Various levels of NLP do get applied in IF, but it doesn't necessarily help much. Being able to parse input is an important step, but the game/story needs to be able to do something with those verbs and nouns. For a good player experience the author needs to communicate clearly what range of input will be acceptable, making sure all nouns mentioned in text can be interacted, any actions implied in the text or by the nouns themselves are recognised, etc. If you do that well then you can have a good player experience with a purely handcoded parser.
Aside from a few of the biggest Stack Exchange sites (including Stack Overflow) most of the 170 sites don't have ads and don't make profit. The only profit is very indirect, demonstrating that Stack Overflow the company can run sites like these, something which is now in doubt. (Disclosure: I'm a mod on one of the small SE sites and helped author the letter.)
It denies freedom to the software more than freedom to the person. For copyleft licences the software is most important; for permissive licences people are most important.
And their open source projects like Chrome do have public bug trackers, but in my experience I've either been ignored or treated with what I felt was contempt. The first is probably the same feedback problem as everywhere, the second is because the Chrome developers don't want the same kind of internet I do...
This is some actual code from one of my projects (though written by another contributor):
To transition to monster card gallery:
animate the gallery-transition as a reel animation targeting the transition-container at 8 fps;
wait for main menu input until all animations are complete;
pause for 1000 milliseconds, accepting input;
now the image-ID of the transition-container is the image-ID of the card-container.
Great. I like those interactive fiction and will play Lost pig :)
What is missing is some sort of save game option via web storage. And maybe you should give some example links on the first page.
bookmarked
