IFDB mods and "This user's profile is pending review."

General IF Community Resources
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If you put a link into your IFDB profile with the <a> HTML tag, even if you take it out immediately after, your account suddenly becomes “pending review”. This makes your user profile page inaccessible to others, so other people can’t look at the full list of games or reviews you’ve authored, and removes your ability to add tags to games or edit game pages. Ostensibly an IFDB moderator can remove this setting, but I’ve noticed the status has been on a few accounts for months while remaining unchanged.

What’s the point of this? It makes your IFDB account quasi-unusable if you make the simple mistake of putting a link in your profile. The only function it serves is providing users a way to irreversibly hide their profiles, but I doubt this is an intended feature, because otherwise there would be a simpler way to make your profile private that doesn’t involve permanently removing features from your account. Something like a “Make profile private” button that a person can actually enable and disable on command.

One way to solve this would be adding more people as IFDB moderators, so they can approve user profiles quickly. I have no idea what this process of becoming an IFDB moderator entails, and it may be impossible right now, since I’ve read the IFTF’s charter for the IFDB Committee and they only allow a maximum of 12 people to be the IFDB team, which includes IFDB moderators. There are already 12 people on the IFDB team.

An alternative and much easier solution would be to remove the “link in profile → pending review” pipeline altogether. IFDB currently requires you to get manual approval from a moderator to create an account, and plenty of spammers never put any links into their profile, so I don’t know why you’d need this feature. After removing it, you could add a way for users to manually private their profiles if they want to reproduce the effect of having their profile hidden.

There are no issues about this on the IFDB Github. I could file one, but I wanted to get the community’s thoughts on this first. It could be that there’s a reason for this feature that I’ve missed, or I’ve misunderstood how it works.

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You definitely interesting points! I’ve approved your page, and you inspired me to check to see if anyone else has been caught in a similar trap, and they have! (including a top 25 user). Edit: Found a top 10 user whose profile was blocked, too.

User activation was mostly automated a while ago (though I think one mod keeps an eye on the feed so well that none of the rest of us have to). This specific issue is rare enough that it hasn’t come up very often (you’d think more people would link to personal sites in their ifdb page, but it isn’t too common).

Thanks for the heads up! I actually didn’t know about the 12 person team thing, that’s interesting.

Edit: I’ve looked at every ifdb account that’s logged in in the last year (about 1050 people), and I found five more people and fixed their issue. Thanks for this!

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All the committee charters have a size limit like that. A lot of them are out of date and can be ignored.

“More moderators” is not necessarily a useful solution, anyhow. Are there twelve active moderators?

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I’d bet a lot of folks who’ve got pending profiles are from the times before IFTF took over. I try and keep on top of approving changes. Even for the folks who change their profile… frequently.

Unfortunately, there are enough spammers posting phishing links that it shouldn’t be entirely automated.

I think, as in most things, communication is key and I’d just ask that anyone who has a pending profile that hasn’t been reviewed in a timely fashion to please reach out. It’s a quick fix.

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This might be naive, but if the link is the issue, shouldn’t the link itself be hidden and pending review as opposed to the entire profile? I’m assuming there’s some pragmatic or programming issue that makes implementing this more difficult than it sounds.

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That was fast, thanks for resolving the issue.

I think I’d much rather lose the ability to put a hyperlink in my profile than run the risk that I forget and have to post to Intfiction about it again, because I really waited for months, under the assumption that the mods could see what had happened and would fix it on their own, and nothing happened. I assumed the mods were inactive. Users who fall victim to this feature might not even have Intfiction accounts or be willing to talk about it on the forum. There’s a chance it’s driven people away.

Right now, the feature doesn’t even prevent you from putting URLs into your profile. People can still do that, they just can’t link them with the hyperlink “a” element without being put under review. Given this, I favor just removing the hyperlink in profile description feature altogether.

Another alternative would be replacing it with something like what Fanfiction.net has. It censors URLs entirely, requiring you to put asterisks or parentheses around them to get them to show, as a way to prevent scammers from displaying their phishing URLs. I would vastly prefer this over what IFDB has now.

Even if none of this is changed, there should definitely be some kind of message on the “edit profile” page, saying that if you put an hyperlink into your profile, your account will become “pending review” and you’ll need to contact the mods directly to remove that. I could quickly add such a message with a Github pull request, but I don’t know how often they’re checked. I understand that people are busy and it’s the holiday season right now, but there are unmerged pull requests from mid-August and the last time anything was merged was on September 2nd. I’m hesitant about making too many pull requests because it seems to me that it could take a few months for them to be looked at. This is another reason why I brought up the IFDB committee, because there are other users that I would trust with privileges for the codebase and it might speed things up if they do get it. This isn’t about me, I’m new to things as it is and I don’t want to be one of those “pls gib mod” people.

The low member limit seemed odd to me, given it’s a volunteer organization and people don’t get paid, but this makes sense. Maybe the detail about the member size limit should be removed? And does this mean it would theoretically be possible for someone to be added to the committee? Some Discord servers will notify everyone when there’s an opening on the mod team, and have them send in applications via Google Forms or the like. Other online communities I know have processes for promoting members to mod if they’ve been active long enough, and have the approval of existing mods. Does the IFDB team have any system like this?

I think this would also work as a solution, but it would be more complicated to code up than my other suggested solutions, and there aren’t many people who are willing or able to contribute to the IFDB codebase on Github as of now. The repo has 400+ outstanding feature requests/issues currently, so it’s likely that anything new that gets filed will sit unaddressed for a long time, especially if it’s a complicated one that requires a lot of review.

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This makes sense to me and seems like an easy addition. I suggest putting this suggestion on the issue tracker. Or adding a PR. Anyone can add a PR, but ultimately @dfabulich is the one who merges them, so I think things getting merged really depends on his availability, which seems like it has been limited lately. But I think if you add an issue, he will be notified.

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I believe everyone who is currently a mod at IFDB and everyone who is able to review PRs for IFDB is in that position because they volunteered. There was a call for volunteers around the time IFTF took over running IFDB (in 2021), but I doubt there has been much active recruiting of volunteers since then. I wouldn’t worry about the 12-person limit. It could be that some of the people listed are no longer active, and do not need to be on the list. Also, I imagine the number can be changed if need be.

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And in the meantime, if anyone ever has a question or concern about IFDB, please visit the “Contacting Us” page on the site: Contacting Us

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Sure, I’ve filed 3 pull requests in the last few days. I can make this yet another pull request, and in fact I have several more branches I made to solve easy-to-fix issues that have gone unnoticed or untouched for a long time, but I was afraid of overwhelming whoever runs the IFDB repo. Each pull request is individually small, but together they could be a lot to look at.

I guess my question was, can only one person merge the pull requests, and is there any way to improve that situation? Because it seems to me like that’s a lot of work, and would slow things down if the code maintainer is busy.

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That sounds like a question for @dfabulich.

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Just as a heads up, I’ve filed a new pull request to add a warning message about the <a> thing in the edit profile page, and added another pull request to fix some issues in the folder that contained Selenium tests. I don’t know how long it will take for these pull requests to get looked at, or how useful they really are.

I’ve also noticed that IFDB isn’t accessible to screenreader users at all. This may seem obvious, because of the CAPTCHAs, but many forms also lack basic accessibility labels and the <table> that’s used everywhere for styling isn’t great for screenreaders, either. I could try to fix this, but it would take a while and chances are it would interfere with my currently unmerged pull requests, and anyone else who’s trying to work on the site at the same time.

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I’m currently the only person who merges pull requests and deploys new changes to ifdb.org.

A few other people have the power to merge PRs, but I’m the only one who normally does so. Even if more people did step up to merge PRs, it’s a separate step (with different security privileges) to deploy to ifdb.org. Currently only I and IFTF’s technical officer @dougv have the power to do that, and Doug is really only a “backup” deployer, in case of emergencies. I don’t think he’s ever actually deployed the site before.

I have offered to extend more rights to a few other trusted individuals in the past, but they have declined, perhaps fearing that having more rights would mean taking on more responsibility for IFDB.

Even just getting anyone non-me to post code reviews has been unreliable. The repo is set to allow anyone to post reviews of PRs, marking them approved or not approved, but nobody has taken the time to review any of the PRs you filed last week.

As a result, sometimes I get very focused on IFDB and do a bunch of work in intense sprints, reviewing PRs promptly, but sometimes I let PRs sit for months as I focus on my day job.

If someone would like to have the power to merge changes to IFDB and deploy to the site when I’m indisposed, let me know over DM and we can talk about it! Nobody wants me to be a bottleneck.

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Thanks for the answer. I’d be interested in helping, but don’t know if I’ve got the credentials for it. I’ve DMed you all the same, since it can’t hurt. Though if anyone else with more knowledge wants deploy privileges, I’ll gladly pass on the authority to them.

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