IF Archive is moving to IFTF hosting

As part of our continuing plan to conquer the universe… (no, don’t say that)

For the past three years, the IF Archive has been hosted by Mark Musante. (See this 2014 post: Archive hosting has changed ). He recently suggested that IFTF take it over, since that’s what the organization is for. And I’m on the board, so it’s not like it’s a big change really.

Announcement: blog.iftechfoundation.org/2017-0 … chive.html

As that says, we’ve already transferred the domain registration; we’ll work on the server content next. It shouldn’t be a big job. I’ll post more news here.

This switch will allow us to make a few improvements, like adding an SSL certificate (so https: access will work). Once everything is in place, we’ll think about what future work might be enabled by IFTF resources.

The web upload form is temporarily disabled while we move services around. Sorry for the interruption.

The move is complete and ifarchive.org/ is now pointing to the new server. (You should see “…a public service of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation” at the bottom of the page. If not, wait a few hours for the DNS to percolate.)

We’ve taken this opportunity to update a few things.

  • The server supports https and, in fact, redirects to https.
  • The About page (ifarchive.org/misc/about.html) describes the Archive Committee and also talks a bit about the Archive’s history.
  • The Terms of Use page (ifarchive.org/misc/license.html) has been rewritten to be more sensible. We now distinguish between admin-generated content (CC-BY-4.0) and archived files (distributed under their own license or an assumed “personal use only” license).
  • The upload form now has check boxes for “I am the author of this file and I give permission for the IF Archive to host and distribute it” and “I am not the author, but to the best of my knowledge the author is okay with this”. You have to check one. We used to say that files should only be uploaded by the author, but we never really enforced that rule and it doesn’t really make sense for us. (But we still prefer that files be uploaded by the original author.)
  • As noted in another thread, FTP upload is no longer supported. Anonymous FTP download still works.
  • Directory names containing “&” no longer screw up the index files.
  • Probably other things I’m forgetting.

Thanks to the team for helping make sure the transition was smooth and painless.