Ziff Davis has announced to shut down several websites in order to focus on IGN and AskMen. Among them are the gaming sites Gamespy and 1UP. So if anyone has planned to process those sites for MobyRanks, now is the time before they go down the drain.

An internal memo can be found on kotaku.

What about their master servers?

Well, that explains it: web statistics.

So...is Mobygames connected to IGN somehow?

I noticed at the bottom of the gamespy arcade window, moby is listed as one of 'our other sites'. Adding mobygames.com in the same webstatistics window you made isn't that impressive either.

Moby is not part of IGN at all. You sure it refers to this site?

Yes, but then it was the 'GameSpy Arcade' browser, which is not the same as GameSpy.

It has a main window saying 'GameFly' at the bottom, weblink gamefly.co.uk The right part of the lower window lists 'Our Other Sites': Cheat Freak, MobyGames and ShackNews.

Possibly it's just ads for the hosting company, it links here anyway.

What does this mean for games that still use Gamespy Arcade for their multiplayer? Games like Medieval 2: Total War. Of course, I absolutely hate Gamespy Arcade with all my hate, so I wouldn't be entirely heartbroken on hearing about its disappearance. It's still never good to hear when a game loses a portion of its features due to shortsightedness.

This doesn't have any consequences for the GameSpy browser - it is a separate company: http://www.poweredbygamespy.com/

So, MobyGames has outlasted a few more gaming sites... but it's hard to take pleasure in that since a lot of good people will be out of work. I never liked 1up's layout and focus, but I did like the journalism there. I hear that Gamespot's articles increased in quality after they switched back to PC-only gaming, so that's another loss.

MobyGames is also older than Wikipedia, if anyone was counting. In fact, there's only one gaming site older than Moby that I can think of at the moment, but it's an abandonware site so I won't mention it by name.

Remarkably The Adrenaline Avault (°1995) is still around.

I think the second-oldest after Avault that is still around would be Blue's News – June 1996!

Also, Gamer's Hell probably isn't older than MobyGames, but it is also one of the oldest that are still being updated daily. They started in 2000.

1UP was horrible to use. They kept deactivating my accounts, and support always took months to reply. I won't be missing it.

But Gamespy I used quite often, before IGN started making it unusable as well. I think I also got into it via Gamespy Arcade, but for a while, after the closure of GamesDomain, it was one of my main sources for PC game news.

What sucks is that they probably won't integrate Gamespy's (and 1UP's) data into the IGN files, or keep the old sites around. But there's a lot of historical information (I'm thinking of pre-release screenshots and the likes) that will be lost.

It irritated me that the press release also announced the closure of UGO. The site already closed in December 2012. The domain has hosted some weird comedy video site since then. I'm surprised that it's still owned by IGN because the site has absolutely nothing at all in common with the games-and-film site that UGO.com once was.

It's definitely true what they say, that IGN is only good at destroying stuff. Every website I can think of turned to shit after they took it over, before they closed them down (3DGamers, Fileplanet, all the other Planet sites, the Vault network...) They seriously have no clue what they're doing. And IGN itself, I never really liked it, but they tried to do this redesign some years ago, and somehow stopped in the middle of it. Half of the features and sections on their website are broken! The game library and collection tools haven't worked forever. I don't think anyone's even working there anymore.

It should be said that this only refers to Gamespy the website. The technology part of the company was sold of to Glu Mobile last year (source).

"GameSpy's technology has been licensed and integrated into more than 1,000 games. There will be no disruption in service to GameSpy's current customers and contracts as a result of this acquisition by Glu."

I wonder how they figure that, since the GameSpy Arcade site is still owned by IGN Entertainment, and the client can't even be downloaded from there anymore (couldn't for a long time now).

Flashback! \o/

With how long it takes for ranks to get approved, by the time anyone'd look at any submissions for these sites, they'd all get rejected as invalid links most likely. I'm sure I have quite a few from all three, including UGO, pending. As for AVault being around for so long, yep, decided to submit them this year actually. Did '97 in December, '98 these past few days...

They won't be rejected. They will be handled like print MobyRanks; those don't have links either. For example I submitted all of gamesmania.de in 2010 or 2011 and it died just a few days afterwards.

Hm, so far if I got one sent back asking for another source for link since the site apparently no longer works and I couldn't find a cache I pulled it :/

You better tell the approvers then, since a couple of sites I submitted MobyRanks for 5 months ago closed and are now being sent back to me. games4mac.de shows up in archive.org but www.gamesmania.com doesn't...and I was told reviews couldn't be accepted without URLs "because I've no evidence of the review date, the score itself and the abstract."

Hm, I've just been adding missing reviews from mid-80s gaming mags gathering dust in my basement... Supposing the approvers don't have the mags in their basements also, I'm curious on what basis they'll be accepted.

(speaking of which, today I was given a huge box full of Nintendo power magazines. That's ... Intense.)

That is wrong on so many levels. This is a deliberate destruction of history. We should be glad that you gathered the reviews in time. We don't demand links for print reviews, why should be for defunct websites?

I could understand it if the contributor is known to be untrustworthy, but this is definitely not the case here.

Wow, Ziff Davis is for websites what it is for magazines, too! An all-consuming fire. The ashes they huddle on represent, cumulatively, the world's greatest gaming info resource.

And TV channels too, if you count the whole TechTV Comcast deal.

Heh, saw this comment on UGO's tiny news piece that they're shutting down: "Oh my god I just connected the Dots. j2 Global are the guys that acquired Ziff Davis. Do you remember when they originally owned FileFront and 1UP? During the time they went bankrupt, they were first to sell or close down their properties. UGO ended up buying 1UP and Break Media ended up buying FileFront. A year later, UGO was acquired by IGN and now Ziff Davis (j2 Global) is back and ended up buying IGN from news corp to head RIGHT back where their started. Closing down 1UP and in this case, and other IGN network websites."

As for ranks, as I said, doing AVault now, but I may have a look at those as well if their servers will still be around over the next months. Just got some other submission back for dead link though, so for once sent it back sans link saying your call whether you approve like that or not... But once again getting others sent back for apparently not picking one complete and unedited paragraph from the text as abstract. Well, in some cases that'd be wrong either way because conclusion's split, often with one paragraph for positives and one for negatives, so picking just one of them (as it was suggested to me) wouldn't be fair... And in other cases, remove the character cap and I'll put in the whole conclusion paragraph, otherwise, I don't think jumping or sitting on it is gonna make it fit...

-As for dead links to sites, how about taking a screenshot from the ranking sites page when it was found and keep it until approved. That way you have the proof if it disappears, or you could perhaps even supply the screenshot together with the contribution?

Currently have 1082 ranks in queue, had some 1300 at the start of the year. And it'd take several screenshots probably, abstract, rating if not in the same place, date, which'd probably double the time spent to submit a rank, and make it pretty confusing to keep properly sorted afterwards.

That's what I do with game release info, some of the distributors (especially the ones for budget releases) remove the release date after some time.

That's at least a step up from old times were obviously neither contributor and approver bothered to read the submitted abstract. I'm going through Gamespy now and I am submitting more corrections for bad abstracts than new MobyRanks. It also seems that every second Xbox game was sports or racing, by the way.

A good abstract needs to be one thing: It needs to be an abstract of the review, i.e. it shows how the reviewer/magazine feels about the game. The paragraph does not necessarily reflect both sides of the coin - for a 5/5 stars review, a completely positive abstract is fine. It is preferred to use a whole paragraph at once with no editing at all, but of course this is not always possible. It is OK to edit a paragraph because of the character limit or because the beginning of the paragraph can't be understood without reading the previous paragraph etc. In some cases it is also OK to combine two paragraphs into one, but only when absolutely needed and when they are next to each other. Combining the first and last paragraph would be not acceptable.

In some cases there is no abstract at all and one has to resort to the "positive/negative" list which many reviews have.

Heh, I should have done that for AVault too, looked to correct abstracts. I just sent some corrections for dates when they happened to show up on summary page and were visible, abstracts... I'd probably be correcting all of them, seeing as those I noticed (usually just do a search to see if it's there) were the first paragraph of the review, which is obviously no abstract (when you have a clearly specified abstract at the end, after the overall score), or if said paragraph was too long then just the first part of it, cut after the last sentence that fully fit.

So now sending things back and forth here...

1. PC PowerPlay AU rank for Botanicula, no longer found on site apparently and not in archive.org or google cache, could just give the Metacritic page as proof and "Well we need an evidence that you contribute the right data. You can contribute a wrong score, a wrong source, a wrong date and also a wrong abstract."
So do I pull that, as I used to do so far?

2. AVault NFS2:SE rank and Bit-Tech rank for FM2012: "Please use whole paragraph as abstract." then on one (after saying I'll use the whole paragraph if someone removes the cap) "If the abstract is longer than 1000 characters then cut the start or the end of the text, not the middle." and on the other (after trying a paragraph and a bit and saying why I won't just pick one of them) "That's part of the mobystandards! The abstract you contributed is either inappropriate, too long or contains typos. The abstract you contributed is not a concise summation of the review. It should be a single paragraph directly taken from the review itself. This is typically the first or last paragraph of the review, but may be from the body of the review as well. Abstracts should not be paraphrased or edited except in the case of space limitations."
Well, yes, and that's a space limitation. Can't use a single paragraph and can't fit both in there in full. So I'm just sending these back ofc... The one I took back and forth the same way for quite some time some time ago with Cantillon is still escalated... And considering how many I have in queue, with this strictness about a single, complete paragraph as abstract, I'll be getting a couple hundred back, most probably.

I only submit corrections for the truly bad abstracts which are only descriptive. If it is halfway acceptable, I leave it.

1) It is not acceptable to reject it. Sure, it is always good to check if there are other links with the reviews available, and that is probably the main reason it is WIPed. But a dead website is no different to a print review - and we don't demand decisive proof for these. At least unless the contributor did not proof himself to be untrustworthy. I just made a topic in approvers' forum discussing this topic a few days ago.

2) This is complete bull. The editing rules are guidelines which should be applied in most cases, but would be stupid to take them for face value all the time. It is completely irrelevant if you cut the start, end or middle of a paragraph. There is only one important factor: The meaning needs to be unchanged. Edit out the sentence which is the least important for the abstract's meaning.

This is not a cover art submission. It is bad, bad, bad to sacrifice the truthful representation of the review just because one wants to slavishly stick to some guidelines. Of course the contributor should leave the paragraph unedited if possible. Of course it is usually the best to cut off the start or end of a paragraph. But in the end the meaning trumps everything.

Well, I'm trying not to change the meaning, but... *shrug* Tell that to jaXen (this time) too.

Then again, probably nobody but us few who submit these in significant numbers (and the particularly picky approvers...) give a damn about abstracts... And I'm quite sure nobody cares about dates, because they can't even see them except for the few that show up on the summary page...

I have noticed that the magazine reviews I submit for consoles get approved very quickly, while ... I don't think any of the PC reviews have been approved!

Depends who approves those platforms. Jeanne was usually doing ranks for PC (and PS3 and X360), a few times I remember Patrick, anyone else very rarely, and since it seems like she wasn't around for a long time till recently when she started to get through them again, those queues seemed stuck for some 6 months. erav recently did a few of the more recently submitted ones, and now also jaXen picked up from the back of the queue (which back of queue is currently at Dec 9 for PC - have assorted others there going back to Aug 30), but... On the other hand, the PSX ones I submitted from AVault were approved even the same day by ALAKA, and TotalAnarchy was quickly approving anything for the Wii when I submitted those.

Admittedly, makes perfect sense for something that's not particularly visible and even less relevant to the goal of MG to take low priority in approvals.

(Er, or was I not supposed to give out names here? Never sure about this...)

There are 1900 pending PC MobyRanks, the oldest dating from December. Plus the ones I submitted, I guess another 1000 or so. This might have something to do with it.

I don't have access to other platforms than PC, but I am sure that PC has the most contributions by far. At least for me, MobyRanks have low priority. Especially when other queues are even more flooded (Release information! Tech specs!)

Oh, I'm not surprised that they're low-priority, but that the priority varies based on platform only -- it never occurred to me that rankings approvals would benefit from the expertise of a platform-specific approver.

That's how approvers "work" (I think?), each can only access a certain platform or platforms, not all, so whether the ranks themselves would need platform-specific approvers or not doesn't matter.

It doesn't have to be that way. Approvers doesn't always have access to everything within a platform. Some only approve ranks, some only approve reviews and so on.

Yes, that is correct. There are only a few queues which are platform independent, e.g. revisions and trivia.

Kind of it...each approver has access to the platforms and / or contributions he is allocated to. E.g. I work with mobyranks for all platforms. By the way: An approver cannot work with his own contributions!

OK, some numbers: Right I can see and work with 7373 mobyranks, 2533 are for PC games.

Holy crap... So me and Patrick have "only" about a third of that put together, if he said some 1k too... Alsy with most of the rest I imagine? I mean, see 2207 approved this year already for him/her!

Plus a couple of mine. Remember: An approver does not have access to his own contributions, so it's roundabout 8K of mobyranks pending :-)

I have overall 1700 pending and I guess about 1000 of them are PC.

On my list there are currently 2,000 PC mobyranks. It appears that most of them come from Patrick (and Alsy). Shame on You :). I have to say there is no end of mobyranks and personally i can not access the oldest one due huge number - causing massive delays. These are comming and comming all the time. Within the last month disappeared one third but at the same time arrived unresolved issues in other columns (tech info, releases, codes). New game entries are increasing as well - these should be highest priority.

I've been slowing plugging away at the PC mobyranks. It's taken me 2 months or so to get to the ones dated at the end of December!!

So, I just submitted about 100 MobyRanks from a single magazine. And then I discovered it was released in 1993 instead of 1994. Pulling 100 MobyRanks just to change the year is no fun.

(Here was an unobjective rant about the quality of the German magazine ASM.)