System Updates

We continuously address small bug fixes as well as regularly work to improve the responsiveness of our pages through programming rewrites and data caching. Additionally, here are some of the more significant site improvements we have worked on recently:

Date	Description
January 03, 2025	Happy New Year! We just launched a Leaderboard to give credit to member's contributions in many ways. Points are awarded for content contributions to the site, recent activity, and donations. From the main menu, see More -> Member Contribution Leaderboard.
December 20, 2024	The home page (scroll down) now shows the 10 most recent member additions and 10 most recent member edits to the various databases here.
December 18, 2024	For years we've had the ability to set up legacy/series/franchise data on a game. For example, if you look up any Area 51 series game and scroll down to the Legacy section, you can see the history of the series with links to other games in the series. Today we released the ability for our members to create, add to, and edit these relationship lists directly (logged in, just go to a game entry and near the top click 'edit Legacy'). Additionally, we've also created a new report to show all these legacy lists. From the Main Menu see Games & Machines -> List by Legacy or Series.
December 11, 2024	We've always had a (major) News page, but now we have made publicly accessible our System Updates page then notes our site improvements of notes. If you are reading this update, you are probably on the page we are talking about!
December 10, 2024	A improvement was made to allow Admins & Moderators to change the name of a machine, or the type of a machine (for example, from Video Game to Arcade or Pinball). This was previously restricted as error checking had to be added to prevent duplicate URLs.
December 09, 2024	We just spent a week and a half working on the search functions of the eLibrary online PDF system. We upgraded the search engine to be able to do fuzzy searches (to find misspellings and more), and added custom support for Spanish and French language (through the French magazine title still has to be re-processed as it was OCRed in English). 99% of the upgrades have launched, though next week we will likely add the ability for users to adjust the 'fuzziness' of their searches.
November 30, 2024	On manufacturer detail pages, we added a 'For Sale' tab to see all the machines that other members are selling made by that manufacturer. For example, please see Cinematronics - For Sale or Universal - For Sale.
November 29, 2024	We released a major upgrade to our encyclopedia's Genres & Themes classification system. On the main site, under 'Games & Machines', select 'List by Genre', or jump directly go our Genres page. Logged in members can Read More About It. Additionally, under game records, we added 'Limited Test Release' to class, in addition to the existing Wide Release, Bootleg, Concept/One-Off-Hoax, Hack/Rom Swap, and Prototype.
November 28, 2024	Admin tools were added that improve the ability to help users with their accounts.
November 28, 2024	Almost 20 years ago, we had graphic images that displayed the Japanese names of games. We've finally converted 3,794 of them to a text field which is much more usable, launched use of them today. These foreign names aren't yet searchable in our game search boxes, but will be soon.
November 12, 2024	In our eLibrary online pdf section, we added the ability to filter the titles show by type of magazine, by decade, or by country.
November 11, 2024	We have added the ability to browse through games by decade and year. On the main site, 'Games & Machines', select 'List by Years', or jump directly to the List by Years page.
October 21, 2024	When a user hasn't verified their email address in a long time, the system can force the user to re-validate before they can use the system. That can be problematic if the user no longer has access to an email address but has forgotten to update their email address on the system. Now, if an email hasn't been validated for a set period of time (say, for 90 days for example), the user will suggest a voluntary email confirmation process allowing a user to validate or change their email address before getting locked out of the system.
October 21, 2024	We updated the Arcade Map so that in addition to centering maps based on user browser supplied location or a user's location is included in their profile, it now also uses IP address to help determine location when the other 2 methods aren't available (particularly helpful for guest visitors not logged in).
October 20, 2024	A 'Report an Issue' form was added for users to identify problematic contributions. It's found on the main site menu under More -> Report Issue. Also, addition tweaks were made on how the site handles non-latin characters (which intentionally are allowed in some places of the site but not others).
October 11, 2024	We broke up the Game Census Detail Page format into multiple sub-pages with tabs for 'Have Game' (to show what users have the game), 'For Sale Game', 'Wanted Game', 'For Sale Part', and 'Wanted Part'. Various significant improvements developed over the last few weeks were launched. We are also testing a 'Serial Numbers' tab. Tabs only appear if there is data for that game. We added maps on pages when applicable. For example, see the page for Sega's Samurai
October 03, 2024	Previously we broke up the VAPS profile pages into multiple pages selectable via a tab system. Today we launched the same for Manufacturer detail pages. At some point in the future, we will likely do something similar for the Game detail pages.
September 25, 2024	We launched a Members Map page in the VAPS member section that tries to display a member map for the visitor centered around their location. Clicking on the Filters tab and one can filter the members map by members that have a particular game for sale, just have a particular game, or want a particular game.
September 25, 2024	On the Arcade Map page, we launched a variety of upgrades. A red 'X' now displays the user's current location on the map (it works better if the user is logged in, or the user allows the browser to provide an estimate of the users location). We upgraded the Search and Filters system to show the most common search fields all the time (Name, City, State, Country), and then to hide a lot more options that open up when a user clicks on 'Filters'. A new 'distance' column attempts to determine the approximate distance a user is from a listed location. Numerous other improvements were made to the Arcade Map section.
September 18, 2024	In our online calendar we added new event types: Competition and Exhibition to the existing choices of Auction, Show, and Trade Event.
September 17, 2024	In the Arcade Map system, we launched a much-extended list of location types (Shopping Mall, Miniature Golf, etc.), focus (types of machines a location focuses on) as well as links on location detail pages directly to Google and Apple maps. We also added support for having a user allow their browser to provide their approximate location to the site, which is helpful for map centering for non-logged in members. Other various improvements were made within the Arcade Map tree.
September 17, 2024	On the Arcade Map page, we have added a Favorites tab to highlight locations of merit. Highlighted locations show with a slightly larger icon on our maps. We are continuing to modify our system of picking what locations make it onto this list.
September 05, 2024	We have added an Arcade Map section for public locations that have a game that can be played on each game detail page. For example, see: Galaga.
September 04, 2024	On the Arcade Map page, we added the ability to search (by clicking on 'Filters') on Focus, so that a user may search for places the focus on Penny Arcade machines, or Modern Pinball, etc. Also, when people add an image to a location, they can now add a caption to the image.
August 30, 2024	On the Arcade Map, one can now click 'Filters' and search for locations that have a particular game (for example Galaga).