Reminder: authors, please use "News" option on IFDB

[Peter Pears]

Hello, authors! I'd like to bring to your attention that us players who see your games on IFDB, or even who come daily to the ADRIF site looking for your awesome games, have NO IDEA that you're updating the games.

"The Way Home" just appeared on IFDB. It's the 2nd part of a saga where the first part is The Dragon Diamond, and it's only because I took the trouble to make sure I'd already downloaded TDD that I realised it had gotten silently updated from v1 to v2.

On the same page I also saw a little something called "SoCC v.6.blorb". Looking at my games, I see I still had SoCC v.1.blorb. Quite a difference!

Authors, IFDB does have a very nifty feature called "news items", or something similar. Please consider using it whenever you update if your game is on IFDB (and if it isn't, could this place have a dedicated board for "game announcements"? If it did I'd follow THAT daily as well).

We players just want to make sure we play the latest version of your game. Please help us stay informed!

[Lazzah]

Hello, authors! I'd like to bring to your attention that us players who see your games on IFDB, or even who come daily to the ADRIF site looking for your awesome games, have NO IDEA that you're updating the games.

"The Way Home" just appeared on IFDB. It's the 2nd part of a saga where the first part is The Dragon Diamond, and it's only because I took the trouble to make sure I'd already downloaded TDD that I realised it had gotten silently updated from v1 to v2.

On the same page I also saw a little something called "SoCC v.6.blorb". Looking at my games, I see I still had SoCC v.1.blorb. Quite a difference!

Authors, IFDB does have a very nifty feature called "news items", or something similar. Please consider using it whenever you update if your game is on IFDB (and if it isn't, could this place have a dedicated board for "game announcements"? If it did I'd follow THAT daily as well).

We players just want to make sure we play the latest version of your game. Please help us stay informed!

It might help if you could provide us with the URL for this news items section on IFDB. I cannot see anything like it on the somewhat cluttered IFDB Home Page, which I am not familiar with.

[Peter Pears]

Sure thing. Let's take, for example, your own game:

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=3915i340rkbnb38l

If you scroll to the very bottom of the page, you will see at the far right the three following options: "View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item"

The last one is the one you want. Clicking that particular one for that particular game will get you:

http://ifdb.tads.org/editnews?type=G&so ... 40rkbnb38l

Any updates made in this manner will come up in the main page of IFDB, letting everyone know!

IMPORTANT: Some authors worry that adding too many news items is spamming. IT TOTALLY ISN'T. We WANT to know that your games are getting better. If you're doing some heavy testing and expect to have a new working release every two days for a month, sure, hold off on announcing until you think it's done, maybe, but until then - knock yourself out!

[Denk]

Thanks Peter for pointing that out. I will use the news feature next time I update a game.