2/27/2021

9/5/2021 11:56 AM

10

0

0 wins / 0 losses

Warden

You're off to a great start, good luck with this!

Ooh, I can answer this one! He's in a team called the IFTF that has taken over ownership of the IFDB. Consisting of zarf, mathbrush, and nine other men who I don't recognize at all. It's not clear what, if anything, any of the rest of them do as they don't appear to be active anywhere in the community. (Their site is also very unclear because it shows smiling pictures of women and BIPOCS, but the "active members" if you look further are just a list of a dozen very white sounding men with no further information.) But Fabulich (according to Fabulich) doesn't control the IFDB, he only hosts it on his server and decides what updates there will be, who can and cannot use the database, what games it will contain, how popular said games are allowed to become, and so on. There are CoG games listed on it, and I don't believe any CoG author or reviewer will ever be shadow banned for having a game become too popular. I've seen positive reviews for games from other commercial companies deleted however. In fact I have a theory this could be the real reason behind the bans. Dan in another post called Endmaster a "demagogue" and pretending like games being linked from this forum and getting a dozen ratings from people who had played it was some panic inducing upset to the whole system that needed to be dealt with. But Endmaster was right at that time getting himself onto the Top Reviewer list by reviewing commercial games from companies that weren't CoG. One of them, Untold, was reviewed by Mizal too, and linked in the Untold discord while I was in there with over a thousand other players. Instant deletion and ban by Dan, she had the apologize to everyone just a couple of hours later. I made a post in a relevant topic on the Intfiction board trying to delicately bring up the fact that the IFDB needed to be better prepared for authors with popular games and many fans, now that the new management seemed intent on policing the entire internet. (Linking a game from a Twitter or anywhere and asking fans who have already played it to rate it under the current policy is literally a bannable offense....time will tell if that applies to CoG games as well.) Oh and my post was immediately split off from the thread, given the generic name 'IFDB feedback' and allowed to sink out of sight. Despute directly responding to several statements other posters made and questions raised, it was "off topic." This is a lot of speculation of course but I really think Fabulich saw this archive built over many years by the true fans, and decided to just step in and reshape it to his own ends. It becoming equally a way to showcase games from other companies would go against that and had to be stopped. Dan Fabulich is not a man who really cares about IF or respects the community, that much is obvious from the fact he deleted so many reviews, (and Endmaster's and mizal's are only the ones that we know of so far, because they had a place they were allowed to speak about it) simply for being written by someone he doesn't like. So what can his motivations be at that point? My account over there can actually be banned for posting this here by the way. A rule was added preventing insulting "past or present IF authors" anywhere on the internet, seemingly entirely to keep CYS and Tumblr and reddit users away. On the Intfiction board I should point out that you don't have to look very far to find members espousing leftist ideals--they've even banned games from "preaching anti-communism". But they let this man who's only interest in what used to be an entirely indie company is monetary just step in and take over everything.

There are a couple of card games here. The new Puzzles/Games category is meant to encourage more unorthodox uses of the editor, you might give it a look. I only lurk here on and off and haven't experimented with the editor much, but it seems very flexible for all its simplicity. And all the focus is always on Jason and Dan when this topic comes up, which I suppose is fitting when they're ultimately responsible for it all, but people often overlook what a vicious twat Eiwynn can be.

Is this the expression you all have sitting at your keyboards every day? Maybe I could get used to it...

H-hurray? I suppose I'll accept being adopted as long as I don't have to write anything, or read anything. Honestly I'm probably just going back to ignoring the entire IF community, everything was great for years when I was just playing the games. I only started browsing the intfiction board out of boredom in the last few months and both times I've tried to post there I just got attacked. I've really be struggling with depression lately as it is and I don't need that kind of pressure. Twine works for what I want to do, it's not ideal but it's what I'm using. But the majority of people who are into IF and especially Twine just don't like to read very much, funny as it sounds for a community centered around text games. That's something I only realized later. My "game" (really more of an interactive novel) is about a diverse group of girls in a prince's harem having to deal with a kind of vampire or succubus among them. She's based off the Greek Lamia, and feeding off the life force of infants, but the prince is smitten with her and any moves against her could have disastrous personal consequences for you and the other girls, while doing nothing may put the entire kingdom in her grasp. If that sounds of interest to anyone maybe I'll swing by here again when it's finished.

The IF community has never been for children, I really don't understand it. But since they're pretending that it is now, I'd love to see how they'd handle it if real life kids started invading the forum and the IFComp and spamming up the IFDB. I can understand a community wanting to keep itself free of AIF, but blocking everything "mature" is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. With the listing of profanity, murder, and sex as the things that good IF citizens do not consider "fun", even your standard noir mystery game may be considered too much for IFDB mods to stomach now. I haven't even gone back there since imw's post, I just gave up in disgust. Funny how this topic has everyone showing their true colors. This entire thing is just a way to exercise the new mod powers over a community that was self policing just fine until now.

Mad ho reporting in. It might amuse you folks to know this thread is still being argued over and it seems that same porn game is going to be the catalyst that turns the Interactive Fiction Database into the Interactive Fiction Curated Child Friendly Safespace. Dan Fabulich and jcompton are slugging it out but I'm not sure what the point is, Fabulich owns the IFDB now and has already made up his mind.