Vivienne DunstanAnother casualty of the UK Online Safety Act: all interactive fiction (inc traditional parser text adventures) games stored at http://ifarchive.org are currently geoblocked to UK users. IFTF folks are trying to work out a solution, but there is no clue how long that might take. IFArchive holds 30+ years worth of generally amateur/free IF games - a vast number. Including my own. Which I can't play online right now. Not that I want to but it's ironic! #interactiveFiction #OnlineSafetyAct #games
Meanwhile the intfiction forum where this might usually be discussed is still down 36 hours later, after a Linode cloud server outage. Fortunately there is still the IFTF Discord. But it's far from a great situation. #interactiveFiction #cloud
And IFComp is also likely to be affected, including the next competition opening for judging in just over a month. IFTF folk are currently urgently reviewing that. I wonder if I'll be able to play *any* IFComp games this year. #IFComp #interactiveFiction #OnlineSafetyAct #game #IndieGame
Damon L. Wakes@vivdunstan I wouldn't use something like this for anything sensitive (personally, I would NOT sign into my IFComp account through it), but if you just want to play the games then even a free proxy should get around the block: https://www.croxyproxy.com/
(I also don't necessarily recommend this one in particular. I literally searched for "online proxy" and this was the first result. Please consider it less an endorsement of this proxy and more an illustration of just how flimsy the geoblocking is.)
@vivdunstan I'm looking into a VPN as a more long-term solution myself, but I figure it's always handy to know about an option that's free and will work right this minute.
Ruber Eaglenest@DamonWakes @vivdunstan I think it is the way to go. VPN will help bypass this fascism whatever this is
I'm sorry. I'm to angry to be constructive.
Angie B@rubereaglenest @DamonWakes @vivdunstan except the politicians are apparently already thinking (and I use that word carefully) about banning VPNs (or the media are claiming they are)
@fallen_angela @rubereaglenest @vivdunstan That's deeply concerning, but I feel as though it would almost certainly be a disaster on the sort of scale that makes it unfeasible to press on with even if it's thoughtlessly rushed through.