According to the most recent backup data, the average number of “I’ve played it” entries each day in 2025 has been about 15. There’s a lot more playing going on than is apparent from the front page!
I was thinking about the “ticker” that bandcamp.com has for music being purchased, which in addition to giving an impression of constant activity serves to advertise the various songs and bands whose music is being bought. How difficult would it be to add something similar for played and/or rated games on IFDB?
Yeah, if the IFDB continues to be the community-facing of IF, I would love to see any feature that makes the site appear as more of a storefront like Itch.io or Steam.
I also wish there was a way you could utilize a back-end API that could tie into new games, kind of like Steam achievements. Something like what Mathbrush is trying to do with the Accelerated IF Reader’s Program but only it would be automatic, and not a manual effort.
Right now, IFDB is open source and you can tinker around with development and running your own copy using github’s codespaces. So most features are created just by someone making one and submitting it as a pull request (or whatever it’s called). BG has been doing a lot of coding recently, and I think one of those things involved looking at recent IFDB activity, but a ticker would be interesting. It would have to be announced and use only people who publicly display their played games list, otherwise it could be awkward if someone marks 30 erotic games as played for their private curation and the game announces it on the front page: “Mathbrush has recently played Dirty Grannies 6: Sherry’s Revenge” or something.
My initial thought was that marking a game as played would just result in a “Someone played Game X” notice, while a new rating might say “Person P rated Game X at ”. It would be fine by me if the person was left out and it just said “Someone played and rated Game X at 4 stars.” – the main point of suggesting the feature is to make the level of community activity more evident and to bring some attention to the games being chosen.
I’d say any game marked as AIF should be left off the feed entirely. (Or only displayed if you have set an opt-in user preference for that.)
I don’t know the first thing about web programming, so I’ll just have to hope that enough people like the idea for someone to take up the job!