Pinball League site

[Wizcat]

I've been meaning to do this for a good while, since taking over maintenance of the site somewhere back in 2021 - but I've finally made the site code open source here:

GitHub - PaulGarnerUk/UKPinballLeague: UK Pinball League site

UK Pinball League site. Contribute to PaulGarnerUk/UKPinballLeague development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

(And the site of course is www.pinballleague.uk)

Although it might not look too different, it's changed quite a lot since Nick handed over the reigns. I have many plans for further updates, not least of which is entirely rewriting the thing in .net. All of which is to say if you're an adventurous coder and thinking of contributing to this codebase, then please get in touch first to chat about things

For the 99.9% that are not coders, then I may occasionally update this thread to describe new features as they get coded in to the site.

Today's minor update was to add a little flag to help show when guest players have attended a league meet in a region they don't normally attend (and so their scores are shown, but they are excluded from the results). I'm planning to continue work on that to have a toggle for showing/hiding guest players.. but not today.

Constructive criticism or ideas on improvements to the site are always welcome too of course, and this might be a good place to do that.
Cheers, Paul

 

[Wizcat]

Made an update to the site in the last few days to (optionally) show guest players in the meet results.

As regular league players probably already know - when playing in a league meet in a different region than you usually play in, then your scores are excluded from the official results (as your results can only be counted in one region per season). So this might be of interest if you attended a league meet in a 'foreign' region and were curious how your results stacked up to the locals!

Where guest players are spotted in a league meet, then you'll see an option to conditionally include (or exclude) their scores. An example from last year is this meet in the Northern region which had three guests : https://www.pinballleague.uk/leaguemeet.php?season=15&region=n&meet=3

 

[Wizcat]

Site doesn't seem to want to let me paste a long list of guest players and links to results, so I'll attach as a file instead if anyone interested

 

[AlanJ]

Any plans to combine the league or the league site with any of the other uk competitive pinball events?

any merit in having a uk ranking points system across all comps in uk?

quick someone. register uk pinball, uk pinball league, as trademarks before Someone else does.

 

[ailsaclunie]

Thank you for all your hard work on this Paul

 

[AlanJ]

@Wizcat PS - link on FAQ page to WPPR doesnt seem to work.

 

[Wizcat]

Any plans to combine the league or the league site with any of the other uk competitive pinball events?

any merit in having a uk ranking points system across all comps in uk?

Long story short - yep!

On the 'old' site, Nick was maintaining (manually) a UK rankings page. If you're reasonably familiar with how the leagues work you can probably see how Nick was calculating that, and fairly quickly spot flaws in the methodology. The old page is still available here: https://www.pinballleague.uk/rankings.php

When I got control I was considering a better way of ranking might be to try and run ELO or Glicko (or other ranking systems) across the data. But I also imagined there's probably not enough 'cross-pollination' of players across the leagues to make it reliable. So I structured the data in such a way that I could hold results for any event, thinking that longer term I could update the players with their IFPA numbers, then use the IFPA API to pull over any other UK based events the players have been involved in, where there will be a lot more cross-pollination across regions.

Then in the last year I became aware that someone else in the UK scene has put a fair amount of effort into trying to do something similar, though (amazingly to me) without using databases! My plans still involve a fair amount of effort/time, and I'm conscious now that I don't want to step on the toes of someone else who has put an enormous amount of effort into similar. So if I get to a point where I'm hoping to tackle that it may be something we can work on together.

I'm also not confident that ELO/Glicko etc would be 'good enough', so I imagine it would end up taking a similar journey of tweaking the maths similar to what IFPA have been doing for years now. But as a stats nerd it would be interesting to me

 

[Wizcat]

Pushed an update to the site so that when league coordinators have provided a list of expected machines at an upcoming meet, then tips for playing those machines are available

Example : https://www.pinballleague.uk/schedule-info.php?season=17&region=n&meet=1

(League coordinators - For the short to medium term, just email me lists of expected machines at upcoming meets if you want this. Longer term you'll be able to manage all this yourself)