Did you miss it? Our sales page has been fixed up somewhat with huge thanks to our server admin Levi.
If you don't know what it is, we track a number of sites selling Linux games, so you don't have to find the best deal.
We spent a number of hours trying to sort out a character encoding issue for the gamersgate importer yesterday, as PHP likes to convert encodings without telling you with its XML function which was causing sales with special characters not to get imported. This was a real pain to figure out. It doesn't help that gamersgate use their system time, and adjust their expiry timestamps with summer time too (WHY!! UTC should be used by everyone...). I had to code in factors that adjust our expiry timestamps for their timezone, and for when they switch to summer time.
We also removed Desura, since even if they come back one day, I will never trust them again.
What we need help with!
Any website we track like GOG, Humble, GamersGate, Itch, GamesRepublic, ShinyLoot, Fireflower Games and IndieGameStand has feeds we use, but due to the mentioned issues above with character encodings, sometimes some sales may not appear.
If a game is on sale from those sites, and it doesn't show up within 1hour of being on sale, please, please tell me directly.
We hope you continue to find it useful, tell all your friends to use it, as it was only getting 0.7% of our monthly traffic, so for me to spend time on it, it needs to be used and useful.
Steam cannot be automated currently, as they have no feed, and they haven't replied to any of my emails asking about it. So, any Steam sales need to be put in manually. Steam did have a feed we could use, but they limited that to one game request at a time, making it useless for our use. You can help by submitting a sale for Steam.
Feedback
Are there any minor issues you think needs sorting to make it more useful? Let us know in the comments!
See the sales page here. It also has a link in the top header menu once again. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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http://isthereanydeal.com imports steam deals automatically so there must be some kind of system
Steamdb also has price tracking. E. g. https://steamdb.info/app/316080/ is on sale atm
Sales list: https://steamdb.info/sales/
Last edited by minj on 9 August 2015 at 2:20 pm UTC
Steamdb also has price tracking. E. g. https://steamdb.info/app/316080/ is on sale atm
Sales list: https://steamdb.info/sales/
Last edited by minj on 9 August 2015 at 2:20 pm UTC
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Quoting: minjhttp://isthereanydeal.com imports steam deals automatically so there must be some kind of system
Steamdb also has price tracking. E. g. https://steamdb.info/app/316080/ is on sale atm
Sales list: https://steamdb.info/sales/
Levi can probably shed light on this, as he was looking into it. Steam in the last few months put a cap on the amount of requests you can do to the API that is capable of getting game info, and it made it very difficulty.
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I was about to write the same about SteamDB.
Your sale page is useful, I used to check it regularly, but I currently don't have much time to play new games, I already have a lot of good ones in my library, in part thank to you :)
A bit off topic, but :
I was wondering... Do you use a cron job or something like this to regularly pull updates for these websites? I am in the process of writing something similar (jobs that have to be scheduled at arbitrary times in php).
Thanks :)
Your sale page is useful, I used to check it regularly, but I currently don't have much time to play new games, I already have a lot of good ones in my library, in part thank to you :)
A bit off topic, but :
I was wondering... Do you use a cron job or something like this to regularly pull updates for these websites? I am in the process of writing something similar (jobs that have to be scheduled at arbitrary times in php).
Thanks :)
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hardpenguin Aug 9, 2015
And what about the idea of ditching the page and replacing it with recurrent posts featuring best sales?
Would be best to have both, I think...
Would be best to have both, I think...
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The general rule is that if they advertise Linux as a platform, it counts for Linux. Bundle Stars emailed me to confirm this, if you buy on Bundle Stars and it doesn't list Linux, it won't count for it.
The sales page is just for people who want cheap games and to display sales, it's up to people to decide how to use it.
We will also do sales articles, and only highlight ones that really will count for Linux in it.
The sales page is just for people who want cheap games and to display sales, it's up to people to decide how to use it.
We will also do sales articles, and only highlight ones that really will count for Linux in it.
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Quoting: tuubiAs minj said, you could scrape the steamdb listings for Steam sales in euros, dollars and pounds. A bit more fiddly to parse than a single clean feed but certainly doable. No request caps, but also no guarantees for "api" stability.
It's a question of if it's okay to do that or not, we don't want to just scrape their page if they don't like it.
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Also: https://steamdb.info/faq/#can-i-use-auto-refreshing-plugins-or-automatically-scrape-crawl-steamdb
They would ban our server if we attempted to scrape them, and I don't feel like asking them to make an API just for us. As I can already guess the answer.
They would ban our server if we attempted to scrape them, and I don't feel like asking them to make an API just for us. As I can already guess the answer.
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Quoting: liamdaweThey would ban our server if we attempted to scrape them, and I don't feel like asking them to make an API just for us. As I can already guess the answer.Ah. Forget it then. I guess the next best thing would be prominently displayed links to these steamdb pages on the GOL sales page. I doubt they'd see any problem with that approach.
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Sales Rage, hm…
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