Board Game Arena

Hi, I noticed a recent change on BGA. The pages for machine-readable game logs are no longer accessible. I am referring to pages such as these:

https://boardgamearena.com/archive/arch ... =267896805
https://boardgamearena.com/3/hex/hex/no ... &history=1

The first was for completed games and the second for games in progress. The error message is "Invalid session information for this action. Please try reloading the page or logging in again."

The reason these pages were useful is that, for the game of Hex, someone had created a bookmarklet that players use to analyze and discuss games: https://hexworld.org/board/about.html

Hex is a very strategy-intensive game, so the ability to export and discuss game records was used quite a lot. However, with the above pages no longer accessible, there is no reliable way for the bookmarklet to access the game records. (The human-readable game record is subject to translation, so not really parseable).

Is there any chance the above pages can be made accessible again? They were really quite useful. Thanks!

BGA never advitized API for game logs, it is possible they closed the loophole that would allow that.
The normal logs still available (non machine readable)
https://boardgamearena.com/gamereview?table=267896805

Indeed, these are internal endpoints that were not meant to be used as an API and should not have been considered as a reliable public resource. We were also not aware of this tool. The best would be for the bookmarklet author to contact us to see if it can be adapted to work with this session validity check (I'm not a specialist about bookmarklets so I can't guarantee it, but it may be possible). But in any case, such a tool can break at any point in the future as it's not relying on a stable public API.

Hi Een, thanks. The original author of the bookmarklet was comonoid. I don't know how he found these undocumented pages, but they were very handy. Since comonoid is absent, I am taking over as the bookmarklet maintainer. Do you want me to contact you outside of the forum? If yes, where do I reach you? Thanks.

Ok, I'll send you a PM.