Strictly speaking I think this is probably correct, though maybe not for things uploaded to the archive before the current IFTF terms came into force. I think the original aim of the IF Archive, which would have been known to uploaders, was that it would have multiple mirrors to ensure its longevity.
Having said all that, I can’t imagine the IFTF ever selling anything from the IF Archive.
It’s not pure waffle. :) It is adapted from previous clients, because, well, we picked this lawyer because she had previous experience with small nonprofits! But the general TOS document is intended to cover everything IFTF does or might do, including running the forum, hosting comps, running conferences, etc. So it’s very general.
Well, it’s gone back and forth.
In the earliest years, there were no mirrors. Just an FTP site.
Later (starting 1999-ish) there was an HTTP site mirror.
A few years later (2001) the FTP site was gone and there was a web site and several volunteer mirrors for backup. The list of mirrors wasn’t all that stable, though.
In the IFTF era, we moved to a more reliable host (daily backups at Linode and annual backups to AWS) so we didn’t need the volunteer mirrors.
Of course for most of that time we didn’t have explicit legal terms. Or a lawyer. We’ve tried to set up the IF Archive terms to cover how “everybody expects” the Archive to behave, but it’s been 25 30 years (yikes) and “everybody” is a lot of different people.
Exactly this - most lawyers would be glad to spend extra time learning all about the details of a client’s needs and writing multiple different sets of terms exquisitely tailored to the specific purposes of each of the various activities the client performs. But since lawyers bill by the hour that’s not really in the cards.
EDIT: I just checked the IFTF transparency report and as best I can tell, they spent $1,100 updating the ToS - and the focus was on GDPR compliance. That’s pretty impressive economy, from my best guesses at what the hourly rates would have been and how long the work would have taken.
I’m not sure if you mean “you should have a plain English summary of the terms you can share with people” - which is true, and why when you go to upload something to the archive it says:
Please read our Terms of Use before you use this form. By uploading files, you give the Archive permission to store those files forever and distribute them freely to the public.
If you’re saying “the best way to work with a lawyer is to tell them what you want, then insist they don’t rely on any previous work product and generate something 100% hand-tailored to your situation,” well, see previous post; as someone who’s done a reasonable bit of governance stuff with nonprofits much, much bigger than IFTF, I can tell you it’s really easy to blow through your budget on this kind of stuff and 99% of the time, there are way more impactful things you can spend the money on.
So I said I’d put my thoughts here and then I saw that 50+ posts were made in a day haha, looks like it was good I made the post!
In my case, I think that IF Archive is a pain to upload to, especially with the bottleneck of waiting for the random volunteers to upload it for me…I think it’s a good endeavor but with the upload limit being ridiculously low and it being a pretty annoying barrier as opposed to itch.io’s ease of use (and a CLI too!) really has made me avoid the labor so far.
I tried to upload a new version of Erstwhile back last year, and then I realized the version I had tried to upload was full of bugs, and so I embarrassedly asked them to take it down a few days later. They hadn’t even gotten it up in the first place! I didn’t try again.
That’s not what I meant, but I do believe that it a good idea, as long as it’s consistent with the terms.
That’s not what I meant either. Using precedents leads to efficiency (whether in law or programming or anything else) but the end result has to achieve the right outcome, and not something different.
I agree with the saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good. The question then is whether in fact the terms are good enough. Maybe they are!
Good edit. I was about to ask a question, but your rephrasing cleared it up before I had the chance.
ETA: Reading that just now, I realize that could be interpreted as snarky. I meant it literally; I understood better what you meant and appreciated the change.
No problem. The edit was to remove a third sentence, but keep the words “and not something different” by adding them to the second. I realised that I was waffling and so had fallen into the same trap as the lawyer
I suppose there’s two things. I use the archive as a host for most of my works, because it’s free and more reliable than my managing my own hosting, and I also have it there as an archive for posterity, to make it more likely that players and scholars in 50 or 100 years time might come upon my work.
As an archive it’s great. The slow speed of entering stuff into it doesn’t matter when the time scale is ‘posterity’.
As a host, it’s pretty good in the medium-long term (free, reliable) but pretty bad in the short term. If I make a game outside of the IFComp, or am updating a game on the archive (as I’ve done recently with Sub Rosa), it’s a bit of a pain as the upload takes days and then the cached versions take even longer to update, so you can have links on IFDB still pointing to old versions of the game even after the new version is uploaded. It’d be nice to see that process be made a bit smoother.
I’ve found Borogove.io pretty helpful for hosting. It’s similar to IFarchive, and is connected to IFTF, but it gives authors more control and is more responsive. I suppose it might be considered an archive as well, although it doesn’t use language like ‘forever’ or ‘perpetual’.
[kicks 41 MB music library for robotsexpartymurder back from where it’s spilling out from under the desk]
One recommendation if you have lots of audio...
I found that for most music files I could cut the bit rate of the sample (and subsequently the file size) in half without noticing any major loss in audio quality. This makes downloads smaller, and if playing online, the music starts faster if it needs to pre-cache.
I edit music in Audacity. Bitrate used to be at the bottom but now it looks like you set it when you export a file - set Bit Rate Mode to “constant” and then choose a lower number in the “Quality” drop down.
I have also created games with media at high quality, then once doing the final compile for publishing used a bulk audio file converter tool like Switch on the Mac to modify all the media files at once uniformly.
So that might be something to consider if Archive space is tight - if you have ginormous media files, maybe don’t save those on IFArchive frivolously as backup until you have a significant project milestone or a complete project?
In my brain IFArchive is like the final resting place for projects that are done and won’t change much, except for maybe a version update. It’s like putting money into a CD or your 401K instead of your checking account where you expect to access it freely.
