Yay! Finally I had some time to do some serious work on the Pinside. The past 3 weeks I have been hacking away over steaming coffee updating the site in all kinds of ways. The main reasons were to enhance the readability. But I also wanted to get rid of flash as well as update to newer versions of the javascript library we're using (mootools). I have stripped all flash from the site, made sure it works well on iPad and more.

So what's new?

- Better readability of all header text. Switched to an easier-to-read font.
- Speaking of fonts, what do you think about the cool Dot Matrix font for the title in the color bar? Nifty huh?
- A complete new section was added to the site: Map. Here you can find the existing Pinsiders map but also a new "where to play" index. Here Pinsiders can add (or edit) pinball locations worldwide.
- The machine archive splash page was seriously updated. Redesigned with lots of tweaks to machine details etc.
- A better player for YouTube (now also flash-free for the iPad). Pinball music mp3 tracks that I got from DrBond will soon follow in this same media box.
- Added a "wiki-like" introduction function. All machines now have a space on their splash page for an unbiased "introduction text". Text is, like all machine details, editable by any Pinsider.
- Re-designed machine rating comments page.
- New section in the Top 100 listing new rating comments on the site. A pretty cool page to visit occasionally and read the latest comments made on machines.
- New section in the Top 100 for all the fun lists I created some weeks ago.
- New formula used for Bang for your Buck list. The formula is now described too.
- My-Pinside -> my ratings page added
- Re-design of the forum! Now includes overview of people's collection, ratings, and where they are from. Shows a heart icon for donators. New colors, new fonts, better integration in site.
- Much better popup-windows for the Avatar editor, story editor etc. as well as for all the image popups.
- Re-designed gallery page for machine photos. Images are now grouped.

Maybe I forgot something. You'll find out soon enough!

I really hope you like the changes, after all I made them for you
Interested to hear your feedback!

Thanks for the comments! I have made the text a bit darker around the avatar.

Yeah I especially like the way the new media (YouTube) section turned out (e.g. http://pinside.com/pinball/archive/twilight-zone#media ). It still uses flash on browsers that support it (that's beyond my control), but now also works on the iPad.

I forgot to mention these new inhabitants of the Pinside forum:

Thanks for the hard work, but the "Splash" for all games indicates that they were made in January of 1970.

Uhm.. Well..

Fixed it now.

It would be really great if when we quoted text from a previous post, that the authours name would pop up as well...

Great idea! Will add this soon!

Well as you can see in this post, I just added this functionality. The old way also still works, just remove the cite="nnn" part of the blockquote.

Let's keep an eye on this. I got some PM's today and no problems. Maybe it was a temporary glitch?

This is all a bit weird, if anyone can put a finger on what's happening, that would be great. Because nothing changed about the notifications icon, except that I placed it on the right... To be investigated!

Pete, sorry to hear that. Which browser are you on? And which version of the browser (this can often be found in "About"). And could you try and hold shift while clicking the refresh icon of your browsers navigation bar?

It looks like (blockquote cite="post-id")The quoted text(/blockquote). Where the round parenthesis are the pointy ones. Mind you, you're not quoting a person, you are quoting a post. I will soon add a post-id somewhere in the post meta bar so you know it. You could save a lot of trouble by using another browser than IE. I recommend Chrome or Firefox. But I will try my best to fix it soon for IE users.

I just did some digging and found a strange height descriptor in the site's stylesheet. This may be the cause of the problem. I removed it, could you please check if the scroll problem is gone now? I will do some more testing on IE later. I'm really sorry that these problems occurred, I though I tested the new design rather well but it turns out there are still some glitches.

As for the quote issue, it's quite difficult to get this working in all browsers. Getting it to work proeprly in IE is gonna require some more time. In the meantime, you can simply use the code <blockquote>The text you are quoting...</blockquote> and it will work like it always did. The only thing the new quote button does is add the value cite="[post-id]" to the blockquote tag.

Thanks for the feedback. You're right, I made the bar a tad darker and the text a bit lighter, it's much more readible now.

I'm about to cry, but I think I finally got that $#%$@ quote button working. I have tested in IE 8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Could someone please test it in other versions of IE?

To test it is easy: select some text from somebody's post, click the quote button, and you should see the <blockquote cite="#12345">The text you selected</blockquote> appear. After submitting your post that will turn out something like this:

Thanks for your help making the pinside better

Indeed, the Pinside currently only has Solid State games (1975 and newer).

As for the pricing info, this is not yet showing. I have plans to re-design that section a bit, showing price, buy date etc as well as the public remarks.

You're right, Space Oddesey shouldn't be in our database, there was no solid state version of that.

I have been considering adding EM games to the site, but as Hellodeadcity said it's a giant effort. I'm also afraid that the modern games we have now (around 1000) will get "lost" when we add 10,000s of EM games. We need to figure out how to get the data in (maybe ask nicely to the folks at IPDB if we can "use" theirs?), get a bigger server and a way to make it work for everyone, site-wise. All in all not an easy task.

Tonight I have added a new enhancement, this should be appreciated by our regular forum users
It's kind of technical: Forum image attachments now get their proper width/height assigned in the html code, which results in easier reading because topic pages and their posts won't jump around anymore while the images are loading.

If you are now thinking: huh? What's he rambling about? Well, then just rest assured the Pinside forum just got a little better again!

Thanks for the heads up!

You mean the bouncy envelope? I'm seeing one right now:

Screen_shot_2011-05-25_at_13.46.46_.png

Can someone confirm that notifications are working again? Or am I the only one seeing the bouncy envelope when I have new Pinsidemail?