All non-Sandpit games have now been added to IFDB: http://ifdb.tads.org/

Still some more details to be added there - cover art will be uploaded soon. Hopefully this will make it easier for other people out there in Interactive Fiction world to find your games.

This will become part of the Publish process soon (after games are reviewed by a moderator and assigned a category).

Cool!

Cover art has now been added, and games on this website with an IFDB page now have a link there.

A few people on IFDB have already started adding reviews - mostly unfavourable so far, but I'm sure they'll get to the good ones eventually...

Neat to see Sleuth up there. I really should finish those last few tweaks I was going to implement and take it out of beta status. If I can get it done really quick, it'll be my January 1GAM entry. If not, maybe I'll use it for February while I finish up some other stuff.

IFDB has now been updated with non-Sandpit games uploaded since the first import.

In future this will be done more regularly, as it's now something I can easily do from the website with one click, so expect to see your game added to IFDB shortly after it's been categorised.

It turns out many Quest games, even the non-Sandpit ones, are unwelcome at IFDB: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=10865

I have turned off automatic submission now.

If you feel your game (or any game for that matter - it doesn't have to be one that you wrote) might comply with the unstated community standards, and the unwritten policy, to be eligible for inclusion on this "comprehensive catalog of IF" (http://ifdb.tads.org/tips), you will need to set up an account and submit it manually.

I don't want to dredge up the discussion already had; I'd just like to add my two cents in case it's useful...

To be honest, I'm sort of partial to a checkbox of some kind for inclusion on IFDB. It is a bit scary to have things automatically presented before a larger audience, and I even had a case once where I accidentally marked a game public, and it was suddenly replicated onto IFDB, beyond my control. (I could make private the game back on Quest, but it was now out there "in the wild" where I couldn't change it myself.)

I would see posting to IFDB as being a deliberate choice, something an author chooses to do. That doesn't necessarily address the issue that was initially raised on intfiction about the flood of games, as (for all we know) all authors will check it anyway. So perhaps consider it addressing a different problem, which is one of letting the Quest author decide when it's time to push his/her game out beyond his/her control to a larger forum, one which appeals to me, as I'd like control over how my game is distributed.

Of course, it may all be moot at this point, since it's been disabled...

Alex wrote:It turns out many Quest games, even the non-Sandpit ones, are unwelcome at IFDB: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=10865

I have turned off automatic submission now.

If you feel your game (or any game for that matter - it doesn't have to be one that you wrote) might comply with the unstated community standards, and the unwritten policy, to be eligible for inclusion on this "comprehensive catalog of IF" (http://ifdb.tads.org/tips), you will need to set up an account and submit it manually.

To be honest, I think your attitude was the biggest problem in that discussion. Everyone else was doing their best to come up with sensible solutions and you just basically said all their ideas were stupid and you weren't going to listen to any of them. If you'd been a little more accommodating, things might have turned out a lot better for Quest.

I don't think it would have made much difference either way. Anyway I wasn't going to bother replying to this, but seriously I've been chuckling all day at the irony of Dave lecturing people about their attitude.

Ah, Al, I only do it to cheer you up. You must realise that, surely?

davidw wrote: Everyone else was doing their best to come up with sensible solutions...

Sensible solution, yes, e.g."Anyone up for banning the Quest bot?"

No, a checkbox wouldn't help, because most writer think their game are absolutely great and they would send them to IFDB. The only working solution would be checking every released game by Alex (or Jay or some other known "Quester" from this site). Only they would be able to send them to IFDB. But who wants to do this endless work? Not me!

And by the way I dont want my game to be added to the IFDB, so deactivating this option is absolutly right.

Like I said, people were doing their *best* to come up with sensible solutions. Maybe banning the Quest bot wasn't the best one overall, but when the person in the ideal position to do something positive was the one telling them how stupid their ideas were and how he had zero intention of listening to them, it was the only one that was likely to make any headway. As I said at the time, it's in no one's interests, especially Al's, if IFDB gets flooded with bad Quest games. It gives the rest of the IF world a terrible impression of Quest and it's pretty discouraging for Quest authors seeing their games get mauled on a site they probably weren't even aware existed at the time they wrote the game, and which they have no choice about their games getting uploaded to.

So in all honestly, banning the Quest bot might well have been the best solution: it stops IFDB getting flooded with bad Quest games and it leaves the option of adding games to IFDB in the hands of the people who wrote the games.

Sorry to butt in, but something I absolutely have to say and right now there's no guarantee Alex will see it on IntFiction.

So now games are being added from IFDB into TA, which is fine, except that it present the same problem - and now TA's feeling it. Because while IFDB allows you to browse through the various new additions, TA doesn't. The "LATEST" page is limited to 18 entries. Add 20 and two of them are gone. Whoever's doing it clearly has some good intentions, but they're spamming it and making the newest actual games (as opposed to the ones release years ago) impossible to find.

There WAS a feed, which I used to use. It broke down a long time ago and it was never reliable anyway.

I visit the site *every day* to download the latest games, so it's no longer theoretical: I'm an actual user, bringing to you a complaint. My suggestion to work around it is simply to allow people to see more than 18 entries, like IFDB does.

Alternatively, whoever's doing it please do, say, 10 per day. That way nothing's lost.

EDIT - Reworded the post to make it sound a bit less agressive, sorry about that.

Although there's currently no pagination on the overall "Latest Games" page, there is pagination for each category if you click "Latest" at the top, e.g. http://textadventures.co.uk/games/latest/fantasy

I'm manually adding batches of online-playable games from IFDB so sorry these will be cluttering things up for the next few days, but once it's done it's done. If you want me to run a query for the latest Quest-only additions at some point I can do that and provide it as a list of URLs here perhaps.

Doing a check for each category is rather tedious, and actually that query would be a pretty good idea!

EDIT - An alternative, of course, would be bringing the feed back, or fixing it, or whatever happened to it...

EDIT 2 - Hey, what do you know, this issue has come up before. Maybe it WOULD be a good idea to paginate.

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3873

Peter Pears wrote:Sorry to butt in, but something I absolutely have to say and right now there's no guarantee Alex will see it on IntFiction.

So now games are being added from IFDB into TA, which is fine, except that it present the same problem - and now TA's feeling it. Because while IFDB allows you to browse through the various new additions, TA doesn't. The "LATEST" page is limited to 18 entries. Add 20 and two of them are gone. Whoever's doing it clearly has some good intentions, but they're spamming it and making the newest actual games (as opposed to the ones release years ago) impossible to find.

There WAS a feed, which I used to use. It broke down a long time ago and it was never reliable anyway.

I visit the site *every day* to download the latest games, so it's no longer theoretical: I'm an actual user, bringing to you a complaint. My suggestion to work around it is simply to allow people to see more than 18 entries, like IFDB does.

Alternatively, whoever's doing it please do, say, 10 per day. That way nothing's lost.

EDIT - Reworded the post to make it sound a bit less agressive, sorry about that.

A system that works is like newgrounds (flash animation site) where things get uploaded week by week and the community either votes things up or down... If things get submitted that are bad enough they rarely swim again where as the better content get lifted into prominence.

That works at newgrounds having a fairly big and active community though but it is open to abuse (friends voting each others bad works up and other people's down, for instance). Not sure what the traffic is like here or IFDB with regards to static versus transient users (the former being more helpful in this scenario), but if it leans more towards the former it could be a workable system.

Rather than the two sites going at loggerheads at each other over this the best solution would be to unite and integrate in some way. The best submissions on newgrounds end up on the front page which IFDB could function as where as TA could serve as the community of budding authors. Why the war? You both serve different functions that would compliment each other perfectly with the right coding. It would also promote greater overlap leading to a less us and them mentality.

Furthermore, running it as a bi-monthly thing (I doubt weekly would work, monthly might) would encourage more people to write and those who do write already to up their game.

Then maybe the winner and runner up make it onto IFDB which both solves the problem of flooding and increases the quality of new content.

I'll post this over there too.

From my perspective IFDB and textadventures.co.uk serve two different purposes. TA is the main publishing site for Quest and has been evolving into a platform for any web-based text adventure. IFDB is the catalog for all IF, online or not, 'out-of-print' or current. I don't think it's necessary or even desirable to have one site that rules them all, especially by popular vote. In my experience on sites that use votes it just leads to fairly meaningless vote wars, vote pumping, etcetera. I think IFDB's rating system is a better mechanism.

Reading the IF forum about this I realized how grateful we should be that Quest page exists because "everyone" can upload a game a have fun as it is supposed to be. It's not only about creating a piece of literature but also creating games and experimenting with it.

Personally, I like when kids upload games created with Quest. It can be a piece of junk today but a masterpiece tomorrow. Once again kids are the future.

Quest made me dream about a new golden age of interactive fiction, now using smartphones and tablets with sound, images, voice control, voice reading, Siri playing IF, people competing to see who ends a game first like those SMS contests out there, etc.

Iam Curio
www.juegosdetexto.tk

m4u wrote:Reading the IF forum about this I realized how grateful we should be that Quest page exists because "everyone" can upload a game a have fun as it is supposed to be. It's not only about creating a piece of literature but also creating games and experimenting with it.

Personally, I like when kids upload games created with Quest. It can be a piece of junk today but a masterpiece tomorrow. Once again kids are the future.

Quest made me dream about a new golden age of interactive fiction, now using smartphones and tablets with sound, images, voice control, voice reading, Siri playing IF, people competing to see who ends a game first like those SMS contests out there, etc.

Iam Curio
http://www.juegosdetexto.tk

That's a fabulous post. I hope you don't mind, I've quoted it in the thread at IntFiction.

Also, I think we got infected by a recurring troll we hoped we'd gotten rid of, so please ignore pretty much everything between pages 14-20. My quote of your post is on page 20.

EDIT - The good mods have split all the trolling off. Goodie.