System Upgrades

mclemore

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Donor 15 years: 2010-2024
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New System Upgrades:

1. For a whole lot of reasons (that would require another thread to explain), the forums 'remember me' function keeps you logged in for 7 days now, not a whole year.

2. When you log onto the forums it logs you onto the main www.arcade-museum.com site and vice-versa. Same with log offs.

3. The VAPS log on/log off process is not as quite as separated from the main arcade-museum.com log on as it was before since it was confusing people apparently. It's hard to explain exactly what the changes are but in short the system should nag you less when you head into VAPS.

4) http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/photos.php
A new page shows all the member primary profile photos together. If not logged in, you don't see any new images (< 30 days old). This gives us plenty of time to deal with questionable photos before the world gets to see them. Additionally, the VAPS stats page shows how many members have added profile photos.

5) You can now add multiple images (up to 10) on your profile. The newest upload becomes your primary image. Previously uploaded photos get shown at the very bottom of your VAPS entry. A future update will allow you to choose which is your primary profile photo and to delete existing ones.

6) In VAPS, submission links are now on their own page

7) VAPS: Looking at a member detail page...when logged in, shows you how recently someone updated their profile and other info. Ie: for my page:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/members...mber_id=270392

*Signup: December 2002 or most likely earlier
*Updated VAPS/CAPS Bio: February 2010
*Updated VAPS/CAPS Game List: February 2010
*Last Login: February 2010

[All signups before December 2002 are listed as 'December 2002 or most likely earlier']

8) the KLOV.com site now pushes you more quickly and consistently to arcade-museum.com for a variety of reasons tied to long term plans here. One is that it makes it easier to log in, stay logged in, etc. It's now actually hard to get to a number of pages on klov.com, though the same pages exist on arcade-museum.com and the klov.com pages are still valid for the benefit of external links etc.

9) A couple hundred more database entries were added to the encyclopedia.

10) Now when you go Arcade-Museum.com and click on a letter to see, for example, all the games that begin with the letter 'A', there is a Filter bar near the top of the screen, so you can look at all machines, or just all the videogames or just all the pinball machines. This is one of my favorite new "why didn't I think of that before" features.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_list.php?letter=A

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_list.php?letter=A&type=Pinball

11) The VAPS menu bar has been rearranged slightly for clarity, and to highlight which items are available just for logged in members.

12) Throughout the site, I'm beginning to try and identify extra features someone is seeing because they are logged in to promote the benefit of being logged in... (like that logged in members get up to 100 results back on a search instead of 50)

13) A couple minor bugs and cosmetic issues on the main site were dealt with. It's an ongoing endeavor.
 
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# 6 above mentions: "A future update will allow you to choose which is your primary profile photo and to delete existing ones."

This has been done. You can now upload multiple images, delete ones you don't want, and determine which one you want to be the primary image.

Note: A very few users are getting errors and broken image links when they upload. I have been unable to reproduce the problem. If this happens to you, please let me know.
 
We just made it through the entire 'new game' queue (the last 400 entries). Thanks to everyone that voted and researched the submissions, in particular thanks to DustyBri for the -extensive- help in providing links to outside references to help validate submissions.

About half of this last batch was accepted into the database, and a surprising number of those were videogame entries.

I'm not turning the submit new entry feature on yet (to prevent duplicate work), as we have our own internal list of hundreds of games (mostly non-videogame) that we know needs to be added.

The submit new entry feature will likely return in mid-March.
 
Today we fixed some minor issues dealing with VAPS ranking (score 1-100) on main encyclopedia game entries, as well some issues with data not refreshing on the Top Preservationists Page.

Also, we added 3 new reports on the VAPS Stats Page:

100 Most Collected Other Machines (Non-Videogame Non-Pinball)
100 Most Wanted Other Machines (Non-Videogame Non-Pinball)

100 Most Desirable Machines (bound to spark a little debate).
 
The encyclopedia now shows you links to the appropriate IPDB page for our pinball entries (only for logged in members).

For example:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=3459

contains a bunch of information about a game called 'Little Chief', and includes a link to:

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1458

Also, for manufacturers that match, we provide a link too.

For example:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/manuf_detail.php?manuf_id=2075&orig_game_id=3459

Provides a link to:

http://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mfgid=351
 
Another set of links have gone up online. This time (for logged in members) for arcade (ie: EM) style games to relevant pages on arcade-flyers.com
 
A number of small changes continue to roll out (ie: moving the quick search box to the menu bar and a lot of small unannounced improvements).

Today we made some changes to VAPS I wanted to make special mention of.

1) At the bottom of your 'My Games' page (when logged in), it how gives you a report of who's games for sale match your want list. It saves a lot of clicking through to individual pages.

2) At the very bottom, the list of eBay auctions remain. Now when you add/edit a 'want' entry, you can choose to exclude that game from the eBay results that show up at the bottom of the page. Popular games tend to fill up this list. Exclude the games you want (eventually) but are easy to find, like Galaga or Theatre of Magic, and the list is more likely to find that rare black-and-white game from the 70s you are really looking for.
 
It's been two months since my last update post, and countless improvements have been made to the system. Here are some notable events just from July.

- The main site's manufacturer list page was totally redone. http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=142695

- We created a neat PCB photobox system. http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=143011

- We addressed a number of minor bugs throughout both the forums and the main site.

- We caught up on ALL pending new game entry submissions.

- We processed over 1200 pending game image submissions.

- Embeded YouTube Links reached 780.

- We further standardized the site header/menu bar (work on the UI continues). We also made some minor changes to the VAPS UI.

- We split the Book List and the Gift Shop pages (and they now have separate links on the main menu).

- We made major changes to our image management system that in short will be useful for all sorts of things in the future, including a site re-design.

- We converted the Events page (http://www.arcade-museum.com/events.php) from a simple HTML document to a database driven thing. Now you can filter the calendar of events to only display Auctions, or events in Oregon, or only events by Superauctions. (this change launched today!)

- We continued to work on a major update to our EM coverage here.

August will likely be a slower month for updates that will be visible to users, but work will continue. A lot of neat new features are planned for the Fall.

Greg
 
New mods today.

- The menu bar continues to get a tad more standardized from one page to the next.

- Most of the menu bar now appears while in the forums too.

- The sign in, sign out, and edit account options were previously available in few places (primarily the home page). These options have now been moved to the menu bar so they appear throughout the site.

- While logged in on the main site and looking at a game record (ie: the Galaga page), there is a new option at the bottom left hand of the screen labeled 'Print Version'. Clicking on this shows you the same game page with the following things turned off: Most of the top menu navigation bar, any ads, 'Contribute' section, 'System Data' section, 'eBay Listings', 'Print Version' button, inline YouTube Videos (which don't print in IE or Firefox), and 'Add Galaga To Your VAPS Profile' link. In other words, it filters the page to show just the information directly related to the game, and is thus cleaner for printing. Again, this is only an option for logged in visitors.
 
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A number of site improvements have occurred recently, most of them unannounced. There are a few new features today that I've thought to mention.

There are 5 new VAPS reports online:

100 Newest For Sale Items added to VAPS:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/newest-for-sale.php
(Sorted by entry date, newest on top. This is my favorite of the new reports).

100 Newest Wanted Items added to VAPS:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/newest-wanted.php

Arcade machines listed in VAPS:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/forsale-arcade.php
(Arcade means non-Videogame and non-Pinball)

Pinball machines listed in VAPS:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/forsale-pinball.php
(There are 150 of these entries now. If the list grows too big over time I'll have to take down this report or limit the number of results shown).

Other items for sale in VAPS:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/forsale-other.php
(Slots, Scales, Trade Stims, etc. - a small list at the moment).

Note that there is not a videogame for sale list. This is intentional since there are two many entries. You can also look at individual game entries on KLOV and it will tell you if any are for sale. Additionally, if you select one of the country or state reports then you can click on a 'For Sale' report for that region, which will mostly be composed of videogames.
 
- Very very early this morning (or very very late last night depending on your perspective), I added a parts for sale and wanted module to VAPS. Entries can be added now, and I'll add two more reports this morning to make it more useful.

- There is an 'auction' tab on the main site that shows you all the gameroom related auction categories on eBay merged together into one single report. Coin-op videogames are going to be sparse on the report because...well... let's just say that coin-op videogames isn't a growth hobby unfortunately.

- Some minor cosmetic changes to the main site's menu bar were made.

- A VAPS member country map was added: http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/

- An interesting graph showing how many videogames games were made each year, and how many of these are owned by VAPS members can be found at: http://www.arcade-museum.com/members/statistics/videogame-title-frequency.php

- The main VAPS stats page was improved.

- A number of other changes were made.
 
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