I’ve seen a couple of questions about “how long does it take for a file to appear on the Archiuve after being uploaded?”
In particular, Max Fog contacted us a couple of days ago to ask about the post-comp release of Milliways. Except, weirdly, we never got the upload at all. Dan and I finally tracked down what was going on, to wit:
The file upload form on IFDB has been completely broken since early October. I broke it while tweaking the Archive configuration.
The form at https://upload.ifarchive.org/cgi-bin/upload.py works fine. But if you hit the “Add a Game Listing” button on IFDB, and then selected “Upload to the IF Archive”, that form just did not work at all. It would silently drop your file and not notify anybody.
Well, it’s fixed now. If you uploaded a file and don’t see it, please upload again.
Boring technical details, since someone will be curious:
As part of the Archive admin interface work, I adjusted the config so that the upload.ifarchive.org domain requires https. Any request that comes in to http://upload.ifarchive.org gets redirected to https.
(This change does not apply to the top-level ifarchive.org domain, which only serves files and therefore doesn’t require a secure connection.)
The Archive’s upload form was always https, so no problem there. However, the form on IFDB was set up to send to the http address. As of early October, that would redirect and lose your form data. It would just show the Archive’s upload form with no sign that anything had gone wrong.
(You might notice that the response was neither “Thank You For Your Upload” nor “Upload Error”, so something must have gone wrong. But I wouldn’t expect anybody but me to pick up on that, and I never tested it until tonight.)
That is in fact how it works – go to IFDB and take a look at some Twine games, and you’ll see that most of the game files are actually located on the Archive.
IFDB works much better as a front end than the Archive itself – I definitely wouldn’t try to send people directly there, given that its appearance is in line with its function. IFDB shows you the cover image, the blurb, reviews, etc. and of course has lots of findability tools, while the Archive pretty much just a list of files.
The Archive works as a front end. You can browse Index: if-archive/games/twine , hit “View Contents” on any game there, and play it. That is indeed its purpose.
IFDB’s purpose is to host all the bibliographic info, reviews, ratings, and so on that aren’t the game itself. Plus it links to the Archive too, as Mike said.