The IFDB Awards are set up so that if the usual organizer doesn’t set things in motion, someone else can. And that plan is visible. This is a good thing.
If you organize/maintain a community competition or resource, and you have plans for how it will be stewarded in the future, feel free to share your plans here. You might inspire someone else to do the same!
If you want to cheerlead other people’s efforts in this area, please feel free to do that, too!
If you have helpful information for other people who might want to make a backup plan for their community resource, please feel free to post it!
The Twine Resource Masterlist is a wiki post, so anyone can edit at will when new resources are made available (or when they disappear)
I have a backup for all the Twine Resources I’ve made on my Github in case itch.io is down, and if the IFArchive ever starts accepting resources, that’s were they’ll end up.
Same with the source code of games, I have a copy in Github respos as backup (either public or private).
The Neo-Interactives have all the info to set up jam pages (text, visual, colour scheme, etc…) stored up on a Github Repo to make it easier for us to organise the next editions of events (just need to copy-paste with light edits and press publish!)
The folder layout is pretty ad-hoc. We have a bunch of subdirectories under programming/tads3 because that’s what people have uploaded. There’s nothing under programming/twine except some (old!) versions of the Twine app, because that’s all we’ve got.
I should think programming/twine/examples and programming/twine/guides, given our existing layout. But really you can upload the files, include an explanation of what they are, and let our excellent volunteers file them where it makes the most sense.
I want to talk about future-planning with IFTF. I realize this is a bit awkward, since this thread spun off the XYZZY Awards discussion which is explicitly not about relying on IFTF. But this may be useful information in the general case.
IFTF formed, in part, as a “future-proofing” system for IFComp and the IF Archive. The forum, IFWiki, and IFDB were added in later. It works on several levels:
A program committee operates under IFTF’s auspices. The committee lead can retire and designate a successor. Or we could help with a successor search, by passing the word privately or publicly.
Or, if the committee lead disappears or otherwise fails to keep things running, IFTF can step in and replace them. (Note: this has never come close to happening.)
IFTF runs the servers. This means that if a service or site goes down hard, and the committee can’t fix it, someone with root access can log in and try. (Of course this assumes the problem is fixable! Or understandable! But we could try.)
IFTF owns the domain registrations. This means that if the server is completely broken, we could set up a new server and direct the domain there.
Note that this is really an a-la-carte menu of options. For the headline services like IFComp, we do all of the above. But other arrangements are possible.
For example, the old Inform 6 web site (inform-fiction.org) is run on an IFTF server and IFTF holds the domain. But Inform 6 is not an IFTF project; IFTF doesn’t contribute to it or manage I6 development. It just keeps the web site alive, because the web site has a lot of useful historical information. (Such as the Z-machine spec.)
For another example: IFTF has a backup of the data on philome.la (the old Twine hosting service). The site is now in stasis. We don’t run it, but maybe someday the maintainer will get tired of it and hand it off to us. Or, if it just collapses, we might be able to resurrect it from backups.
I could imagine someone saying “I’ll run an event, I’ll make the web site, but IFTF can hold the domain on behalf of whoever is running it in any given year.” Or some other arrangement.
Most interesting. So what tools are IFTF projects? From the website, there’s a Twine committee. What about I7? Any others?
Because;
The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) helps ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction.
This thread has given me an idea. I’ve been worried with Spring Thing about something going wrong with the site or data getting lost.
But the game files are already preserved on the IFArchive. The only thing that could go wrong (besides any issues with the domain, which I already have a plan for) is losing the infrastructure of the site (like the index.html and images). I think in about a month or so I’ll go through the site source and make a zip folder of all the essential pages (sans passwords) and see if I can archive it or host it on github like the IFComp code. It shouldn’t take up much space, without any of the games.
Thanks–I was hoping someone would talk about IFTF, too. This thread isn’t aimed at any particular person or project, so IFTF info and non-IFTF info is all welcome.
I’m not sure it needs explicitly mentioning, but, for IFDB, IFTF’s plan for stewardship is our plan for stewardship, and I imagine that’s true for pretty much all of IFTF’s program committees.
It’s a static website. It’ll update as more resources for tads3 are added and eric updates adv3lite. But literally I meant the domain name tads.dev lol. If yall could take stewardship of the site itself that would also be cool, but the domain is the only thing costing $ rn since the site is on gh pages
I’ve floated the idea before about the idea of a “protected list” of heritage community websites that could either be approached by someone like the IFTF to get prior permission to mirror the contents, should the site ever disappear. Or authors could actively sign up on a list (or display a badge on the site) so that if they (or the site) do disappear without warning, people would feel okay duplicating the contents so they weren’t lost.
It’s cases like the Adventure Family Tree that prompted it in the past.
I don’t know if it’s a viable project or even if there are key resources that people feel should be protected. I guess the start would be to see if there were any names people would propose for such a list. It could obviously include competition sites and any list could, of course, have specific protection boundaries as to what the site owner would say can be preserved (not necessarily the whole site*).
[*For “less than the whole site” contents, I guess they may could also actively dump contents into the IF archive but a list could cover circumstances where that has not been done for some time.]
