It had sections with brief information about various ports of this game, but now these have all been split into separate pages. It was also quite confusing – for example, it said Roger Firth was the “porter” of the Inform 6 version, when in fact (I now realise) the Inform 6 version was his original reference version. Also I added a direct link to the story file.
Anyway, although it’s not on IFDB, it is on CASA and that website lists versions that aren’t on the wiki at all. Adding details to IFWiki might be a nice project for anyone who knows about the missing versions or can add details to the existing pages
If these are straight ports (as they should be), then I think it’s a mistake to give them all their own page. The main page will need to give links to all the other pages and the other pages will need to give a link back to the main page. What are you going to say on all the other pages? The purpose is the same, the game description is the same, the solution is the same, the links to other sites are the same. This is a hell of a lot of duplication.
I have come across one or two versions of Cloak of Darkness that aren’t on CASA and there are one or two versions on CASA that are no longer available as public downloads. All in all, it’s a bit of a mess and I think this mess is easier to maintain on a single page.
I’ll try to address your concerns, then explain why I think this new approach has advantages. It got into a bit of a mess over 20 years on a single page, so I’d like us to see whether we can improve things a different way.
This happens automatically when, on a port page, you choose “Port of” from the dropdown and type Cloak in the autocomplete text field. The relevant reciprocal links appear under the “Related games” heading.
On the other pages you generally only need to enter the information that’s different (e.g. porter, release date, authoring system, IFID, download and play online links). Some things that are the same (e.g. links or information about Cloak of Darkness in general) should be left out, and some others could be (e.g. genre and cruelty scale). The only real exception is that it’s nice to add the original author as well as the porter.
Here are some improvements:
Having a new page for each port, and so a data entry form with content relating only to that port, will make the whole system easier to maintain. If you know the release date for Cloak of Darkness (ADRIFT) - IFWiki you can just go there, “Actions → Edit with form”, and put the date in the right place on the form.
If we wanted more information from the port pages included on the main page, then that would be possible, as it’s all in the database.
Now, if we are writing about a specific port we can link to that one easily. For instance, typing {{game citation|Cloak of Darkness (TADS 2)}} will display the full citation above.
The old Cloak of Darkness infobox had information about all ports mushed together along with the original in one place. Well, it only identified Roger Firth and none of the porters, and no dates. It listed authoring systems but some were missing as people hadn’t realised you needed manually to type this into the infobox as well as in the page content.
When we get round to tidying up the “person” pages, it’ll be easy to query the database to list “Porting credits” because we have saved the information separately on separate pages – and, for example, if someone has ported a game to multiple authoring systems then those can be displayed separately.
Thinking more generally if a port receives an award then the situation is clearer when we can link to that specific port.
I just spotted this thread and noted that there are a lot more fields for the ports now. I dug into the revision history of my silly AWK port (which, because it was written in 2005, was kept in a darcs repo: Debian doesn’t even package darcs any more!) and updated the releases based on that.
It’s also been sitting in the same funny subdirectory full of nonsense and temporary files for the past 20 years. I should probably come up with a more official-looking place to host it and set up a redirect for the weird URL.
