app. I think it's a fun way to learn programming. That's how I initially got involved, yeah. Yeah, and so we've had three iterations of the iOS app, first made by Isaac, who did Brac-a-Lope also for tournaments. I don't know if people know that. He just stepped up and did it. And then we had Frank Michael come in, just step up and did it. And then Beth came in and said, you know what? We need a React Native app. And she came in and stepped up and did it. Did I say we need a React Native app? Yeah, you said you guys are doing it wrong.
    32:13
    I think I recall volunteering to take on one platform. It was going to be iOS, Android, or React Native, with a heavy preference for React Native.
    32:26
    So yeah, when we went to React Native, that combined both of our Android and iOS apps into a single app now. So there's just the one code base for our mobile platforms. So that's been a nice change for folks. If you want to get involved, your updates would be applied to all mobile devices that are using the app.
    32:51
    So now I'm just going to walk through some of the different ways that you can contribute to Pinball Map if you're interested.
    33:00
    First and foremost, it's really the edits that you all make to the map on a daily, weekly basis. That is really important, and it's what keeps us alive and is the greatest contribution that anyone can honestly be doing at this point. But if you want to get even more involved, we have different ways of you being able to reach out to us to either come up with feature ideas or letting us know if you think something's wrong with the app, reporting a bug or anything. So I think we brought up GitHub before, but if you go to github.com, you're welcome to at any time file an issue. And an issue could be a feature request or letting us know about a bug or just anything that you'd like to see changed within the app.
    33:51
    Yeah, people complain to us a lot about issues and stuff, and it's more helpful to put that on GitHub where we can track it and resolve it and have more of a proper answer to that stuff. but you know that's another barrier to entry of creating a github account it's easier just to contact us and say what you want yeah so like other ways to to contact us uh like it if you if there's a data issue that isn't able to be updated yourself in the app or just if you see anything funky there's um there's a contact us section both in in the app and on the website We're regularly checking those boxes. So if there's anything that you see or would like to provide feedback for, we'd love to hear from you there. And then there's also the Pinball People Discord, where folks that are using the app, Ryan will jump in there and often ask for feedback from folks so you welcome to join that channel and get involved in there as well Yeah and there a link to that on the Pinball Map homepage And it just very helpful Like how many Android users are having this issue And then three people respond in five minutes. And so it's really a cool tool to interact with. I'm the only one on there of us three, but... Well, we often struggle to recreate issues because like... Yeah. It's really nice that all of our mobile code is in one place now, but it's also like we're serving several different types of devices. So we can't always, like, if you're seeing something weird on an Android device, there's a good chance that we're not seeing that. Because we all typically use iPhones, for instance. And so just letting us know if you see something weird, it goes a long way so that we can fix it and continue to make that better. I think we only have like eight minutes. We should do Q&A. But maybe we should go faster. Oh, yeah. I think this was our last main slide. And just in general, if you would like to go even And a step further, also on GitHub, if you would ever like to submit any code, actual code, you're welcome to open a pull request. That's just how we would end up integrating any code that you would actually like to have be to be integrated into the app. And there are, like Ryan alluded to earlier, there are some barriers to entry there. But also, we're very happy to help. So please reach out to us. I joined as a contributor when I was a student, and I remember Scott especially being really helpful in telling me some of the things that I should do to get going to make contributions. And that meant a lot to me, and it helped me get going. And same to anyone here. If you'd like to ever have any code pushed into the app, just talk to us. We'd love to work with you.
    36:38
    SCOTT FRIENDLY- Thank you. Yeah. No, we weren't in 2006, no. No, but... Yeah. Uh-huh.
    37:39
    Did you have any other points of reference besides the football record? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't know. It was so long ago. I mean, we really just didn't want to go everywhere on our bikes. And again, we were just focused on Portland at the beginning. We were just saying, okay, we're just going to help us, and we had no grand plans or anything. Also, at that point, against pinball, and we were probably at parity for the amount of substantive discussion. So you could have seen things and ideas from either one. Do you remember any of that? What was it you were thinking?
    38:15
    I don't know. I think we were more focused just on Portland and making something that was really easy. Like we were seeing a lot of clunky interfaces, essentially, that were hard, and we wanted to make it something you could search for. Search a machine and see where all those machines are.
    38:33
    Search. We had zones so you could search a neighborhood in a city and pull up all the machines in that area. And so we wanted to keep it quite simple, real simple interface, so someone hopefully could just, with a few clicks, get everything they want. But then, you know, just help the community in Portland, basically. I think for my money, too, a lot of things come and go. Like, it's easy to have the idea and put it together. but we were focused on longevity, and part of how we did that was this thing is tested from the ground up. So we are confident we can keep making changes and not have to worry that we're breaking something. It just makes it easier to hop in and add stuff, whereas I think if it was a chore or if it was overly complicated, we would have just moved on a long time ago, like Ryan never moved on.
    39:24
    I have a question, but I'm going to preface with a story. Okay. L.J. Green. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we didn't.
    40:07
    Yeah, that was very generous and a very cool surprise to get his prize money donated straight to us. And he's a contributor and submits locations to Pinball Map and stuff. And over the years, we did mention that. In addition to being a free site, We tried to keep our costs low or nothing for a number of years. And then after a while, because it kept growing and growing and growing, we would have to kind of beef up the infrastructure behind it. And then we got, a couple years ago, Patreon. And that's the kind of main way I think we have Patreon supporters that help us pay for all the infrastructure costs. And I will note that it more than pays for the infrastructure costs. So we're fine. Yeah, we're doing okay. We had to keep it as scrappy as possible for a long time, so it's kind of baked into the culture. Yeah. If you want to donate, it's helpful, but again. Honestly, I feel like buying a T-shirt is maybe a better way because sometimes people don't even know. No. I don't think we do. I think we're out of T-shirts. We do have some, and I got sick of shipping them, so I just took the store down. Yeah, I guess we should do that. I do have stickers. Everyone here can have stickers.
    41:29
    Lots of stickers. I brought a whole stack. Any other questions? We've got like a minute and a half. Well, man. You do it.
    41:38
    One of the things I've been talking to people, and they said, oh, I was in such and such a city last weekend. And I said, oh, did you go to the football show? And they went, what football show? And I said, oh, well, I think that was on football max. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question. The seasonal locations will sometimes keep on the map year-round and will have a location description that just says, you know, it's closed in the winter, don't go here.
    42:20
    Because that saves us time to have to remove and add it again or someone else submit it. It is, you know, if somebody did want to submit Pinball Expo or something, they could potentially. We could put it up and then remove it a few days later.
    42:38
    Yeah, there's a burden right there of listing those. If the event has an IFPA-sanctioned tournament in the app, if you go to the event section, it will show the event. so that may not call it out as loudly as maybe we would like to expect. But if there is an IFPA tournament, it is discoverable in the app by going to events. Yeah, it pulls down that information.
    43:04
    Question in the back? You. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes things are, you know, decisions are made based on demand for them sometimes, and, you know, that has come up. Yeah, that's something of a load. It comes up, and we're like, man, we wish we could do it. But then that's where sometimes we default to pull requests welcome. You can add that feature if you'd like to, but we could put it on our list and it might not always be at the top of the list. But, you know, we opted to have operator at the location level, not at the individual machine level in order to kind of simplify, you know, people's, you know, what they have to click and how many stuff they have to click or something like that. But there's, you know, it could be down the road if we figure out a good design solution. Yeah, we limit some fields, you know, and that's from experience over the years we've found that users tend to make mistakes with some things. That's why, you know, auto-completing address information as you submit is a good addition because that people would type things all the time if they are having to submit every, like, here's the address, here's the state, here's the zip. It would come in as a messy format. So now we use the Google Places API to kind of auto-fill that information. If it's wrong, then the answer is just to contact us and an administrator will edit that information because it, you know, you have to regenerate the latitude longitude so the pin shows up in the correct location.
    45:32
    So, yeah, just tell us. And also interesting, stats wise, I mean, we get, I've probably had, we've probably had like 20 locations submitted in the last two days since this event started. It just is like nonstop that people are all day, every day, sending us locations around the world.
    45:54
    And it's just interesting. People might not know how often they're coming in. That's why we're happy to have Kineticist articles where we can highlight the top, you know, the most interesting ones that come in every month. And that's out of, we're highlighting eight locations out of like 200 that come in every month there.
    46:15
    Yep, we're done. Thanks, everybody.