Link Utilities: Custom link profiles

Work in progress help page for an upcoming feature of Link Utilities!

Overview

Using custom link profiles you can basically add other websites to be linked via Link Utilities. For that to work the website must have pages with URLs, that can be found via the game name, steam ID, GOG ID or rom name (mostly the fixed rom names MAME uses) and have no other variable parts like their own internal IDs for example. MobyGames couldn't be added that way, because they have their own ID in the URL. PCGamingWiki would work, because their URLs only use the game name as a variable part.

Another use case for custom link profiles is to provide an easy way to search for a game on a specific site by opening the search page in a web browser. Combined with the bookmarklet function of Link Utilities you can add links to sites that won't work otherwise.

Custom link profiles unfortunately can't be used to add websites to the internal "Search link" function of Link Utilities, because that would require much more involved steps to interpret the search results, that can't be easily parameterized.

How does it work?

To add a website as a custom link profile you need to click add on the custom link profiles tab in the Link Utilities settings, then provide a name for the link to be added, the URL to the game with placeholders for the variable parts and optionally tick some of the checkboxes to modify, how the game name will be formatted and how the link will be verified. You can also provide an URL to open the search page of that website with the game name filled in. This will also work without a game URL then.

Placeholders

You can use the following placeholders in the game url:

• {GameName} - The name of the game. This field will be formatted using the ticked checkboxes described below.
• {SteamId} - Adds the steam ID to the URL. This only works for games, that were added by the Steam library addon, because we won't have access to said ID otherwise. This placeholder is useful for sites like SteamDB, that are directly tied to steam games.
• {GogId} - Adds the GOG ID to the URL. This works the same way as the Steam ID, but for GOG instead. The placeholder likewise is only available to games added by the GOG library addon.
• {RomName} - This placeholder only works for emulated games, that are installed and have a rom assigned. It's mostly useful for MAME based roms, because those have static names that represent the unique ID for each game and are often used on websites with info on MAME games.

Formatting options

Since you can't use every possible character in an URL, most websites use different ways to format strings to omit or mask these characters. Because of that you can combine several common techniques by ticking the corresponding checkboxes to fit the specific needs of each website.