MrMamen (11747) on 4/19/2017 9:54 AM · Permalink · Report

I think the next logical step for mobygames is to add support for IDs to other sources of data. Especially the API, but also the site could become much more useful when linking it up to other databases. The IDs usually comes from URLs, and could therefore both serve as an URL to a third party site, and as an available ID for APIs and possible scrapers. This could be used on mobygames to show more information, possible link to stores etc. From the API it would easier match the correct game. I could create an extension which loads more information on a game when I browse a different database or article featuring the game.

There are two ways of doing this. It is a more closed version like thetvdb.com uses. It has a few hardcoded fields for imdb-id, tv.com-id, etc. A very good example of the open-ended version is musicbrainz.org/ which really lets you paste in any url, and it parses and validates that it is on correct form for certain types. I suggest we use the latter, as this would really just be an extension of the Releated Web Sites-feature.

A few examples of sites/IDs that could be supported: Wikipedia, metacritic, steam, gog, app store, imdb, facebook, twitter

The important part is that the ID is extracted so that it can be exposed and used for other things. The advantage here is that if a site changes structure, we are likely to be able to recreate links on new formats as long as the IDs still are valid.