We -the guys behind Pinside.com- would really like to know from you -our beloved visitor- what you would like to see happen with Pinside.com next. Do you have a great idea for the site? Let's discuss it here!

Gee, thanks for those compliments. It's really very nice to hear those things! I agree, it seems like a lot of our visitors are either a bit shy or indeed very busy playing their games. But with this new forum we may have another reason to get all pinball enthousiasts around the world typing and communicating! As for the section you suggested, I'm affraid I would be building it for little use

Hi Lorenz, the YouTube thing is because of the way our current player works. I will take a look and see if more video sites can be added.. Stay tuned for that!

As for the thumbnails, could you provide me with a list of the machines you are referring to, so I can see what's going wrong there?

Thanks for your suggestions, keep 'em coming!

Wow, some good ideas here! Thanks so far!

As for the "where to play pinball" idea. This may fit perfectly in our World Pinball Map page (http://pinside.com/pinball/community/map), don't you think? We should build some web-based form on that page to enable users to 'pin' their favourite gameroom up on the map? Would something like that work?

As for the Pinside database "going back" to 1965 or possible even earlier, it could be done of course. The Pinside has originally always been about Solid State_ pinball, but if enough people would request it, we might consider doing EM games as wel. First of all, we would need someone to step up and compile a list of the games (in a format like csv or xml so we can easily insert into the database). If you have some free time on your hands and want to organise this effort, you could open up a new topic and we'll discuss further details there.

Uploading pics of your gameroom can already be done. If you go to your Pinsiders profile and edit your profile story there's an option to include pictures in it. Or isn't that what you mean?

As for banners, we don't currently have any. Maybe you can use the logo image from our site?

As for getting more people on the site, it's not only about visitors, it's all about active_ visitors. Pinside.com currently gets well over 600 unique visitors each day. The thing is: most of 'em don't actively participate. If you have any good suggestions on how we could more actively involve people in the site, I'm very interested. Are there things that aren't clear enough, things that could be re-designed? Did we make things too difficult? Do let me know! It's sometimes hard for us to visualize how our visitors 'view' and use the site, if you know what I mean.

And keep those ideas coming! I'm trying to spend the little spare time I have on implementing the best ideas on Pinside.com and any suggestion or help is most welcome and apprciated!

Did you have a look at this blog post: http://pinside.com/pinball/blog/bang-for-your-buck
That's where the Bang for Your Buck list is explained in detail. All the prices come from Ebay alone.

Another handy tip to try out: Go to the archive page ( http://pinside.com/pinball/archive ) and in the search form, leave the big text box empty and only set the 'sorting order' to price (ascending or descending). Now click the "find machines" button and presto! A list of games sorted by price.

How about an update to the front page

Hmm, not sure what happened there. The story was already there some time ago but somehow never published. Thanks for letting me know

I have read all ideas posted here and there are some pretty good ones - just so you know that ideas are actually being read. Now if I only had some more time to build all this stuff

I'd really digg seeing another 5-10 (15-20 in all) pinsiders up on the Kings of Karma section of the community page

Good idea! Done! That was only 1 minute work!

Isn't that what PinsideMail is for? A simple way to send messages to other Pinsiders.

Really? Wow, I really have to disagree on that as I am particularly fond of our forum software! What I like about it is that it's initially very bare bones and well integrated with the rest of the site. We have done a lot of research two years ago, when we first had plans for a forum, and found all existing forum solutions so bloated. We eventually settled on this tiny open source forum software called bbpress, which we could shape into our 'pinside' way. Many (and I do mean many!) hours went into the building and extending of the forum software and integrating it into the existing Pinside. There is no way we're going to swap it for another. Sorry to disappoint you, RobT!

I have build this functionality yesterday and it is now ready for use. When editing your post, simply click the "Add edit reason" button on the lower right side of the message text box.

_{Post edited by robin : Look, here is an example of an edit reason text block!}

I'm sorry, that would not be a good idea in my opinion. A good explanation why can be found here: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/01/should-links-open-in-new-windows/

My own main reasoning: You should be able to choose yourself wether links open in new windows. You can now choose to do this by holding ctrl or shift when clicking a link. You can also click a link with your middle mouse button if you have one. If links would all open in new windows by themselves there would be no way to stop them from doing so (there's no un-shift button so to speak).

I hope that explains it well. Thanks for the suggestion though!

We're working on this! As soon as it launches I will put a post up and ask everyone's help to give the EM machines thumbnails and fill in their details!

Now that I would like to see! Pinsiders around the world! I'll even throw in a price, how about a Pinside T for the best photo?

Check this post, in this same topic
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/what-should-be-next-on-pinsidecom/page/4#post-69430

Coming soon!

In the plans!

I like that! Will think about how this could be implemented...

Got it!

No, not possible atm. Would be great but I have no idea how I could implement this easily_. I would have to store last read post for each user in each topic. Pretty complex stuff. Maybe I could do it with a cookie, that might work - hmmm I'll add it to my to-do list!

Definitely high up on my list. I really want to give some more attention to users gameroom/collection/hi-scores etc and present it all in a nice interface. I just need some spare time to implement this but it's gonna come to the site.

I haven't added that one because many people here use that abbreviation for PinsideMail or Private Message (which is essentially the same thing).

You actually found a little bug. The ad should not display the text "make an offer" at all. A wanted ad has no price, the way it was designed at least.

I really want to make this, believe me! I have some plans and sketches laying around here so there is a start.

Good idea, maybe I could add a "tech tips" sub-forum? Where only topics may be opened that are tech tips, like "How to measure a tIP36" or "How to remove a popbumper".

Both great ideas. Will add those to my to-do list!

Coming very soon! Working hard on this...

I'm planning an iPhone app. I would also like to make the site look better on small devices (Android, Windows phones) but haven't begun work on that.

Good idea! Like recommendations? "If you like Demolition Man and Dirty Harry you will also like Johnny Mnemonic". That's a good idea. I'll see if I can come up with some smart mechanism to make these

That might be a good idea, turning Pinside into the next Facebook! No seriously, it might be nice to have an idea of who's friends with who on the forum. I'll put this on the 'to-do'.

This will be the Pinside Knowledge Base - which ties forum topic to games in the archive - Coming soon!

Definitely a good idea but not easy to implement. It's high up my list though!

Have you tried adding topics to your favorites? This, in combination with the "new!" badges introduced with Pinside 2.5 update will make your Pinside life a lot easier!

With Pinside 2.5, this is now possible with "Tilt Warnings". See the post ratings box (the bumper icon) in the top right of a post. You can mark posts as unsafe by adding a tilt warning. Obviously this will only work if all Pinsiders participate and mark posts with a tilt warning where needed.

Note that there are still rules stating what can and what cannot be posted to the site and yes, the moderators will still delete questionable content.

I just hope "Tilt Warnings" system will be faster to mark posts as NSFW then any moderator could spot them. After all, we're using the power of the whole Pinside community to help tag posts as NSFW!

Suggestions on what kind of filters?

The current search is powered by Google custom Search. I did this because the huge influx of new users was also putting a lot of stress on the database. Handing search off to Google solved this issue quick n' easy. I agree that the search is very limited, and date sorting is needed badly - I'm open to suggestions how we could best tackle this. Indexing our MySQL? SOLR? Another Search-as-a-service provider? Feel free to chime in!

This is already possible! Hover you mouse over a user's "backbox" and choose "posts".
On an iPad you would tap the "backbox" and the lil' menu containing "posts" link will be displayed.

I've looked into this but can't really see any huge advantage, at least not any that benefits the larger part of Pinside community at this time. And also considering the time it would take me to integrate this. On a side note: Tapatalk is not even free, nor is it opensource. Lastly, I want people to enjoy the full Pinside website which I've tried so hard to integrate with the forum (locations, collections, ratings, archive etc)

I agree with you on this one. And have plans to build some functionality to accomodate this. The reason I am not simply enabling IMG tags to be rendered inline are twofold:

1) I'm worried for dead image links. How many other forums (and even old threads on RGP, for example) don't have dead links that often make the thread more or less useless. For example, a tech question about the location of a plastic. Someone answers with a picture hosted on their photobucket. But when they decide to quit photobucket, the image disappears and the thread becomes useless. Hope I'm making sense here.

2) Copyrights. What I could do is recognize image urls, copy the images to the Pinside server and host them from there indefinitely. But then things like copyrights come into play. So I'm not sure yet how to proceed with this.

So for now, we're stuck with the current uploading implementation.

Subscribing may be a possibility for the near future. This wa snot possible for a long time because our e-mail was being handled by a third party and we had hard limits on how much e-mail we could send.

Last month we set up our own Pinside e-mail server which no longer imposes these sending limits. I can imagine building a "digest" e-mail feature in the near future.

Being able to delete your own posts (while in the "editable" state) is a good idea, I'll add this to the to-do.

Good suggestion. Maybe I can combine this with another feature I had on my to-do list: image captions. For pasted image urls, the caption could be set to automatically include the original image url.

Copyrights may not be a problem if the image is being resized to our forum format (say, 800 pixels wide) and we publish the original url below it. Google Image Search basically does the same thing.

Don't worry about it. I agree that we need better search. I'm currently looking into adding a SOLR search engine to the site but this takes quite some effort as this is totally new material to me and I have to do this in my spare time (which is rather limited). Please be patient as I will make search better!

Pitch and bat games were not included in the Pinside archives because our idea was to only include games with two or more flippers. Just as we originally did not include EM games. The P&B games that are_ in our database made it there accidentally. I'm not against adding them, it's just that it takes a lot of time and effort and there never was any request for it (until now).

I've been reading your post a couple of times, but i can't make sense of it. Sorry, must be because I'm Dutch. Could you perhaps explain it in a different way so I understand the issue you are describing?

There are issues with the Tilt system as well as the rating system. Remember, what's out there now is my first attempt ("in beta" so to speak). Expect it to change in the future. I agree that Tilt is currently being abused too often - there will be mechanisms where mods can un-tilt a post. There will also be "punishment" for abuse of the Tilt system. Probably a (temporarily) ban on using the Tilt feature for people who abuse it.

Phew, this is all getting really confusing - all these suggestions and questions in one thread.

I suggest we start up new (separate) threads for each suggestion in the Pinside's new "Pinside Website" sub-forum.

So please open a new topic (thread) in that sub-forum if you want to post a suggestion for the site or if you want to continue the discussion we were having in here - I'm getting really confused with all these different features/bugs/suggestions in this one topic.

Closing this one down...