Hi, Pinball Map is a hobby project we've been doing in our spare time for the past 10 years. It's currently listing 6,725 locations and 22,704 machines. Code is on github[1][2], and we have an API that is used by various folks.
Web Stack = ruby on rails, heroku, tile server on aws.
App = React Native (launched the redeveloped app last June)
We took a relatively slow-growth approach for the first 9 years: we added "regions" one at a time for places where people demonstrated a strong desire to update the data, and a volunteeer administrator could oversee it (in fact, we originally intended for this to just be a map of pinball machines in Portland, Oregon, but people kept asking us to expand to their areas). This gave us a pretty strong userbase and a reputation for having clean, up-to-date data. Each regional map was a distinct, silo'd map. Lately we've de-emphasized this model in favor of a single map that covers the whole world.
For the first 7 years, all map updates were made anonymously. But after two instances of abuse, we implemented a user system. We now have about 8,600 registered users. The map gets around 3,000-5,000 edits per month, including 100-200 new locations.
Search experience on the web could use some updating. The app is where it's at right now. We spent the past 14 months on its design/development, and we think it came out well. Throughout the 10 years, the majority of our users use the app rather than the website (but we don't have great analytics).
Web Stack = ruby on rails, heroku, tile server on aws. App = React Native (launched the redeveloped app last June)
We took a relatively slow-growth approach for the first 9 years: we added "regions" one at a time for places where people demonstrated a strong desire to update the data, and a volunteeer administrator could oversee it (in fact, we originally intended for this to just be a map of pinball machines in Portland, Oregon, but people kept asking us to expand to their areas). This gave us a pretty strong userbase and a reputation for having clean, up-to-date data. Each regional map was a distinct, silo'd map. Lately we've de-emphasized this model in favor of a single map that covers the whole world.
For the first 7 years, all map updates were made anonymously. But after two instances of abuse, we implemented a user system. We now have about 8,600 registered users. The map gets around 3,000-5,000 edits per month, including 100-200 new locations.
Search experience on the web could use some updating. The app is where it's at right now. We spent the past 14 months on its design/development, and we think it came out well. Throughout the 10 years, the majority of our users use the app rather than the website (but we don't have great analytics).
[1] https://github.com/scottwainstock/pbm/ [2] https://github.com/bpoore/pbm-react