Where are the old mafia games?

[Lucky Wizard]

Page 2!

Heh, reading through some of these links has me all nostalgic. I started reading the Visitor Games forum around the time we were in the high 20's, and now we've got numbered games going up to 61, and many more unnumbered games. (At the time, mafia was played in VG... and I seem to recall hearing once that before that mafia was played in VSP?) My first game was Newbie 3. I'm also enjoying reading some of the non-mafia games in mith's Old Games folder... I just stumbled across Balderdash 3, which I was looking for a few months ago (but it had been pruned... 000736 if anyone's interested).

For those interested in the general topic of GL mafia history and who joined after the creation of the Mafia Games forum, check out the old waiting list at http://www.greylabyrinth.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=5990 . At the time, you had to join a waiting list to mod a game. This thread was where the list was kept, and where a list of old games was also kept. This is why games at the time were numbered. When the waiting list became obsolete in favor of a free market system, people stopped having to number games, and the games were moved to the new Mafia Games forum. (It may shed some light on the 26 question. Since the game listed for 26 is 27, and so on up to the duplicated 31, it seems that 26 was skipped by mistake, and I do have a very faint recollection of someone saying so.)

L'lanmal: Hmmm, this is odd... Verbose is 000809, if you want to check mith's Old Games folder. But while trying to find it in Courk's list in the Mafia Games forum, I decided to check the waiting list (which was being written at the time, while Courk's is well after the fact). It says Verbose was 44. So I checked Courk's list. It says 44 was Simpsons mafia. But the mod list says Simpsons was 51. But Courk's list says 51 was Harry Potter mafia. But the waiting list says HP was 52. But Courk's list says 52 was Lord of the Rings. But the mod list says LOTR was 55. But Courk's list says 55 was Football mafia. But the mod list says football was 60. But Courk's list says 60 was the first GME game, which is not in the mod list, as that game started after the beginning of the free market.

By the way, some of the first pages which are not corrupted but are not on Courk's list may be found on archive.org. For instance, the first page of the third (and last, and only uncorrupted) thread of Newbie 3 is here.

By the way:

[Lauritz Melchior]

This has no relation to mafia, but how does a link become corrupted?

Also, does the RSA smiley stand for Ragin' South Asian? Did he make the smiley or something?
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[Courk]

When I numbered, I took the games that had numbered themselves, and excluded those numbers from the list. Then I arranged the remaining threads by start date (or by the earliest date I could find if page 1 was unavailable), and gave them the remaining numbers in order. Some games are probably lost or were abandoned very early. Other games may be misnumbered because they went by sign-up time and not start time. If I want to mod mafia 23 and you want to mod mafia 24, and our sign-ups are filled on the same day, but you can start on Friday and I can't get to a computer until Monday, then your mafia would now be #23 and mine would be 24. Also, mini games might have been included in the numbering, but I skipped anything that called itself a mini-game, except for Small mafia, since that had more players than a game I considered full-sized anyway.

Hmmm... Mafia 35 was two different games? I briefly scanned it and saw in DP's thread that he said mith was taking over as mod for a while. I assumed mith had made a new thread while he did that. I'll take a closer look at those two threads.

Lauritz: By link corruption I'll assume you meant thread corruption. Before the switch to the php, the GL was pretty unstable. Threads often broke, usually when they became too large, but some smaller ones also broke. If you're ever in VSN, you'll see a thread called Just 4 fun. This is the 4th thread in a series that started with "Just for fun (worthless news)." The other threads were locked because they got really large and we feared they would break. I'm sure we did that with other threads, too. The old forum was bad. We didn't have the option to create sticky topics, so Hy had to do some pretty risky hacking to change the posted dates of those threads to the future -- 2999 .

Ragin' South Asian created the RSA smilie, and someone else, IIRC, created the smaller version.

[L'lanmal]

Ah ha! Verbose Mafia

[Courk]

I'll make it #41.

Rearranging the rest of them gives:

electoral 42
star wars 44
simpsons 49 <-- only 2 off
fantasy 51
HP 52 <-- exactly right
LOTR 53 <-- only 2 off
anarchy 55
football 59 <-- only 1 off
vanilla 60
GME 62
dilbert 63
LOTR cancelled 64
etc.

We're getting closer, but we'll never be perfect.

[Courk]

I don't know how to use archive.org to find the first pages of old threads. Can someone explain how to use it? I've tried every logical thing I can think of.

[Lauritz Melchior]

While only distantly related, I heard that the people behind The Corporation used a lot of footage found off of archive.org in their documentary.
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[Lucky Wizard]

Courk and anyone else: Put the URL of the thread in the "take me back" part of the archive.org main page. This will be of the form:

http://www.greylabyrinth.com/Forums/Forum<<forum>>/HTML/<<thread>>.html

where <<forum>> is the forum number (all of the pruned mafia threads were in VG, so the number for these is 9) and <<thread>> is the thread number (in the case of Newbie 3, 000583). So for Newbie 3, the URL is http://www.greylabyrinth.com/Forums/Forum9/HTML/000583.html . By the way (and Courk, this is probably why you're having problems) not all the first pages are there (neither Discworld's nor Verbose's was). I got the thread numbers from your post which linked to the other pages of the thread.

BTW, electoral mafia had two threads, of which Courk's post only lists one.

Oh, and the effect of thread corruption was originally that the first page would get overwritten by any new posts, with the thread title becoming the time of the post that caused it to break, and the poster's name getting listed in the "number of replies" column, and a few other things like that. There would also be no links to later pages (you'd have to manually type the URL to access them).

Also, RSA's original version was about one-quarter the size of an 800x600 screen. (Both versions in the emoticons screen are smaller versions made by somebody else.)

[Courk]

OK, I got the ones I could then. It threw me off at first, because the ones I was trying weren't available. Luck of the draw.

Did we have the mafia games forum before the move? One game had a missing page that was linked to forum 15. Archive didn't have that, but it doesn't seem like MG would be #15.

Thanks for your help!

[Antrax]

Using webarchive... how come I didn't think about it?
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[MatthewV]

Mafia Games was around before the move.

[mith]

Mafia 35 was one signup that got enough interest for two games, so DP offered to mod a B game.