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.
"Play On-line" button works for zipped games: Thanks to the IF Archive's new "unbox" service, the "Play On-line" button can now play games that are only available in zipped format. For example, we now have a "Play On-line" button for Worlds Apart. Removed Download Adviser: The "Show Me How!" button is gone from all games. The "Play On-line" button works great now for 98 of the top 100 free games on IFDB, and individual story files have links to up-to-date IFWiki pages like https://www.ifwiki.org/Z-code_interpreters for all of the major file formats (for non-newbies who want to try a few interpreters and pick their favorite). New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.
1 February 2022
16 December 2021
Added "Play On-line" support for ADRIFT: play.adrift.co is back online, so most of the ADRIFT games now have "Play On-line" buttons, linking there.
Added "Play On-line" support for web games: Why should web games miss out on the fun? Games with an HTML download marked "playable" or where the link name contains "Play Online" will have a prominent "Play On-line" button, like other games do.
Allow rating/reviewing on mobile: For years, IFDB has hidden some boxes on mobile to try to reduce clutter, but hiding the "Have you played this game?" box was a step too far.
New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.
Reorganized header links: Most of the header links only make sense if you're logged in (Profile, Settings, My Activity, Inbox), so we now hide all of those and just show a "Log In" link when you're logged out. When you're logged in on mobile, we put all of those links in a new "Menu" menu.
Added "Play On-line" support for TADS and Hugo: As of two weeks ago, Parchment now supports TADS and Hugo, so we've updated our TADS 2, TADS 3, and Hugo games to include a "Play On-line" button.
Home page loads faster: The home page loads a lot faster now. (We now compute the list of recommended games and the "Reviewer Trophy Room" in the background.)
New this week: The team has been hard at work on improvements to IFDB.
Collapsed author list for Cragne Manor: Cragne Manor has 84 authors, making it appear rather ungainly in search results and other lists of games. Now, in most places where authors are shown, if the game has a very large number of authors, we'll just show the first two authors as "First Author, Second Author, et al."
Fixed emoji handling: IFDB was displaying emojis incorrectly in various places, especially "joined" emojis that combine two emojis into one, such as "Woman Vampire: Dark Skin Tone." 🧛🏿♀️
Fixed author search results containing parentheses: A number of games have authors whose names contain parentheses, e.g. "author:Hanon Ondricek (as Keanhid Connor)" You can now click on those author names on a game page and get reasonable search results.
Fixed white background on transparent images in dark mode: In dark mode, non-square images had a blindingly bright white background. Now, the background is transparent.
