Contacting Us
The IFDB committee of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation maintains IFDB.
If you have any comments or questions about this site, you can reach us by email at [email protected]. To suggest a new feature or to report a technical problem, you can use IFDB's Github repository. (You can even fix bugs yourself, filing pull requests there.) Please read the advice below about reporting specific kinds of problems.
Reporting errors in game listings
If you catch an error in a game listing (a typo, factual inaccuracy, etc), there's no need to send us email. Instead, please take advantage of IFDB's community-edited, Wiki-like design and make the correction yourself. This is the best way to keep IFDB accurate and up-to-date, since it avoids the inevitable delay of involving a site administrator in every change.
Likewise, if you discover that there's a game missing from our database, you can add a new listing yourself.
You can edit any game's listing by clicking the "Edit this page" link at the bottom of the game's main page. To add a game, click the "Add a new game listing" link on the IFDB home page.
Violations of our code of conduct
If you see behavior on IFDB that violates our code of conduct, email us at [email protected], including a link to the problem.
Deleting a game listing
You can file a request to delete a game listing by clicking the "Delete this page" link at the bottom of the game's main page.
Typical reasons to delete a game's listing include:
- Non-IF spam
- Listing is blank, created as a test or by mistake
- Duplicate of another listing
We avoid deleting reviews of any game, unless the review is a violation of our code of conduct. Since deleting the game listing would also delete its reviews, we avoid deleting game listings that have reviews.
If you're the author of a game and you would like to remove a listing for your own game, be advised that our goal is to allow our users to review any work of IF, especially any game that has been submitted for publication in a competition or game jam. We usually won't delete critical reviews simply because an author requests it.
(If you're the author of a game and you would like to remove your name from IFDB, we can edit the game listing to change the author's name to "Anonymous.")
Reporting broken links
A broken link in the "External Links" section of a game listing should be treated like any other listing error: you can correct it yourself by editing the page containing the bad link. To edit a game's page, click the "Edit this page" link at the bottom of the page.
A word of caution, though. It's much better to correct a link than to delete it outright. If you know that a link has moved to a new location, or contains a typo, by all means update/correct it. But if you're not sure why a link isn't working, it's probably better to leave the broken link as is than to delete it. Links are sometimes only temporarily broken - the target site might be down for maintenance, for example, or the site admin might be in the process of moving files around. We strongly recommend that before you delete a broken link, you contact the game's author or the target site's owner to determine whether the link is truly broken or just temporarily out of commission. If you find out that the file was intentionally removed and is no longer available anywhere else, that's the time to actually delete the link.
Reporting technical problems
If you encounter any problems using the site (especially an error message saying something to the effect that "you should try again later or contact us if the problem persists," and especially if you did try again later and the problem did persist), please let us know what you were trying to do, in as much detail as you can. The most important thing is to tell us the step by step procedure that triggers the problem, since we have the best chance of fixing it if we can reproduce the problem ourselves. Budget constraints and a certain prima donna attitude among our senior staff force us to assign bug-fixing duties to our most junior technicians, whose thankless toil in the dark recesses of our underground laboratory complex leaves them so broken-spirited and bewildered that everything has to be spelled out to them in minute, tedious detail; so we ask for your understanding and cooperation in providing as complete a report as you can.
