I picked up 4 #delistings of #Disney #games with #GameSieve's scans of #GOG's API - then went to steamdb to see that the damage on #Steam's side was even bigger:

* The Incredible Machine Mega Pack (GOG)
* Outlaws + A Handful of Missions (Classic, 1997) (GOG, Steam)
* STAR WARS™ Dark Forces (Classic, 1995) (GOG, Steam)
* STAR WARS™ Rebellion (GOG, Steam)
* Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End (Steam)
* Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure (Steam)
* Disney Universe (Steam)
* Disney G-Force (Steam)
* Disney Tangled (Steam)
* Chicken Little (Steam)
* Disney Alice in Wonderland (Steam)
* Disney's Treasure Planet: Battle of Procyon (Steam)
* Bolt (Steam)
* Disney•Pixar Brave: The Video Game (Steam)
* High School Musical 3 (Steam)

#GOG made available a "hidden" bundle of Untold Tales #AdventureGames and story-rich #games at an insanely good price (particularly in pricier regions like Western Europe, as it doesn't have regional pricing enabled - but even in the US it's cheaper than the combined all-time low price of its contents: $37.11 rather than $42.21). You can't find it through the store, but you can buy it. Plus it gets proportionally cheaper if you already own any of its contents on GOG.

#GameSieve picked this up during its regular scans of GOG's API, and whenever something like this happens (a few times a year), I'm always hesitant about promoting it. This can't have been *intended*, can it? But it's been there for 4+ days now, so I guess I'm sharing it:

https://gamesieve.com/grouped_product-dynamic-pricing?q=%22Untold+Tales+Adventure%22

Got an important lesson in selection bias (is that the right term?) today.

To reduce the load on #GameSieve, I've been firewall-blocking recurring IP-ranges for one of the more obnoxious AI-scrapers when they use data centers rather than their residential proxies (those just get soft-blocks which humans can bypass). One of the more frequent sources, also for a bunch of annoying vulnerability scanners, is datacamp.

I also monitor what gets past the soft-block, as I made that initially trivial to bypass, and want to see if I warrant (and can then waste) human attention from the organizations behind those AI-scrapers.

Today I saw a bypass from a datacamp IP-address.

Because I check the source of all evil traffic, and have seen datacamp a lot in that traffic, I immediately concluded that the datacamp source meant that it was an evil party bypassing my soft-block.

The thing is, I have no basis for comparison! I have no idea how much of my human traffic originates from there! I am aware of the fallacy here, and despite the actual behaviour not being indicative of scraping, I still nearly firewalled it. (Before realizing that hey, this was probably a legit human using a VPN!)

'Unique Selling Point' for #GameSieve which I'm sad about: Games on my site have URLs which point to the right game page, unlike the same on #GOG :/

I'm manually working around a GOG bug, where the base game, the prologue expansion, and the soundtrack for that expansion of the recent Neva release all link to the page for the complete edition. But the way I've set up data harvesting, this fixed URL will be overridden if there's any other change to the 100 products on the same API page. So until they notice the reports about the bug and fix it, I need to keep an eye out for that override happening, and re-apply the fix.

Correcting faulty or lacking data from GOG's side is one of the intended improvements of GameSieve, but I never expected it to hit such core functionality, so of course that field is one where I don't have things set up for a permanent override. I *really* hope I don't have to go change that...

@seq

I'm so glad you enjoyed it, and thay it helped you discover #GameSieve
Its one of those things that I understand is hard for the creator to push (promoting yourself is difficult to do), but I do wish it wasn't.

You know how much I love #GOG, so anything that helps promote the site and make the experience of using/buying there? A win in my books.

The developer is such a good person too, I really enjoyed writing this one :)

So I interviewed the developer who created and maintains #GameSieve

𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘚𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭, 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥-𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘎𝘖𝘎.𝘤𝘰𝘮

I've used it for the longest time now, if you're a fan of buying #gaming titles on #GOG then this one is worth its weight in gold!

I got to chat to the dev about why they created it, what goes into it, the ethos behind GameSieve, and more :)

If you're at all interested, have a read!

https://gardinerbryant.com/building-gamesieve-for-gog-a-chat-with-the-developer/

...and go visit GameSieve!