Every so often I come across duplicate game entries in the database. Sometimes two versions of the “same game” make sense for various reasons (such as one being a remaster or considerable reworking of an original title) but often they are just unknowing duplications, particularly when a game may be known by various titles (or have uncredited, renamed ports).
Here, for example, is a straight accidental duplication…
There currently doesn’t seem to be a way of flagging these entries up for duplication by an administrator.
Would it be possible for someone to add this feature and is there someone who carries out the role of those sorts of administrator-level edits?
A flagging feature would be good. This would probably need just one field to identify which entry was duplicated and a text box to explain why it should be deleted. This could automatically send an email to the adminstrators.
Come to think of it, why not just have a feature to request a game to be deleted and a reason? The reasons could be:
I get the goal here, but I have to say I’m very wary of opening up the Pandora’s box of building a “this is not IF” flag. There’s currently a fair bit of IF-adjacent stuff on IFDB which I think is helpful to have there - Heaven’s Vault has a page, for example, since despite being graphical it’s made by some IF alums. Similarly Fallen London and many of its pieces of DLC are there, and IF authors are responsible for a whole lot of those.
It makes sense to me to have these entries available since it makes the IFDB a more useful, comprehensive database - and more to the point, the users who posted these entries and put up ratings and reviews clearly find value in them.
Add to that the difficult place this would put the volunteer team in - there’s not really a simple, agreed-upon test for what makes something count as IF, so forcing them to make case by case decisions in a nontransparent process of responding to private complaints seems unfair to them and has the potential to create conflict.
I’m very strongly inclined to think deletion should be reserved for duplicates, clearly erroneous listings, and anything abusive. If someone creates a page for a game that isn’t of sufficient interest to the IF-centric user base, that page will just languish in obscurity so the potential harm of allowing such things in seems far lower than the potential harm of throwing stuff out.
