History
The predecessor to IAFD was an email- and FTP-accessible database of adult film actresses called Abserver that had been created by Dan Abend in 1993.
IAFD itself was started by Peter Van Aarle, who had collected data on adult movies since 1981, when he began keeping notes on index cards on adult movies he had seen or were reviewed in Adam Film World. In 1993, he began contributing to the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.movies, where he met Dan Abend. The two exchanged databases and began work on a WWW-based database.
Van Aarle later collaborated on this Web database with Ron Wilhelm who went by the pseudonym of "Heretic". The first version of the IAFD was brought on-line in 1995 by the programming efforts of Heretic who used the project as a training ground for SGML programming which he was learning in college. After Heretic left the Internet to join the military, the site eventually fell victim to link rot.
In the fall of 1998, Van Aarle was at a trade show with Jeff Vanzetti who asked if Van Aarle would be interested in resurrecting the IAFD -- this time under its own domain. Vanzetti was looking for a project on which to teach himself on-line database programming using SQL Server, and this seemed like a natural fit, since they were both co-moderators of the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.erotica (RAME), and members of the newsgroup would often lament about the passing of the original Internet Adult Film Database.
The beginning of 1999 brought the first baby steps of the IAFD. Initially search boxes only searched females and data was restricted to movies released post-1989.
Van Aarle said on this:
"In those early days of the IAFD I had made one stipulation: I did not want the movie info on movies before 1989 to be available. The idea behind this was basically that if I would ever decide I wanted to do something commercially with my database it would be a good idea to keep the most valuable parts of it off limits. The data on older titles was clearly the most difficult to compile (and very few people I ever talked to had much info on the older stuff, with a few notable exceptions like Jim Holliday), and therefore the more valuable part of the data. The cut-off date of 1989 was a compromise to include at least the titles of Buttman, who was one of the most popular directors of the time."
Van Aarle died on September 18, 2005 at the age of 42 from a heart attack. In 2011 he was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.
On March 1, 2007, the IAFD rolled out information on over 18,000 gay titles and some 39,000 gay performers. Like the IMDB, forms are used for submitting data corrections, though the IAFD's form is considerably simpler than the IMDB's. However, neither IMDB or IAFD corrections are immediate; thus both correction services are fairly equal. According to the site, it contains entries on over 119,453 titles and 111,498 persons (both actors and directors).
According to Vanzetti, IAFD adds about 500 new titles a month and processes thousands of corrections -- corrections that anyone can submit.
IAFD is a former sponsor of the podcast Infected by Martin Sargent.
On October 1, 2007 an article about the Internet Adult Film Database appeared in the online equivalent of Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
Read more about this topic: Internet Adult Film Database
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