I have been working on a sort of "fan site" for my first EM which is the Bon Voyage. I have been casually searching here and there for other examples that I can use for inspiration. Here are a few I found so far. I was wondering if anyone has made a list of similar sites?

This one is pretty good for the Fathom:

http://www.pinball.yoo-design.com/

This is a really good one IMO (although heavily relying on Flash which is going away):

http://firepowerpinball.com/

I found this while looking through Vid's pop bumper guide. In here it was written:

vid1900 said:

http://www.firepowerpinball.com/ is the greatest effort "fan site" for any pinball machine ever.
Excellent work.

Agree 100%

Then they got "the letter".......

In relation to what is written above, I am presuming that they received a copyright/intellectual property notice about information on their website. That topic is basically my second question. If anyone has any links to further discussion about putting details about machines on websites I would like to read about it.

Based on what I have read so far, which includes information about the infamous ballsofsteel website, it seems to me that the main topic of concern is the specific graphic design of plastics. For example, on the firepower webpage, while there are some small non-downloadable images of the plastics, there is nothing detailed that can be downloaded. Based on the fact that they have very nice, high-quality, high-resolution documents for virtually every other aspect of the machine, I would make the presumption that they have in their hands similar-quality files for the plastics, but these were taken down from the website, much like the ballsofsteel site being closed down because from what I understand it consisted of scanned images of plastics.

On this site and others including IPDB, I see rampant examples of detailed backglass photos, playfield photos and drawings, and all sorts of schematics, manuals, score cards, etc. So it would seem to me based on what I observe that all of that stuff is OK for sharing in the pinball community (and the world), but the plastics are "off the list" due to the desire of the owners of that property. Since I am new to all of this and I am sure it has been discussed, I am interested to know more.

I get what you are saying, but let me rephrase this a bit. I don't intend to use anyone else's photograph or graphic file that they created. I would do everything myself. So, OK, on IPDB you have photographs - these are just photographs of pinball machines that somebody took in their gameroom. Yes those photographs are their copyright. So I can take a photograph of my own pinball machine, and that becomes my copyright because I took the photo. But if the photograph, for example, is of a backglass, then that artwork in the photograph is the copyright of the whoever owns that right, the original artist, or company or whatever. I suppose it is the same idea of posting a photograph of a famous painting. No one is going to confuse your photograph of the painting with the original painting.

OK, that makes sense then. Nothing wrong with pure "fandom", and that's all I'm planning to do.