(Topic ID: 152849)

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Three..

By LaughingOtter

8 years ago



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    #1 8 years ago

    Hey!

    Just wanted to let you guys know that I've sorted through the locations in Washington (306 locations), Oregon (209 locations), and California (610 locations). Getting the hang of sorting things out on the Google side.
    Illinois and New York are next. That should take most of the next week.

    #2 8 years ago

    The Illinois scan 269 locations) is completed. Next up is New York (272 locations), and then Wisconsin (310 locations) and Ontario in Canada (291 locations)!

    #3 8 years ago

    I don't quite follow what this project is that you're undertaking. Could you elaborate on what this is?

    #4 8 years ago

    This is what he's working on. Will be nice when complete.

    https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/you-dudes-are-gonna-love-whats-coming-up

    #5 8 years ago

    Really cool. Thanks LaughingOtter for doing this !

    1 week later
    #6 8 years ago

    Not a problem! This is the kind of database work I've done for other companies. Might as well share my skills, since I'm still learning to be a decent pinball tech!

    Again, being limited to 100 place searches/day will mean it'll be a couple of months before about 95% of all listed locations will have been confirmed, except for some places located where Google hasn't reached yet, like in parts of Israel.

    Good news: I've sorted out a pretty good way to weed out potential duplicates before they get registered. Would you dudes be put out if, after you've entered a location, a screen comes up saying the place you've put in is very close (under 100m/300ft) to an existing location or matches a location already entered, and to choose one if this is the case?
    I've come across at least a dozen cases where both the current location name and what the place used to be called were both listed here. If this happens I usually put a note (and any previous user notes) in the current location and delete the older one, but I could see where having an 'alias' table to keep track of names once known (and what current record it maps to) might be useful. This new functionality would catch duplicates, enable location name updates, or possibly even catch when a location has moved to a different location.
    Sometimes this catch would be wrong in the guessing (if there's more than one location in a certain area, like three Chuck E. Cheese places in the general NYC area) but would still make a good attempt.

    Am I on the right track here?

    Halfway through Wisconsin's listings now. Ontario, Canada (291 locations), Pennsylvania, USA (238 locations), and Michigan, USA (229 locations) are next up!

    1 week later
    #7 8 years ago

    OK. Ontario in Canada (291 locations), Pennsylvania (238 locations), Colorado (179 locations) and Florida (207 locations) are done. British Columbia (126 locations) and Michigan (229 locations) are next. I apologize for Michigan being done out of sequence. I don't know how it got passed over.

    States will be getting done a lot quicker now that I'm down to states with less than 200 total Pinside references. I'm averaging about 90 location responses a day (and about five to ten of every batch done need redoing since they matched the wrong address or location).

    I'll be posting up a status report page pretty soon so anyone interested can see the progress of the Google verification process.

    If anyone wants a particular state being verified ahead of the most-locations order, please let me know.

    On the heels of this is the duplicate location match attempt. You enter a location, you may well see a page asking you if the location you're entering is one that already exists or is a known location within five miles of where the Pinside algorithm places the geo-marker. It may well be that the location you're entering is one listed under another name. I've redone a couple of dozen of these already.

    Let me know if there's anything you guys can think of that I can add to ensure our location entry section is as accurate as it can possibly be. We'd be the only ones doing this particular kind of verification, I can tell you. Pinball Map, PinballRebel, Pinformer, FindAPinball, PLDB, SkillShot, PinballNYC, PinballJAX, Flipperliste.at (Austria) and the Colorado Pinball Directory don't use this technology yet.

    More to follow!

    1 week later
    #8 8 years ago

    http://bookcity.net/pinside/pinsideGoogleRpt-1458277372.html
    New status report page gets generated whenever I regenerate the SQL for Pinside location statuses.

    Île-de-France is proving to be extremely difficult. One in three addresses is wrong either because the location moved elsewhere or was incorrectly entered. Many of these locations were entered in 2011-2012. One in five doesn't have anything on the Web to say it even existed. So a number of locations will be dropping out of France soon.
    If I can find a location with the same name but different location (within the same city or so) I will change the address to the new one. If I can't find any reasonable reference at all I'm just going to mark it as closed. We're going to introduce a new status code to indicate that a location has moved and someone should find out if the games moved with them.

    After I fix Île-de-France (162 locations), it'll be North Carolina (152 locations) and then Texas (145 locations).

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