I make a better insane overlord than committee member. Probably better to let me just keep lobbing “Well, what about this? What about this? How about that?” white-hat-hack questions at more suitable authority.
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This is awesome news! I’d be happy to help out too.
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That’s fair :) The whole point is to have a more responsive and involved IFDB, so forum discussions should be a good way to stay involved.
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Does this mean that old links to individual game pages are going to keep working, long term?
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That is the idea.
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This is great news.
I also would prefer to have ifdb in the domain name rather than ifdata or anything else.
In the medium term (once the existing site has been transferred to its new home) it would be interesting to see whether IDFB could work on MediaWiki software. If I could see the code I would be happy to try to answer that question.
Then in the longer term it would be good to approach the people behind IFWiki to see whether their content could be incorporated into the new site. Oreolek made an interesting point about the lack of a specific licence on IFWiki, but I suspect that it mostly contains text to which nobody is likely to claim any rights (e.g lists of external links).
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I can help, if more people needed.
Have technical and managerial experience with a lot of IF love.
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I can also help with testing etc. if needed, though I do not intend to be in the committee.
I am still concerned about the idea of making IFDB into a wiki-like site. I think it would be much better to have links back and forth between IFDB and IFWiki. I think IFDB should cover what it has always covered, and for more in-depth articles you go to the IFWiki. If there is a link from the top of an IFDB game listing to the main article of the same game on IFWiki and there is a link going the other way too, that is all we need. Hopefully, the IFWiki is flexible enough to hold all kinds of information about a game, though most of the game articles on IFWiki only have these “chapters”:
- [1 How It Begins]
- [2 Notable Features]
- [3 Versions]
- [4 Links]
I haven’t looked into the IFWiki’s policies - perhaps everyone are allowed to add all sorts of related information.
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IFWiki seems to be almost identical to Wikipedia - any registered user can completely edit any page, although there is a preferred format for game pages and they do get occasionally groomed by others or the admins (?) if they’re way out of whack with the norm and can be reverted.
IFDB is currently more editor-friendly essentially using forms, but Wikis take a bit of markup knowhow and there’s a learning curve.
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I suppose this is something the new committee can discuss in due course!
There is an extension for MediaWiki called Page Forms which works similarly to the forms on IFDB.
Like Jonathan said, we can discuss it later, but I think there’s a reason that out of IFDB and IFWiki, it’s IFDB that’s received the most attention. The main attraction or use of IFDB to most users (I believe) is its download links, with cover art, description and reviews only secondary to that. I think the wiki format would be better if information was the main purpose of the sight, but I think for a lot of people it’s just like a convenient dressed-up version of the IFarchive plus links to other games out on the web. I think moving from file-management focus to information-management focus isn’t necessarily a pro.
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Right. Movies have IMDB and Wikipedia entries in most cases, and each site serves a different purpose. If you want to know the entire cast and who that random guy with a bit part was and see what other movies he’s done, you use IMDB. If you want the general story and history of the production in narrative format, Wiki may be better.
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For anyone who wasn’t aware: there was a survey about IFDB in 2017. Results are here: https://iftechfoundation.org/reports/ifdb-survey-2017/
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I’m not in a position to tech lead but would love to volunteer on the software side of things.
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I have a lot of love for IF, I’ve just got nothing to show for it (aside about 20 Inform, Twine and Adventuron side-projects…). However, I’ve over a decade of web development using Linux under my belt (Debian / Ubuntu), and a lot of devops knowledge also. (I currently manage 50 servers with Ansible.) I’d be excited about (helping to) run the show, for sure!
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I unfortunately don’t have the focus nor time nor state of mind to help with any of these things (and last time I touched PHP was 15+ years ago) 
but I’m really happy to see there’s so much interest to continue IFDB, and that there’s thought going into keeping it running in the long term. I think the site is very good to have, and is more like a GoodReads of the IF community than a wiki. Good luck!
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Quick followup to this: I don’t think anybody who is heavily involved in IFWiki has spoken up. Or if you have, I missed it.
Does someone want to? I don’t expect we’re going to make any radical jumps like “IFDB turns into IFWiki” or vice versa. But it would still be good to have an IFWiki perspective in the discussion.
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I think IFWiki should always be independent, as it serves a different purpose. However, it would be really nice if every entry in IFDB had an entry in IFWiki and the former had a link to the latter. It is a lot of work to maintain it, though.
Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that there is currently a fantastic database of hints, walkthroughs, solutions, maps and screen grabs at the Classic Adventure Solution Archive. IFDB should have links to that for each game. Ideally the two databases should be a union. There are lots of games in CASA that aren’t in IFDB and vice versa.
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It would definitely be great if there were links back and forth between game pages on IFDB, CASA and IFWiki. However, I don’t see why IFDB and CASA should be a union. At least historically, IFDB has never been the place to upload things (except cover art). Instead, it links to most things relevant (and ideally “all” things relevant). In my opinion, what it is lacking on IFDB is simply links to the most obvious sites with game-specific pages: IFWiki and CASA (others?). And I think that these links should be near the top of each game listing instead of at the bottom, which is currently the case for the “Baf’s guide”-link.
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