TracyPoff

I'll definitely get in contact with you once things are further along. Once I've got a preliminary design for the schema, I'll send along the details so I can get your feedback. No point implementing an API that doesn't serve its users, right? There are still various architectural concerns to be dealt with before implementation, but the design doesn't really depend on that, so hopefully you'll hear from me on the order of weeks rather than months.

Jason Carr said Good news! Simon got back to me over at MobyGames and it sounds like they could possibly be interested in me developing the API. We'll work through the details and hopefully it all works out. This is great, because there is no better database that I've found, so this could mean much better searches/metadata/images in LaunchBox. Great! If it works out with you coding the API, then I'll look forward to your contribution. If not, building an API is on the todo list, anyway, so we'll get this done one way or another.

Jason Carr said Hi Tracy, that is good to know. That link doesn't work for me though, I get an empty page. I have a feeling that the stance on that has changed a couple of times over the years; they changed owners right? If development time is the issue, I'd even be willing to help them develop an API (or even develop it myself) if they were seriously interested. Who could I contact to get that rolling? Oops, the link went to the approver forum, which isn't generally accessible. Sorry, I picked a bad example. Yes, MobyGames changed hands a couple of years ago. Development has been severely limited for years, so it's not a bad first approximation to say that any given feature is missing because we haven't had to time add it yet. There is presently just one active developer (namely, myself), so coding bandwidth is limited. If you don't mind discussing this publicly, a post on the suggestion forum is the way to go. There are some emails listed on the contact page, which I presume someone is monitoring, if you don't want to make a public post. I don't know whether the site's owner will be interested in an offer to code an API directly (though feel free to offer, of course), but even if not, I would myself be interested in hearing what you'd be looking for in an API. Having a use case in hand when we eventually design the API is bound to be helpful. (Just to be clear: I'm speaking only for myself, here, as someone interested in both MobyGames and Launchbox--don't take anything I say as an ex cathedra pronouncement.)

Jason Carr said It's questionable whether MobyGames.com is purposefully changing their site to break the import processes for D-Fend Reloaded and other applications, but generally the impression that I get from MobyGames.com is that they do not want to support third party applications using their data. MobyGames.com is a for-profit site that is anything but "open". In addition, they have no desire to create an API or any kind of a stable way for third party applications to retrieve the data. I'm a little late to the party, but I wanted to say for the record that this is totally wrong. MobyGames would definitely like to have an API and see the data used more widely (as seen in this post from the MobyGames forum, for example), but there are limited resources for development, and other things have taken priority, over the years. Hopefully, one day we'll be able to use Launchbox and pull data from MobyGames--there's no better source for the kind of obscure games I collect.