Please contact us by email:
info@ifarchive.org: General questions and information
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tech@ifarchive.org: Technical questions (server errors, etc)
The IF Archive is managed by the Archive Committee of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. It is funded by the donations of IF supporters like you.
The contents of the Archive are contributed by the interactive fiction community, past and present. Thank you all!
(That means that the files archived here are owned by their contributors, not by the IF Archive or its maintainers. Please respect this.)
This Archive runs under Linux, Apache 2.4, and Linode. The server machine is a state-of-the-art cephalopod satisficer with hyperbolic connectivity.
(Please do not abuse the cephalopods. They can only take so much before they ink off. More specifically: we use CloudFlare for content distribution and caching. If you want to download every file on the Archive, see these instructions.)
The site style was contributed by Chris Klimas, as an entry in our CSS Competition. (See that page for other style submissions.) The map image on the front page was created for us by Maia Kobabe.
The index-generation program and scripts for the RSS feed were written by Andrew Plotkin, based on scripts by Stephen van Egmond. Please contact <tech .at. ifarchive .dot. org> if you have problems with the index files on this site. (Or server or other technical issues.)
The IF Archive was founded in 1992 by Volker Blasius at the Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH Bonn. It was originally an FTP server running at ftp.gmd.de.
FTP mirrors soon appeared in the US and elsewhere. In 1999, Andrew Plotkin and Paul Mazaitis brought the IF Archive to the World Wide Web at ifarchive.org. This was originally just a mirror, but when GMD was shut down in 2001, the ifarchive.org site took over as the Archive primary server.
The Archive was hosted at Carnegie Mellon University for many years. In 2014, Mark Musante volunteered to take over the hosting. Then in 2017 Mark suggested that IFTF adopt the Archive. That work is now complete — and here we are.
(For more about the early history of the Archive, see this 2001 post by Stephen Granade.)