Right now, we have three sites that should know about new IF games - IFArchive, IFDB, and IFWiki.
Running ParserComp has given me great respect for the people who regularly maintain these sites. Submitting stubbed-out versions of 14 games in IFArchive and IFDB took far more time than I anticipated - enough so that I haven’t even set up ParserComp in IFWiki yet.
It seems like there should be a single tool that lists all the fields for all three sites, which then creates a submission for each site.
Does such a tool exist? If not, has anyone done any work in this direction yet?
Does it mean anything to submit a stubbed-out version of a game to the Archive? Or is this something that people have been doing which I’m not aware of? (Possible…)
I have this notion that IFDB has an “also upload to the Archive” button when you create an entry, but I’ve never used it myself.
I wonder again to what extent it benefits us to maintain three distinct information sources with such largely redundant domains. I know, every time I get placated with indications as to how the different sites have slightly different mandates, one has a greater emphasis on reviews, etc. I think that consolidating them into a single mega-resource would be a mountain of work – but would save effort in the long run.
It does: ifdb.tads.org/ifarchive-upload?t … =&version= but I’ve never used it either. It prefills an IF Archive submission form with information from the game’s IFDB entry. I can’t tell if it works the other way as well, automatically adding a pending download link to the IFDB entry.
I’d say the redundancy - what redundancy there is - is probably a good thing. The IF community sometimes has a hard time keeping even the most important projects like the IF Archive and Gargoyle running smoothly. Trying to consolidate all the features of IF Archive, IFDB and IFwiki into a single site would create a huge unwieldy codebase that it’d be even harder to find maintainers for. And if something went really, really wrong and that one site went down, we’d be in big trouble.
I mean, it’s not so very long since Baf’s Guide was the main portal to the IF Archive, and now it appears to be permanently defunct. It’s just lucky (or maybe it hastened its demise) that all the information and reviews from Baf’s were archived on IFDB before Baf’s went down.
Nope, just sloppy writing on my part. There aren’t enough IFArchive fields for stubbed-out versions to exist. It was a full IFArchive submission and a stubbed IFDB submission.
I uploaded all the ParserComp games via the IFDB button. Somehow, I got the idea that the IFDB would update once the games were available in the Archive. It did not… which required me to loop back and edit all the games again to correct their links and remove the “pending” checkbox.
In some ways, this was almost worse than not having the helpful link, because I assumed functionality was in place that wasn’t. (Or did I somehow miss the explanation? or duck in before a helpful script finished its job? I am willing to believe either of these things.
That is the basic idea of how it is supposed to work. Once the file is moved into the Archive there’s a Python program we run on the file that talks to IFDB and confirms the final location of the file. Did you edit the IFDB pages before I sent you that email indicating that I’d moved all the files into the Archive?
It looks like this is failing in some circumstances. I just noticed that Saturn’s Child seems to have used the auto-upload to IF Archive function, but the links on IFDB never got updated after the files were processed on the IF Archive. I updated them manually myself just now. Have no idea if this is related to Carolyn’s problem, though.
No, I didn’t. I uploaded via IFDB to the Archive, got your email, went to the IFDB, saw that things weren’t hooked up, and went through and hooked up everything by hand.
To help address the “creating new pages for IF works on IFWiki” part of this issue, I’ve been working on my first ever Python project: a script to gather info from IFDB and create stubs in a text file which can then be pasted into IFWiki. It’s rough. Definitely use it at your own risk because I don’t know what I’m doing. But it’s a start.
To use it, you need to create a text file that contains URLs, one per line. Each URL needs to be either an IFDB page for a single work, or an IFDB page that links to single-work IFDB pages (for instance, you could list the url of a page of search results). In the second case, it’ll look for links on that page to follow. I’m considering taking that option out because I’m not sure what risks are involved or how to put safeguards in, but it does make it a lot more convenient. (There’s more info in the file.)
Help/suggestions appreciated. I’ve attached this as a text file because .py isn’t allowed.
(EDITED to update, and to upload newer versions. Last updated 6-Jun-2016.) ifwiki.txt (35.2 KB)