The Internet Pinball Serial Number Database or IPSND collects serial numbers of pinball machines and
publishes a database of these on the Internet. Our goal is to make available a registration of all pinball
machines in existance and allow tools for slicing, dicing and visualization of the data.
Quickstats -- Games:4,971 Serials:10,883 Most Serials:The Addams Family(228) Most Submissions: Dan Gutchess(539)
Visitors:1,047,558 Members:79 Serial Photos:63
News Items:
I will be doing a pin-chat at the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown next week, the chat will be a tour of the IPSND, how it is built, the database and all the interesting stuff that I can show from the site. You will also learn some advanced usage of the site features.
Well it has been just about 2 years now and we have crossed the million visitor mark. Looking deeper into the stats, most of those visits are by bots it appears but it is a legitimate session count when the visit I suppose. Thanks to everyone that has continued to support the site and keep the submissions coming!!
There is a new statistic that lists latest submissions that include a photo. A nice way to browse all the pretty pictures everyone submits!
I have updated the logic for the search results so that it does two new things. Now, the number of players is also listed in the results to better clarify the games from each other, plus the results are now sorted descending by number of submissions for that game so that the post popular games exist at the top of the list. Since I don' really have a fancy search engine, this should give back more applicable results at the top of the list.
Members may now upload photos for existing submissions by going to their member profile page and editing the submission. You can also replace existing photo uploads via the same interface. Right now, there is only 1 photo per submission however.
In the area to the right where the charts and the google analytics exist, there is a new item in the rotation that shows the most recent member uploaded photo that has been put into the database. FYI, there are currently 9 different items that rotate in the chart panel on the front page.
Members can now do some basic editing of uploaded photos, right now there are tools for rotating and flipping images. I will also be monitoring images uploaded by non-members and doing rotations etc to get them presented properly.
Based on the traffic and feedback from my post on RGP last night, I have fixed several bugs relating to the Emailing issue, login accounts and Activation processes and the Affiliate configuration script. There is also a new 'remember me' checkbox in the login control so you can keep your default email on a computer by computer basis.
There are some issues with the confirmation email going out to yahoo, gmail and other large ISP's. Im changing the code now but the site will be a bit flaky for the next 10 minutes while I deploy the updates. Thanks for your patience.
We will call this a BETA test for now, but you can now attach photo's to your serial number submissions that show the serial number explicitly. This will potentially solve so may problems over time as we get more and more submissions and error's gradually pile up. This is only the first step in a bigger picture solution but it is pretty cool to see them for now. You can either upload a photo from your local PC or specify a web URL for the photo. The image is stored in our local IPSND database so it is archived along with the submission. Submissions that have an attached photo are 'starred' in the serial number listings.
The Serial Bot has been improved to not only categorize submissions into various 'status' levels but it now assigns a point value to each submission that ranges from 1-5. This value basically shows how accurate a submission is based on several factors. More details can be found on the Serial Bot Page and this functionality will be getting more improvements in the weeks to come.
There was a bug in the serial number sorting algorithm that appeared to effect games that had alpha characters in them (Early Bally Electronics most notably). This has now been fixed so that they are again sorted in numeric order.
In several tables that list submitters, there is now a 'member' icon that appears similar to the way an icon appears if a person has given a donation. Clicking this icon will take you to the member profile page that shows some summary info about the member, a link to their website and a listing of their submissions. It is fairly similar to the regular submitter page, however I will continue to develop this page and probably not develop the submitter page beyond the basics.
You can now register on the IPSND if you are here regularly and would like a little more power over your information and ease of use. The big advantage is that you can now edit your submissions to a certain degree if you want to correct them or update them. Registration is free and we of course do not share any information.
When I started this database, I imported all the known serials that had be registered with the old Internet Pinball Project as the basis. That was about 7500 serial numbers (3/4 of where we are now at 10,000 serials). I changed the 'Status' of these serials to 'Unvalidated' since they technically have not been validated. I also wanted these submissions to have a 'lower' value than submission by people that have personall submitted games and verified them through the email link. This doesn't really change much except you now see much more 'blue' in the serial number listings.
I updated the Statistics Page with a feature that allows you to view entire datasets instead of just the top 25 or 50 rows which I commonly limited the stats to in the past. This allows you to drill down into the data if you really want to and also do full exports of the data instead of having just the top.
The site is now running ASP.NET 3.5 under IIS. Im not technically using any of the fancy 3.5 features yet (except one simple LINQ OrderBy function but Im working on it.
I sat down the other night and did a search for 'prototype' on RGP to come up with threads discussing odd features of games (generally due to someone posting that they had a 'prototype'). What came of this was that I added game custom properties to about a dozen games this week. Two examples are... Cleopatra and Sinbad: SheetMetal vs. Plywood cabinets. Bally's Wizard!: two different playfield arch artwork styles. I really encourage everyone to add more custom properties for games that you collect or are interested in... it really starts making the serial number submissions a little more interesting than doing simple existance tracking. More info on the Community Defined Fields page. You can see examples on the Games with the most Community Defined Fields statistics page.
I have given the site's Data Abstraction Layer a major overhaul and deployed it this evening. It was about a two week process but the changes should optimize the communication between the web server and the SQL server which should give better speed to the site overall.
It never fails, every time I leave town, I have power problems in Laramie and a server goes down. This time it was the SQL server due to the old UPS battery. I will get a new battery ordered this week so things should at least improve in the future. Im also not going to be out of the country for a full week anytime soon either.
I think that Dan has held the title of 'Top Submitter' for over a year now but today Ray Johnson made a dash into the front. Nothing like a healthy rivalry between my favorite submitters to get all these lovely serial numbers! Nice job Mr. J.
The original SQL database server is now back online. The site should be back to being somewhat fast now. Im in the process of migrating all databases over to the new server and things should be pretty stable from here on out. I apologize for the interruptions this past week!!
I am running the site of my backup database server this weekend while I build a new SQL box. Until I get switched back over, the site will be running a bit slower and may experience intermittent timeouts as a single proc machine doesn't do too well with both IIS and MS-SQL. :-) Someday I will move this beasty over to MySQL.
The site was down Saturday night due to some 'unexpected' server maintenance. Bottom line, don't promote your SQL server to a domain controller and then demote it. Bad Idea!
I added a new statistic on the statistics page that displays a breakdown of serial number submissions by Manufacturer. Also, on the stat pages that show IP addresses, clicking on the IP will take you to the whois record.
Dan Gutchess submitted the 10,000th serial number into the database today. Thanks to everyone who has been contributing and keep the serial numbers coming. Dan wins a free IPSND T-Shirt as soon as I get them made. ;-)
There is a new Google Analyic chart in the rotation, this one is similar to the breakdown by city but instead does the breakdown by country and color codes the various levels of visitorship. Similar to the city chart, it has fancy floating info panels for each country.
I have included the newest version of the Google Analytics geomap in the stats to the right. Basic functionality is the same but it definely looks prettier and loads a little faster. I will be working on this some more to get different aspects of analytics showing here on the front page.
Just to keep track of those pesky IP address that use bots to auto-submit web links into our sacred database, there are now two new stats on the Statisics Page that allow you to see what IP's are currently banned and a listing of all IP's aggregated by count that have been banned in the past.
In my passionate attempt to keep the site free from bot porn and viagra submissions I have deployed a few new countermeasures to prevent the bots from filling the database with crap data. I put these in place in lieu of using the 'captcha' verification images as those images were causing a few people submission grief. So, if any IP address submits porn links or lame-o data, that IP will now be banned for 48 hours from the site. Huray!!
If you know exactly which game you are looking for, you can quickly type in the ipdbid with a pound symbol in front, so, for example... #1976 will take you directly to Robocop and #311 will take you to Black Knight 2000
The validation images (captcha) were removed from both the sumission page and the parts submission page due to continued problems with some people's browsers. I had added them to prevent bots from posting invalid serial numbers but I will look into other measures for preventing that from happening.
When you click on the verification link that the site emails after every submission, that resulting page will now display all the serial numbers that were marked as verified. It wasn't very apparent in the past but even if you had submitted 25 serials, clicking any single one of the verification links would mark all 25 submissions as 'Verified'. That meant that you didn't have to click every single email that was sent to you in a single batch (defined by session which is equal to 30 minutes in this case).
I added a new front page graph that shows a pie chart of the distribution of all game part submissions on the site. I may change this to be only the last 90 days as I want the front page charts to sort of constantly morph based on time and the way it looks now, most part submissions might be CPU or display PCB's. We will see what happens with the data before I change anything tho.
There is a new statistic that shows games with most number of submitted game parts on the statistics page.
When submitting a game part, there is now a drop down that lets you define what type of part it is (CPU, Driver, Display, etc). When viewing the game part listings under each game, you can then see this information.
I have added a new tab to the game details page that explicitly lists all game parts that have been calculated to belong to that specific game. Some game part serials can be associated with a specific model simply by the structure of the serial number and others cannot. As I manually find these game part serials, I will assign them to a game and they will start showing up in the 'Game Part' lists. The concept is not quite complete but you can read more about it under any game detail 'Game Parts' tab.
I upgraded my entire Data Abstraction layer to full .NET 2.0 compliant code that takes advantage of nullable types and gives me an easy way to audit all database changes. While this doesn't technically effect the site, it will probably introduce a few bugs. I have already fixed about 4 issues tonight after watching the exception log, so if you do have any problems, bear with me and I will get them fixed asap.
There was an issue with the GamePart submission page that was causing some issues accepting submissions, this was due to some old code that tried to prevent duplicate submissions caused by double-clicking the submit button. A big thanks to John Duchi for helping to troubleshoot the problem.
The site was down for 4 days this past week due to me being out of town and Laramie losing power for more than 20 minutes. Since my UPS' can only deal with that much power outage, the servers were down until I got back into town. All should be good now however and Im going to start saving for a bigger UPS. :-)
I went through and defined a custom game property for the dozen or so Bally games that came in both English and German versions. Maybe we can start to see a trend in the serial numbers now.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later but the web bots have officially found us and are attempting to submit all kinds of crappy information including URL's of malicious web sites. So, you will find that some submission forms will require image validation (also known as captcha images) to prevent me from getting a mailbox full of 'Improperly formed submission' errors every day.
When searching for games the results now return a column that specifiies the number of submissions on record for that game, this is helpful for games that might have been made for home use orfor games licensed to other manufacturers. Overall, it allows you to see the potentially most popular or common game amongst all the results.
I added the standard 3 charts for viewing submissions by Country, Condition and GamePart to the manufacturer pages. An example can be see at the Stern Electronics Manufacturer Page. I also added a column that summarizes the number of submissions for that game in the table.
There are now 5 different 'status' levels that a serial number can have defined by the Serial Bot. They are now a little more defined and include a status for games that don't yet have a serial mask defined.
When viewing game serial number lists, if any serials have been submitted in the last 90 days, they are now flagged with a small 'new' icon. This lets you see the activity on specific games you might be watching.
After some playing around with photoshop, I think I have improved the logo a bit for full browsers. Mobile users still have the same old 'compact & flat' version but it works better on limited bandwidth.
I'm starting to experiment with ASP.NET caching and have also been working on optimizing my database trips from the web application. This should help improve page load times in the future.
There was a problem with the submission page today due to a change I made in the code that displays example serial numbers. I have things fixed now so all should be back to normal.
I added pretty icons to the tabs within the game detail page. Also, there is a new tab that explains any known serial number format for a specific game... an example would be Sample Game serials and Production Game serials. Read the previous news item for more info.
I broke the serial masks into a seperate table that now allows me to track multiple formats using regular expressions. This allows the database to have different masks for Sample vs. Production games for example. I was having issues with making a single regular expression that covered all the different known formats since in addition to the literal format, the actual numeric range was often constrained as well. For example, 80's Gottlieb games had sample games that were typically prefixed with an 'S' and started in the one thousands; Production games did not have the 'S' but also started in the two (or greater) thousands. Hence... a serial number of 'S02438' would not be a valid serial number based on this information.
Now that we are on the virge of collecting 10,000 serials, I am starting to fully audit the database with validation masks. These masks allow me to flag serial numbers that look suspect according the best known information on the format of a specific game serial number and the range of known serials. To go along with this, I have created a new Statistics category called 'Quality Control'. There is one available statistic right now that lists the games with the most suspect serial numbers.
The GamePart submisson form now remembers your default values for 6 months using any prior submission, just the way the main submission form works.
I have just added serial number mask definitions for about 1000 games. What this gives me is a method to start determining if submitted serial numbers are in an expected format. I previously only had about 1000 serial masks defined, but we are now at a total of 1880 games out of ~5000 defined. After doing this, I now have about 200 existing serial number submissions that are showing up as 'possibly innacurate'. So, I will start cleaning those up this week.
I have purchased a new server for SQL 2005 and am running Windows 2003 64-bit Edition along with SQL 2005 64-bit. It might be slight overkill but I wanted to support AMD and since their new Athlon's are all 64-bit, I figured I would give it a go. All my drivers were good and the machine is up and running. You should see substantial improvements on the page load times now. I will be working on optimizing indexes and server cache info over the next month to get things as snappy as possible.
I added a new tab on the game detail page that is called 'Find your Serial Number' which basically is a blog style interface for posting tips on finding serial numbers for the *manufacturer*. Posts to this are global to the manufacturer so they aren't necessarily game specific.
I added a new Stats section with a listing of all the current affilate sites, ordered by ranking. GameArchive is the only current affilate so Im hoping to get at least one other site to try out the new feature sometime soon. Come on Webmasters!!!! Also, I added a new feature to the Affilate serial submission process based on a comment by Jesse at Pinball Magic. What happens is that when a new serial is sumbitted via the Affilate include, upon submission, you are now taken back to the Affiliate site to make the process much more streamlined so that submitters don't end up leaving the affiliate's site.
There are two new stats on the Statistics Page that show games with the most current Community Defined fields and then a list of games that have the most community defined field values submitted.
I modified the way the Community Defined Field data is displayed in the second tab of a game's details to show only serials with registered information. This makes the data much easier to read. Since many community defined fields have been defined after-the-fact, the resulting data was pretty sparse generally and involved lots of scrolling. This will also make pages load a tad bit faster.
On most of the Statistics pages, there is a new column called rank that shows the appropriate row number. This makes it easier to see that statistical rank, an example as of right now... 'joust' is the 7th most popular search.
This is a 'feature' that I have been working on for quite a few months now. Due to the really flexible nature, it took awhile but I think it is finally release-able. You can get substantially more info by clicking on the Become an Affiliate link at the top of the page but the basic jist is that now people that have 'owners list' pages, can actually stop trying to maintain static lists of serial numbers that they get submitted via emai and instead simply 'include' data directly from the IPSND using a really simple line of HTML that is similar to the way Google Analytics works.
For games that have Community Defined Fields, there is now a basic data grid underneath the graphs that were previously not there (see Star Gazer for an example). The grid is basic and generally sparse right now but it is a little more useful than the graphs which showed totals but no distribution data. I also fixed a bug in the graphing code that was skewing totals for each property so the grid and graphs numbers now make sense together.
I have added a new field to the serial number database that tracks if the submitter is the 'current owner' of a game or not. This came to my attention from games appearing at shows like the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown where non-owners may submit a serial number of a game that was on display. The reason I wanted to distinguish the difference was simply so that I could make a report filter to only show registrations by owners etc. All the existing registrations are marked as 'non-owner' submissions for now.
A big thank you to Dan and Holly for organizing the Rocky Mountain Pnball Showdown again this year. I had a great time and got to hang out and chat with everyone I haven't seen in awhile. The show had a great variety of games and I was happy to see a nice lineup of Bally's including a Xenon and Medusa. I have a list of about 100 serial numbers that I collected there so I will work on inputting them to the DB this week. See you next year!!
It seems like I have had a failing stick of memory in my server that was making it *extremely* flakey this past month. It is now removed and running stable again. I also upgraded the database server to SQL 2005 from SQL 2000 so we will see if that gives any performance improvements.
For everyone in the Rocky Mountain Region, don't forgot to come over to the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showndown from April 27th-29th in Jefferson County, Colorado (just west of Denver). There will be over 100 games set on free play along with a Pinball Tournament and guest speakers. I have volunteered to do the 'Pinball Shopping 101' session and will be bringing my Williams Cosmic Gunfight and Warlok to the show. The Pinball Showdown website is at http://www.pinballshowdown.com.
The game search algorithm has been improved a little by ignoring 'special characters' in game names like hyphens, colons, asterisks, etc. This was a request from Dan G. because when typing in 'Pinbot' you would not get any matches due to the official game name being 'PIN*BOT'.
I also have made search tokens logically AND'ed together so that searches like 'time line' dont return 150 matches but only game names that have substrings of both terms somewhere in the official name or game abbreviation.
Since there seemed to be many common questions about serial numbers and the database, I made up a little FAQ that attempts to give some feedback and guidance. Hopefully they help answer some of *your* big questions in life.
There were some issues with some of the statistics pages that would cause them to time out. This was because I was tracking hits in the DB from the IIS log and the table was enormous. I moved away from logging IIS traffic in the database and have stored hit values for each game in the database.
There are now some basic pie charts on the game serial pages that summarize the collected data for the community defined fields. I have changed the interface to have tabs across the top so that I can store more info here in the future. Also, I will be adding a data grid that displays the community defined field info in a table below the charts similar to the main serial number registration table.
I came to the realization this weekend that the serial numbers that Williams used for their video games are in the same sequence of serial numbers that they used for their pinball machines. This actually addresses some concerns of mine on the big gaps in their pinball serial numbers since there were large seqences of numbers missing during the 1982 era when pinball was waning and video games were still popular. Because of this interdependency, I have added the 12 video games that Williams manufactured in the early 80's. Please tell all your video game collector friends to register their serials if possible.
Okay, I think this new feature is pretty neat. You may now add additional properties to a game so that when people register a serial, they are asked for some more game specific info. A really good example is with Jungle Lord... there are two different cabinet colors that were produced from the factory... RED and BLUE, by using the Community Defined Fields, I was able to submit the property and define the different allowed values that submitters may choose. Now, we can track game specific production properties to serial ranges to better figure out when these 'features' existed in the production run. Several other examples are... Captain Fantastic... Starred Backglass or not, Twilight Zone... 3rd Magnet. For those of you that are really into specific games, I challenge you to get some good community defined fields submitted so we can track these trends as early as possible. It took me about two weeks to get it up and running so please test it out and give me any feedback you might have on how to improve it.
I created two RSS channels that are described on the RSS Feeds Page. Im not sure where these will go but I thought it would be interesting to be able to see the IPSND announcements available on my Slim Devices Squeezebox in my living room. This is also my cheap way of providing a semi 'web service' interface to the data. Please let me know if you would like to see anything else with the RSS feeds.
I added a new chart in the front page chart rotation that shows top submitters in the last 90 days. I'm trying to come up with charts that change regularly so there is always something interesting to see and you will become hopelessly addicted to visiting the site and submitting serial numbers.
If a game is electronic and has a known MPU (Master Processing Unit) board, there is a link under that game to the MPU details page. The MPU detail page lists all games using that MPU and the aggregate stats associated with it. Header columns on data tables are clickable and allow sorting. Most tables are like this but I will work to make this more consistent across the site.
In addition to the Google Analytics map that normally appear