At the time of writing (March 2024), history downloads for your matches on Backgammon Galaxy are available to paid customers only. This tool makes entry history download available to everyone.
The Galaxy developers have stated in the past that they wanted to make file downloads available to everyone. We believe that, while it makes sense to put certain features behind a paywall — advanced analysis, blunder databases, and other extras — it doesn't seem fair to lock away the basic match history download feature.
Not at all. The Backgammon Galaxy website itself uses its own API to get the match history and present it to the user (this is how the analysis feature works). All SnapGalaxy does is use this API to download your match results, convert it into a text file, and then offer it to you to download.
Probably! If they wanted to, they could make it much harder for SnapGalaxy to work. We hope that they will see the value in making match history available to everyone. The intention is not to cause any harm to the site or its developers. Galaxy is a fantastic site and we want to support it.
It's a lot of work to submit your browser extension to the Chrome web store. This is a personal project, made available to the public in case others find it useful. There is currently no plans to go through and add it into the store.
Firefox requires even manually-downloaded files to be signed by Mozilla. This is a bit of a pain, and so we haven't done it yet. You can download a Firefox build if you wish, but just loading the zipped file won't work — you need to "debug add-ons" and load it that way. You also need to manually allow page access in the extension permissions.
When you click the download button, a few things happen in the background on your behalf. First, it pings the API to get the match stats, including player names and ELO, and a list of its games. It then requests each game in turn from the API. This game data is then converted into the "standard" match file format, and offered to you as a download.
When we say "Standard", backgammon match files in text form don't actually adhere to any formal structure, as far as we can tell. It seems to be loosely called the Jellyfish format, presumably because the Jellyfish backgammon program used it. It's a simple text file that is both human and computer-readable, and modern tools like XG support it. SnapGalaxy uses this format to make it easy to import into your favourite backgammon analysis tool, though there might be cases where the file format doesn't work.