The game of Dixonary began on 4 July 1989 and has been around for over 30 years. Since it is a game of exchanged messages, among upwards of a dozen players, that adds up to a lot of emails.
This archive of the game is something that few players will ever want to consult. It is here primarily to back up the claim on Wikipedia that Dixonary is the longest-running online game in the world. But it does also serve as a resource for such things as establishing the precedent for the unwritten rules by which the game is played.
Dixonary began before there was a World Wide Web, and it has seen online services, web forums and message protocols—and the software that went with them—come and go. To consult the entire history of the game you need to negotiate several data formats. The game started in the Tapcis forum on CompuServe. The forum supported the program Tapcis, which was an offline reader that went online and downloaded forum messages at computer speed, stored them on disk, then disconnected and allowed the user to consult them later at human speed. This was important in the days when network connectivity was dial-up and charged by the minute: CompuServe used to charge up to $50 per hour.
Rounds from the CompuServe era (from July 1989 to December 2004) are available as follows:
Rounds 1-25 are available only in summary form, in a retrospective post by Theresa Carey, who founded the game. This post talks about Fictionary, not Dixonary: the players changed the name between Round 60 and Round 65 because of (groundless) fears of IP infringement.
Rounds 26-48 are, as far as we can determine, lost, except for the words that were played.
Proper records began in Round 49. Rounds 49 to 1569 are xml renderings of raw ascii CompuServe message streams as captured by the Tapcis program. They are verbatim records, but were redacted at the time to omit messages not strictly related to the gameplay, because in those days, disk storage was expensive. The xml will render the messages in a rough approximation of how they would have appeared in an offline reader like Tapcis.
Rounds to 49-979 were produced from the archives contributed by Russ Heimerson (1945–2010), founder player and longtime scorekeeper.
Rounds 980-1569 were produced from the archives contributed by Scott Crom (1927–2013), another founder player.
Both players painstakingly stored the data on Iomega Zip drive superfloppies. On CompuServe, old messages rolled off forums after a matter of weeks.
Unlike later rounds, it is not always easy to say when a given round was played just from reading the CompuServe messages. The file round_to_date_lookup.zip offers a translation table that does its best with what can be gleaned from the timestamps of the redacted message streams.
Rounds from the post-CompuServe era (from December 2004 onwards) are available as follows.
The results announcements for rounds 1561–1613 (from December 2004 to May 2005) were downloaded from CompuServe WebView as insurance against the Tapcis forum closing without warning. We knew it was coming; we did not know how much notice we would get. They are presented here as a zipfile of individual html pages, one per round. These pages are at best bald summaries, and so include none of the cross-table talk that can make playing the game a joy. Some are unusable.
In May 2005, the CompuServe Information Service closed. The players migrated to a Yahoo! group, and in May 2007, migrated again to Google Groups.
Messages for rounds 1613–1999 (from May 2005 to May 2009) are reproduced here from the forum The Parlor on ⛓️💥tapcis.com, a site founded to provide a new home for the lively Tapcis community, after the Tapcis program itself had been overtaken by events. Messages were automatically crossposted between tapcis.com and the Yahoo! group (2005–2007), and subsequently between tapcis.com and the Google group (2007-2021). The crossposting was shut down in 2021 after 15 years of service, and old messages were subsequently purged from the tapics.com bulletin board because of privacy concerns. The tapcis.com site finally closed in May 2024, and the players relinquished the tapcis.com domain name.
Yahoo! shut down Yahoo! Groups in 2020, promising to provide all group owners, on request, with downloadable versions of their groups' data; a promise that was not honoured.
Messages for rounds 1804 onwards are available on the Dixonary Google Group.
The files described above were all created from what might be termed data dumps. For CompuServe, the process entailed parsing and sometimes repairing forum post message headers: repairs were needed because acoustic modems were not perfect. For tapcis.com, the process entailed stripping out markup, which in many messages was a mixture of BBCode and html tags, and ads and disclaimers at the end of each message. In both cases, messages, parts of messages, tabular layout, or simply nuances that depended on markup, may have been lost or mangled. In case of doubts as to the faithfulness of the xml renderings, the Source Data folder presents the raw material that was used to create them. Caution: If you simply click on the xml files in the folder below, some browsers will display them as raw xml. If this happens to you, then download the file you want and view it as a local file in the same browser.