
Show HN: Pinball Map – user-updated map of public pinball machines - ryantgtg
https://pinballmap.com/
======
ryantgtg
Hi, Pinball Map is a hobby project we've been doing in our spare time for the
past 10 years. It's currently listing 6,725 locations and 22,704 machines.
Code is on github[1][2], and we have an API that is used by various folks.

Web Stack = ruby on rails, heroku, tile server on aws. App = React Native
(launched the redeveloped app last June)

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.

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 8,600
registered users. The map gets around 3,000-5,000 edits per month, including
100-200 new locations.

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).

[1]
[https://github.com/scottwainstock/pbm/](https://github.com/scottwainstock/pbm/)
[2] [https://github.com/bpoore/pbm-react](https://github.com/bpoore/pbm-react)

