gamepedia - more search sites

[williedigital]

i like gamepedia, but a lot of the games i search for aren't found at any of the amazons. isn't there some sort of site like imdb for video games?
IGN seems to be pretty good...

[Nora]

Unfortunately almost every game site we know of has something like the following in it's user agreement (this one is taken from ING):

E. Limits on Use of the Services. You agree not engage in any of the following: (i) use any automated means, including, without limitation, agents, robots, scripts, or spiders, to access, monitor, data scrape, copy or transfer any part of the Services or the Registration Data or other data of any User (whether individually or in the aggregate);...

(...and just because they have a typo in their agreement doesn't make it any less official... )

We've addressed this before on the forum - we don't really know how to work with this. We do have IMDb in DVDpedia which isn't quite legal, according to their website but it is still beyond me how facts can be copyrighted... That's why we included the Links section in Gamepedia so that you could link to any webpage and access it again through Gamepedia but you wouldn't actually have the data on your computer, i.e. no user agreements would be broken.

We'll keep working with this but for now this is probably how it's going to be...

Nora

[nootilus]

Have you contacted some of these sites to ask them about an agreement between them and Bruji, or is it a question of big $$$ ???

[Nora]

I haven't tried contacting any gaming sites, no. But it probably is a matter of money, I don't know if just a link back would do it for them... I'll get on it though, see what they say.

Nora

[williedigital]

a yes, i had forgotten about that.
As to whether they can "really" copyright stuff like that, it would probably be up to the courts. There are of course the famous cases of things that can't be copyrighted (phone books), but the whole history is so convoluted that it's hard to be sure about anything. I'm not obsessed with it, but i think the absolute best thing about dvdpedia is the ability to use imdb as a "primary key" and be fairly confident that it won't go changing anytime soon. I don't have confidence like that in amazon.

[Conor]

If you happen to have Xcode installed in your computer you could build your own plug-in for Gamepedia to do a search on any site/medium. We are in the middle of a big upgrade not just for our apps, but also for our site. As part of that, we'd like to make the plug-ing creation easier and with better documentation as to encourage more users that are hobby or professional programmers to build plug-ins. We also plan to place the source of the current plug-ins online so you could start from an existing one and modify that. So give us a month or so and check back. Otherwise if your not afraid of some confusing programming here is the current information.