spathiwa
commented
1 year ago Hi Dan,
I'm finally working on a Frotz update and am revisiting the default IFDB search query.
I think I'm going to adopt your change only partially; here's my rationale:
- Changing the default sort order to the default is good, especially with the 'starsort' improvements; I had originally viewed the IFDB portal in Frotz more as a catalog than a search, but the query limitations and the returning of results in pages makes that unworkable.
- Dropping
language:englishis fine. - Changing to
format:*blorbseems problematic. It actually drops hundreds of older games never published as zblorbs, including quite a few well-reviewed/contest winner games, including many in the 'Top 50 of all time' lists, such as Curses (just a couple spots down from Suveh Nux), Shade, Aisle, The Edifice, and Vericella. It adds only a few Dialog games. ZIL games don't seem important as they don't have download links, it's likely someone looking for a particular Infocom title would just search for it directly, and there are several built-in bookmarks to pages covering Infocom (including Zarf's download collection). - I actually want to keep Hadean Lands in the results, just to support Andrew; the game file works fine in Frotz if purchased, as does the App Store link for the dedicated iOS app.
- I'm inclined to keep
rating:3-and#ratings:2-; these don't actually appear to interfere with the starsort "Highest Rated First" ranking, and I'd still like to cull out the very bad games as users can easily click the ring to change the sort order to Title or Author.
Hopefully your suggestion to enhance the IFDB search capability will be adopted, as that would be very helpful.
Absent that, I'm thinking about splitting the default query into multiple ones, and adding a pulldown menu or other affordance to search for TADS or Dialog games separately.
dfabulich
The previous search was searching for
system:inform rating:3- #ratings:2- language:englishi.e. games with a 3+ average based on at least 2 ratings, in English, written in Inform, and it forced the search to sort alphabetically.That's not an ideal approach.
system:informexcludes TADS games, which do work in iOS FrotzThe new search is simpler:
format:*blorb. This will return all games with a download link whose format type ends with "blorb," such as "Z Machine/Blorb" and "Glulx/Blorb." It will use the default sort order, sorting by Highest Rating.This doesn't match TADS games, but it does include Dialog and ZIL games, and excludes Hadean Lands. It also misses some Inform games, due to IFDB's multiple overlapping format types. The highest ranking game that we miss this way is Suveh Nux, which should have appeared at position 17 in the search results, but doesn't, because its file format is "Z-machine" (
.z5) instead of "Z Machine/Blorb". "format:*blorb" also includes a few ADRIFT 5 games, which don't work in Frotz, but they don't rank highly.Finally, note that IFDB now uses Evan Miller's "starsort" to sort by highest rating. https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.html
We used to sort by average rating, but this would tend to rank games with just one perfect 5-star rating above games with dozens of 5-star ratings and a few 4-star ratings. Evan Miller’s formula sorts by our confidence in the game, by adding five "fake" ratings to the average (one 1-star, one 2-star, one 3-star, one 4-star, and one 5-star rating) and subtracting the standard deviation from the average.
I've filed an issue on IFDB to support searching for multiple formats, which could allow searching for
format:glulx*|z*|tads* -system:adrift, which I believe would be ideal. https://github.com/iftechfoundation/ifdb-suggestion-tracker/issues/272