IFDB database available

After my experience at the “digital preservation” talk at the ELO conference last month, I asked Mike Roberts about getting a database dump of the IFDB service. This is now available on the Archive, in the ./info/ifdb directory:

ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfoXifdb.html
ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/ifdb/

This is a MySQL dump containing all the public information in IFDB: game metadata, reviews, recommendation lists, comments, and so on. It contains public profile information, including your “who has played what” lists, but excluding passwords and other private account info. (As noted on the IFDB site, all this information is under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

We plan to add a new (updated) dump every three months.

Hopefully this will be of some interest to IF researchers, today or someday. Thanks to Mike for agreeing to this and putting together the export process.

If the internet is still around 100 years hence, I’m sure all the web-archaeologists doing their theses on the online presence of early 21st century interactive fiction will be very thankful.

Neat!

  • Wade

Awesome. Will the dumps be announced after this (on the IFDB news feed, or elsewhere?)

There’s a “new additions to the Archive” RSS feed: ifarchive.org/indexes/archive.rss

ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html

Whoops, we retired that a couple of years ago. I’ll remove it from the indexer template. (Should disappear tomorrow.)

Thanks.

I can’t find game ratings in the database. Are they not included?

Never mind, found them: they’re in the “reviews” table.