Thanks for all your support! Pinball Map is really going strong. We've been getting at least 10 new location submissions a day. And we seem to be getting more attention in Europe, especially in Italy, France, and Austria.
We're also regularly mentioned in articles about pinball. Also, last week on the /r/pinball reddit, we sorta trended - people were posting screenshots of the app, showing off how many locations are near them.
APP UPDATES
Holidays mean time off of work, and time off of work means more time to work on the map!
In the last couple of weeks we released two updates for Android, and one for iOS. For Android we added Dark Mode support. Not all Android versions have access to dark mode, but if yours does, you can turn it on in "Settings > Display" and then when you open the Pinball Map app, stuff will be dark. However, our Android Dark Mode support is not 100% done. The map itself is still light. In the next update, we'll make it so the Google Maps Night theme is shown (this happens automatically on iOS).
We also fixed some bugs and updated the navigation a little: Android has more "swipe right to go back" support; And the bottom navigation on some screens now stays visible (this is in line with current best practices).
We have some more updates in the works! Bug fixes, but also new features.
WEBSITE UPDATES
The website and our tile server are super stable and fast these days thanks to all your support.
Funny story: a couple months ago we caught the attention of spambots (I mean, we are already well on the radar of spambots, but we usually leave them in the dust since the site is so secure). They figured out how to sign up for accounts. We think the bots were Russian-based, based on some .ru accounts that signed up just prior to the invasion. Their MO was they'd sign up for accounts using legitimate email accounts that had been breached at some points. All of the email addresses came from yahoo, sbcglobal, and some individual domains (with occasional gmail and hotmail). Even though the email addresses were seemingly legit, the usernames were always nonsense. Like ghthskihgskhg, and thshgksghh. So they were easy to manually spot and delete. Furthermore, they never "confirmed" their accounts, so they never actually gained any editing privileges.
We were routinely deleting them manually, as well as occasionally deleting all the accounts that hadn't been confirmed in a little while. But it was still tedious. So! A couple days ago we added a captcha to the Sign Up screen on the website. And since then, none have signed up!
Pretty simple fix.
That's not a very exciting website update to share with you. But some of you may find it interesting! Oh, and we think we caught the attention of those bots because of a link on hacker news.
We'll try to share some fun stats in the next post. See ya!