This is a summary of recent additions and changes to the site. The list isn't comprehensive - we report only the more visible and significant changes, so you might notice some minor changes from time to time that aren't reported here.
Style sheet graphics: The style sheet system now lets you
customize most of the graphics on the site, including things like
the "star" icons and the various form buttons. You can upload
these sorts of graphics to IFDB and then refer to them from your
style sheets. Style sheets: You can now create and share style sheets
to customize the way IFDB looks. You can select a style sheet in
your profile so that IFDB has your custom look every time you
log in. Rating-less reviews: You can now write a review without
providing a "star" rating. This lets you share your thoughts on
a game even if you don't want to affect its overall rating score
(for example, because you haven't played enough of the game to
feel you can assign a fair rating, or because you're reviewing
an out-of-date version). Random lists: It's sometimes fun to browse through the
database randomly, on the off chance of stumbling upon a really
interesting game that you'd never have thought to look for. There are
a couple of new tools for doing this. First, the regular Search page
now has a "Random Order" option in the sorting controls - this lets
you get a random sampling of games matching any search criteria.
Second, for a really quick and effortless peek at some random lists,
there's a new button on the IFDB home page for "10 Random Games",
which gives you just that. And when you get to the 10 Random Games
page, you'll see more links for more random lists - 10 random
high-rated games, 10 random unrated games, and several others. New rating analysis tools: The Search page now lets you
search and order results by the Standard Deviation of the member
ratings for games. (Standard Deviation is a statistical measure that
basically tells you how closely grouped the ratings are. A low
deviation means that all the ratings for a game are tightly clustered
near its average rating, which implies that people largely agree. A
high deviation means that the ratings are all over the place, implying
that opinions on the game are more polarized.) The Search Help
explains how to use this feature. The search results also now show
the number of ratings for each game whenever the search terms include
the "#ratings" (number of ratings) or "ratingdev" (rating standard
deviation) criteria. Spoiler markups: In reviews, the new <SPOILER> tag
lets you mark portions of the text as spoilers. When the text is
displayed, the spoilers will be hidden and replaced with a button
saying "Spoilers - click to view." Readers can reveal the hidden text
clicking the button. RSS Feeds: The "New on IFDB" list of recent updates is now
available as an RSS feed. Just click the "RSS" link in the New
section of the IFDB home page.
There's also a separate feed available for each game's reviews -
this is linked on the game's home page. Authors might be interested
in subscribing to these feeds for their own games, so that they'll
be notified whenever a new review appears. External reviews: You can now add links to off-site reviews
for games listed in IFDB. The link can include a star-rating and
a summary, for display on the game's IFDB page. Author profile links: Games can now be linked to their
authors' IFDB profiles. Linking a game to an author profile
automatically includes the game in a new list of authorship credits
in the author's profile. Full new-item history: If you want to see more than just
latest few additions to IFDB, you can now go back as far as you want.
Just follow the "see the full list" link in the "New on IFDB" section
of the home page. (Also, Recommended Lists are now included in the
news feed.) Image copyright labeling: You can now enter copyright
information when uploading an image. This is optional, and we've
tried to make it as effortless as possible by providing pre-set
options for the typical cases. The reason you might want to include
the information is that some viewers might want to know how they can
re-use an image. Delete a game listing: You can now delete a game page,
provided that you created it, that no one else has edited it, and that
it doesn't have any reviews or Recommended List references. This
makes it easy to remove a page that you added in error - the most
common such situation is that you discover shortly after adding a game
that there was already another listing for the same game. Original beta launch: I announced the site on the IF newsgroups (rec.arts.int-fiction
and rec.games.int-fiction).22 June 2008
10 June 2008
13 April 2008
27 November 2007
25 October 2007
16 October 2007
