Wowzers, another big update to the site. Does this guy ever sleep?

Off course not, there are things that are more important than sleeping, like

Okay, so you probably noticed some changes to the site header, the sharper logo and nicer big menu links. You did, didn't you?

We now have a site-wide search. Try it, it's the box on the top right of the screen, next to your user name (if you're logged in). It searches games, topics, pinsiders, locations all at once with links to each respective search engine for power-searching or viewing more results. I still have to add stories here.

The Top 100 section has gotten a makeover and is bigger and better than ever. The Bang for your Buck list is back (but really in test phase).

The Pinside Market has gotten a huge re-design. I'm now rendering ads in waterfall style and it is such a fun way to browse through classified ads. hope you like it too!

The Pinball Events page has also been updated and a calendar added. It still needs some tweaks in the design department, but it's a handy addition to that page, having a direct glance of upcoming pinball events for the next two months.

The forum has gotten a lot of performance tweaks and lots of design improvements. For example, topics lists now display the age of a thread, which I thought would be quite handy. There is now also an option to preview your posts or edits. I have also rounded the look of some icons, trying to make things feel more "pinball"

The "start new topic" page is completely re-designed, it should streamline topic creation but also help in avoiding duplicate topics when breaking news occur (remember those 6 topics when sad new reached us about Robin Williams?). You will now be shown recent topics that match your topic title, so you will spot it if a similar topic was already started.

The image uploader is now "lazy loading", which means faster loading pages in general. The uploader was also updated to support older browsers better (and iPads too).

Your Karma points may go up or down a little depending on your contributions because I have made some tweaks to points scoring. If they go up: lucky you! If they go down: sorry!

I have also brought in some new recruits on the smily front:

And of course Mr Pinball smily that is shown above (inspired by a smily I had seen on the Belgian Gameroom forum).

What else has changed? In all honesty, I have lost track. So I figured it would be fun if you guys would spot changes to the site.

And of course you can list the inevitable bugs you encounter here too. Please do so in a constructive way, by listing the steps it takes to replicate a bug and which browser+version you are on. This way I can fix bugs super-quick (I hope)!

Hope you all like this update!

Hey thanks, guys! I really appreciate the nice words!

Thanks! Some leftover debug which wasn't cleaned up properly. Fixed it.

Ouch. What country are you from? Hmmm... Netherlands? Hmmm.. Sorry, never heard of it!

JK, will fix soon.

Nope, it's there to stay.

This is in pipeline as well as plans on an alternate ratings system.

That means two games are tied. I looked and there was a bug in hiding the second "19". Fixed now.

Will look into it, thanks.

No problem, look for this control at the top of the list and set it to "1".

This control allows you to customize the Market listing

Screenshot 2014-09-18 14.04.23.png
Tap on the flippers images at the bottom of every page. Or the jump to top link below it.

Note that this doesn't work for auto-scrolling (E.g. the forum frontpage) pages because you will never reach the bottom (if your internet connection is fast).

In that case, use the reload button showing in each of the page separators:

Screenshot 2014-09-18 14.03.35.png

You can easily disable Ebay ads using the filtering options on the left. The only current known problem is that these choices do not stick. So the week after you would have to uncheck it again. This is on the to-do.

I was going to add Craigslist classifieds as a source too, but they don't have an API, I think.

The default sort ordering should be 'date placed', not distance. You're right that's a bug and I will fix it.

That icon means it is a hot topic, a topic that has had many posts in short time.

Here's how it currently works: Every 5 minutes, we look at the amount of posts made to each active topic within a certain time interval (currently this interval is the last 12 hours). We divide this number by the total number of posts made in the time interval. If the resulting percentage is higher than a certain value (currently 2%) it marks the topic as "hot".

So let's say there were a thousand posts made in the past 12 hours and this topic had 60 posts made in it within those 12 hours. This makes it 60/1000 = 6% = hot!

I hope that makes sense! The values mentioned above are subject to change if I feel there are too many or too few hot topics.

You can use this icon (at the top of the ads list) to re-format the list:

Screenshot 2014-09-18 13.49.41.png

The old one is not coming back (for various reasons), but you can always make suggestions what you are missing or what should be changed and maybe it will be implemented in this new version!

I noticed some of the Ebay labels being to large, will see if I can fix this asap.

Thanks for the positive feedback but also thanks for constructive criticism. I appreciate both!

It seems most critique is about the top menu and about the market place. The menu is something I have been struggling with for a long time. I wanted it to display bigger on my iPad (nowadays a huge percentage of Pinside's visitors) but I also need space to extend for future menu items. And also allow for things like polaroid images to "stick out" and not go over the menu. So what I ended up with seemed the best option, considering these factors. I will dive back in at a later date to see if I can improve it, make it work better in some other way.

As for the market, I personally really like the new Marketplace view but also realise that not everyone would like the waterfall. That's why I also included the option to have single rows, or double boxes (option 1 and 2 in the 4-views selector). That said, I did notice some display bugs in those 2 views which I will look into asap.

I can understand the requests to "remember" your market search filtering options (e.g. turn off Ebay or change default sort order) and will work on an option to store these in a cookie or in your profile.

People who lost a lot of Karma, please PM me and I will investigate what happened. There could be some gains/losses but it should run into the millions.

All in all I think the update went pretty smooth, at least the site is still running

Ok, a small update:

- Made all menu items in one row again
- Fixed some market place bugs and cosmetic glitches
- Added a "save as default" button to save marketplace filter settings (and view type) as default.
- Fixed problem where ratings were no longer counting for your karma
+ Extra karma points are now awarded for adding comments to your ratings. Points based on length of review but with a limit to prevent abuse. As with all things ratings, this only works if your ratings are public.

There are some server issues, working on it!

Server problem should be fixed now, friggin' source control was testing me.

Okay, how about this simple walkthrough:

market-place-back-to-how-it-used-to-be.jpg

Do you mean like viewtype 2, pictured above?

Maybe make 2 the default? Although I still think the "4" view is the best.

Hmm, could it be an ad blocker plugin doing this? I'm seeing those images just fine.

Thanks for noticing this one, fixed it.

Thanks, found a bug and fixed it.

Thanks!
I'm open for offers

Which version of IE are you using?

You're right, that's a bug! Will work on it.

Yeah, I could move the view box to the left. Might be more obvious than the way it is now. Good call.

Thanks, I was showing the top100 score, not the user score. Fixed now.

Chrome-only bug. Fixed!

Thanks. There are a few more bugs in the Market section that I will work on asap, most notably paging through ads doesn't seem to work anymore.

I tried several browsers but could not replicate this issue. Could you provide me with some more info?

And is the Pinsiders map or the where to play map working for you?

"Eėn patatje met, alsjeblieft!"

patat-met.jpg

Can't believe no one spotted that earlier!

Love that idea and will add it soon to the main site search as well as the Pinsiders search.

Did you use the "save as defaults" link under the filter form?

Hmm, I will investigate.

Could it be stickied threads that are missing from your list?

Yes, these are frontpage stickies. That might well be the problem then. I'll have to look into that.

Oops, my bad. It should be showing again on your My Pinside > Ratings page.

Thanks. This was indeed a bug. Fixed now!

The pin prices on Pinside are currently in a very early "alpha" state. I'm interest in feedback like this to look into improving the algorithm. More on this soon.

Yes, this was indeed a bug, stickies were not showing. Fixed!

In other news, I have added some cool new features:

- Major improvements to PinsideMail search box. It is no longer a filter box, but instead is now a full fledged searchthrough all your current and archived PM messages.

- Location icons on the "where to play" map now are bigger when a location has more games. The amount of games is also listed in the pink bubble now.

- Forum buzz (previously "games talked about") on the forum frontpage now shows trend arrows. Looks like Lebowski is trending right now

The reason I walked away from a filter type interface was that I needed to add paging to the message list. Some people get too much PMs (myself included) and loading all of these was causing to much strain on my connection (not to mention on Pinside). But after adding paging, the filter wouldn't work for me anymore (filter used clientside code to show/hide rows already loaded on the page).

As for searching for part of a Pinsiders name, like in your example, this *should* work. Maybe a bug? I'll look into it!

Edit: yes this was a bug., it was only searching messages matching the "from user" name field. Fixed this now.

Okay just kidding, but honestly. Maintaining Pinside for IE is just not all that easy. First off, there is still no IE version for Mac, so I have to resort to Virtual Machines to test stuff. I need different virtual machines to test IE8, 9, 10, 11. Aaargh! Their javascript debugging still stinks ("an error occurred on line 1219") and where other browsers all generally work well and follow the spec, IE always seems to be the outsider that does things differently. I'm not necessarily claiming that IE sucks, but it's not easy for a one-man development team (working on a Mac) to support all different version of this browser especially when its brilliant developer team also cooked up the wonderful compatibility view mode.

All I can honestly suggest is: please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox or (preferably) a webkit powered browser if you want the best Pinside experience (and even that is not bug free, but that's mostly my fault). These are all free, cross-platform.

I know some of you are stuck with IE at your workplace and I feel for you. I am not ignoring you and will try and fix IE specific bugs occurring in recent versions of IE, so do send them in (preferably via PM) but I cannot make it my #1 priority, even if I wanted it to.

/End of rant

ie.jpg

Edit: Sorry, forgot to answer your question. I will try to look into the uploading issue with IE11, but as it turns out my latest VM is for IE10. I still need to download the VM for IE11, a 3.6 GB download

That might be a good idea. But it would mean that those threads would no longer go into the manufacturer forums. Hmmm... Why don't you open a topic about this and see what others think of your suggestion?

Hmm, I don't understand the fuss. If you click the "1" viewtype, the market view is almost the same as it was before the update. After that, click on the "save as defaults" link (under the filter form on the left) and your filter/view settings are saved forever and will be re-used on any device you use to sign into Pinside. Hope that helps!

Nope, that is too weird. Will check it out, thanks!

Definitely a welcome idea. So are you volunteering to start doing write-ups about them? If you gather information about a designer then I would love to accommodate a place to put this info on every designers page.

As for game splash pages. These already have publicly editable wiki, I welcome everyone to do small write-ups for games. I think the game Pinball Arcade does it well: they have very nice short stories about each game you can download. Obviously we can't "steal" their little essays but it is nice example.

You're right! I was sorting the wrong column. Fixed now!