Waxy Refresh: The End of Playfic

Like I mentioned last week, I spent the last few months quietly updating several projects of mine, like my blog and Supercut.org. Today’s refresh is a bit different: after 14 years, I decided to finally retire Playfic, the community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games that I launched in 2012 with my then-teenaged nephew, Cooper. Why Now? Why shut it down after 14 years? Two main reasons: maintenance and obsolescence. Over time, it became an increasing pain to keep running. Every time I moved servers, I’d need to recreate the old environment for compiling games on the server, including moving all the compiled game files and the Inform 7 extension library. It was a frequent target for SEO spam bots, who would sign up and try in vain to post anything publicly to the site. Spammers made over 174,000 attempts to post fake “games” into a text field that would only accept valid Inform 7 code, amounting to around 116 million words that nobody ever saw. It’s funny, in a way, but…