A request to CCRL

[vittyvirus]

Please upload your games as scid databases too (.si4). They are much more compact.
Do keep compressing with 7zip.

[Adam Hair]

Please upload your games as scid databases too (.si4). They are much more compact.
Do keep compressing with 7zip.

There is an incompatibility between the CCRL databases and Scid. The CCRL uses the Round tag (which is useless in the context of games being submitted by multiple people) to identify each game. Scid has a limit of 2^18 - 1 Round tags, which less than the number of games in either the 40/4 and 40/40 databases. Since CCRL's practice differs from the intent of the PGN standard, Steve Atkinson (Scid vs PC) decided to not to increase this limit (there may also be some technical reasons for this decision IIRC).

Both sides have their points, so I have not tried to press either side to make a change. I simply perform a search and replace (I should take the time to write a script to do this) to edit the Round tags before I import to Scid.

[vittyvirus]

You can use pgn for your use, and also for distribution. But distribute using scid dbs too, because many people like me have limited internet bandwidth.
Scid dbs are several magnitudes smaller than pgns. A pgn db I have was 8 mb using pgn, is 600 kb as scid db, and will be around 100 kb with 7z. So, I won't be surprised if you see a 90 mb pgn db become less than 10 mb with scid and 7z.