Show HN: Pinball Map – user-updated map of public pinball machines
HN suggested I repost this, since last time it didn’t get much attention (cool feature!).<p>Here is the description I wrote last time:<p>Hi, Pinball Map is a hobby project we've been doing in our spare time for the past 10 years. It's currently listing 7,291 locations and 24,918 machines. Code is on github[1][2], and we have an API that is used by various folks.<p>Web Stack = ruby on rails, heroku, tile server on aws. App = React Native (launched the redeveloped app last June).<p>We took a relatively slow-growth approach for the first 9 years: we added "regions" one at a time for places where people demonstrated a strong desire to update the data, and a volunteeer administrator could oversee it (in fact, we originally intended for this to just be a map of pinball machines in Portland, Oregon, but people kept asking us to expand to their areas). This gave us a pretty strong userbase and a reputation for having clean, up-to-date data. Each regional map was a distinct, silo'd map. Lately we've de-emphasized this model in favor of a single map that covers the whole world.<p>For the first 7 years, all map updates were made anonymously. But after two instances of abuse, we implemented a user system. We now have about 9,000 registered users. The map gets around 3,000-5,000 edits per month, including 100-200 new locations.<p>Search experience on the web could use some updating. The app is where it's at right now. We spent the past 14 months on its design/development, and we think it came out well. Throughout the 10 years, the majority of our users use the app rather than the website (but we don't have great analytics).<p>We have no ads, no analytics aside from the free new relic stuff that comes with heroku, and no business model.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/scottwainstock/pbm/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scottwainstock/pbm/</a> [2] <a href="https://github.com/bpoore/pbm-react" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bpoore/pbm-react</a>