New Features on IFDB

This is a summary of recent additions and changes to the site. The list isn't comprehensive - we report only the more visible and significant changes, so you might notice some minor changes from time to time that aren't reported here.

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31 January 2023

Rules for the 2022 IFDB Awards:

The IFDB Awards is an annual competition designed to award excellence in creating interactive fiction.

It is held from February 1st to the first weekend after February 15th each year on the Interactive Fiction Database, and take the form of polls.
-The Player’s Choice competition is a set of open polls that anyone can participate in.
-The Author’s Choice competition is a set of closed polls that only published authors can participate in.
Votes in the Player’s Choice competition are public. Votes in the Author’s Choice competition are public but anonymized.

Eligibility to vote in the Author’s Choice competition is determined by having a game linked to your IFDB profile (this can be found by editing a game page and use the ‘Link to Author’s Profile’ feature. Authors added incorrectly to a game will not be permitted to vote (for instance, if someone associates a random game they didn’t make to their account).

Rules for discussion and voting
-Voting must be in good faith and be based on personal experience with the games involved.
-Campaigning or organizing voting is not allowed if it breaks the above rule.
-Discussion of games on merit is allowed and encouraged.
-There is no hard limit on how many votes a person can cast in each poll for different games. A player voting for so many games that it makes voting difficult for others (such as voting for every game from the whole year) may have their votes removed, but only after warning.
-Author cannot vote for their own games. Such votes will be removed so that the running tallies are correct. Authors can post about their own games (for instance on intfiction) as long as doesn’t encourage people to break the rules (such as telling people to vote for your game even if they haven’t played it).

Code of conduct

-Voters must abide by the IFDB Code of Conduct. Harassment of other voters (including on other platforms) and creating multiple accounts for one person are prohibited.

Moderation -Votes that are cast incorrectly (for instance, voting for a Twine game in a Choicescript poll) or fraudulently (for instance, using sockpuppet accounts) may be removed.

Eligibility -For most polls, games are eligible if they are listed on IFDB and have a publication date during 2022.
-For system- or genre-specific polls, games additionally must have the appropriate system or genre listed on their IFDB page under the specified field.
-Each poll will have a link to an IFDB search listing eligible games.
-Any IFDB user can edit game pages to confirm eligibility. However, malicious editing (such as adding every genre to a game or adding incorrect systems to a game) will be reverted or removed.
-Any game author can opt out of the competition. Adding a note to the game page during the competition may be helpful to let others know not to vote for it, but opting out should be officially done by messaging the organizer (me, for now).
-The organizer’s games are eligible for the player’s choice awards, but not the author’s choice awards.

Results -Results will be clearly visible throughout the poll. However, there will be a grace period of up to 3 days at the end to allow checking of votes before the official announcements, which will be made on Intfiction and IFDB.
-Polls with very low traffic will not have a winner awarded. This is left up to organizer discretion, but low traffic may include less than 5 votes for the winning game or less than ten votes total cast.

Future of Awards

One of the main purposes of these new awards is to be community-owned and regular. They need to keep working even if I don’t keep working.

The awards begin on February 1st of each year. If Feb 1st passes without the current organizer having created the polls, anyone can create the polls themselves.

The community can propose new changes to awards or new organizers via public discussion. A public yes/no poll on intfiction with more than 50% voting yes can be used to add new organizers. Current organizers can also add in other organizers or successors, subject to a public veto.

24 January 2023

New this week: Improvements to IFDB Polls: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.

Locked Polls: When editing a poll you've created, you can now "lock" the poll, preventing anyone from adding, removing, or editing votes.

Anonymous Polls: When creating a poll, you can now choose to make the poll "public" or "anonymous." In public polls, everyone can see who voted for each item in the poll. In anonymous polls, you can only view the number of votes for each poll item. (IFDB administrators can see who voted for what.)

1 February 2022

New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.

Exclude editorial reviews from member reviews: In a few places, we were miscounting off-site ("editorial") reviews as "member reviews." (If you see the number of reviews has decreased, that's almost certainly why.)

"Play On-line" button works for zipped games: Thanks to the IF Archive's new "unbox" service, the "Play On-line" button can now play games that are only available in zipped format. For example, we now have a "Play On-line" button for Worlds Apart.

Removed Download Adviser: The "Show Me How!" button is gone from all games. The "Play On-line" button works great now for 98 of the top 100 free games on IFDB, and individual story files have links to up-to-date IFWiki pages like https://www.ifwiki.org/Z-code_interpreters for all of the major file formats (for non-newbies who want to try a few interpreters and pick their favorite).

16 December 2021

New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.

Added "Play On-line" support for ADRIFT: play.adrift.co is back online, so most of the ADRIFT games now have "Play On-line" buttons, linking there.

Added "Play On-line" support for web games: Why should web games miss out on the fun? Games with an HTML download marked "playable" or where the link name contains "Play Online" will have a prominent "Play On-line" button, like other games do.

Allow rating/reviewing on mobile: For years, IFDB has hidden some boxes on mobile to try to reduce clutter, but hiding the "Have you played this game?" box was a step too far.

6 December 2021

New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.

Reorganized header links: Most of the header links only make sense if you're logged in (Profile, Settings, My Activity, Inbox), so we now hide all of those and just show a "Log In" link when you're logged out. When you're logged in on mobile, we put all of those links in a new "Menu" menu.

Added "Play On-line" support for TADS and Hugo: As of two weeks ago, Parchment now supports TADS and Hugo, so we've updated our TADS 2, TADS 3, and Hugo games to include a "Play On-line" button.

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