Pinball Map API Tokens

We have always been happy to provide an open, friction-free public API for any developers that want to use it. This has encouraged a diverse group of people to make interesting uses of the data: Students simply wanting to learn how to use an API; analytics-minded folks who like to explore the data in interesting ways; businesses that want to easily list their line-up on their website; folks like Matchplay that use it to quickly import machine line-ups for a tournament. These uses align with the intention of the API: to make the data available so others can make interesting things. Most of the time, people approach us with their plan and we work together to find a good solution. There have always been people here and there who grabbed the data (often very inefficiently) and made a “where to find pinball” site with it - basically cloning our core functionality, and sometimes with no attribution. Lately, though, with the barrier to entry so low, basically everyone who is working on a pinball app/website of any sort is slapping on a pinball map. Making a pinball rules app? An operator maintenance app? It appears that whatever you’re doing, your LLM is going to suggest “now let’s help people find where to play.” After spending a couple hours completely hallucinating API endpoints, they settle on something like, “query the Pinball Map API and load 6,000 locations every time someone visits the site, and then poll these 98 other endpoints once an hour” (or something equally bad). Every week there are about two of these new apps popping up. It’s can be a lot to deal with for a hobby project like ours, and we don’t have a ton of time and patience for it. Our goals are always to provide you with a fast, reliable, and easy to use and update map. And these apps, while useful in advertising our site, are devouring our resources and effectively taking people off-site for a very similar map experience, thereby reducing our chances of receiving updates.