A related issue, possibly meriting a ticket of its own: tags are an easy target for vandals, as there is no moderation/approval stage to prevent them being displayed to all site visitors. This could be something as childish as tagging swear words, or it could be less obvious - there's an author who has (as far as I can tell) upset people with differing political viewpoints, and as a consequence has suffered a number of impersonation attempts on Reddit and elsewhere to try to damage his rep/cause embarrassment. If those miscreants realize they could easily tag his books with any words of their choosing, well....
Some possible mitigations:
Disallow profanities in newly created tags. I did run a crude check of extant tags vs a profanity list on GitHub, there are fortunately no genuine profanities in the database, but I did find a far few matches that are controversial topics but perfectly legitimate tags e.g. "racism". This makes me think that a reduced profanity list would be needed. There's been some published research on what words people in the UK find offensive (or not), I can dig that out if needed.
Restrict all tags to ASCII characters, to prevent attempts to use homoglyphs to circumvent the aforementioned filtering. (I haven't checked the database to see if this would affect any existing tags, and I dunno how much this might affect non-Anglophone users of ISFDB?)
Have some nightly report and/or mod page and/or notification of the most recently created tags (not sure which of these fits best into admin/mod working practices) allowing mods to easily remove offending tags via the tools/functionality proposed in this ticket.
ISFDB has (AFAIK?) gone this far without any such vandalism, so perhaps this will be considered a low-priority or non-issue, but based on experiences in my working career, it's the sort of thing that suddenly becomes top priority as soon as it starts being abused.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I don't think we have encountered outright vandalism yet. However, a few years ago we came across a related issue -- users creating non-bibliographic tags. For example, a user may create a tag like "SF-read-by-user-X-in-2013". They can be handy in certain cases, but they make no sense to other users.
The solution was to allow moderators to turn regular tags into "private tags". Private tags can only be viewed by the users who assigned them. It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time and it has been working fairly well.
In addition, there have been requests to allow moderators to monitor newly created tags. I think it should be doable if we create a "creation date/time stamp" in the tags table and tweak the software to use it.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
A related issue, possibly meriting a ticket of its own: tags are an easy target for vandals, as there is no moderation/approval stage to prevent them being displayed to all site visitors. This could be something as childish as tagging swear words, or it could be less obvious - there's an author who has (as far as I can tell) upset people with differing political viewpoints, and as a consequence has suffered a number of impersonation attempts on Reddit and elsewhere to try to damage his rep/cause embarrassment. If those miscreants realize they could easily tag his books with any words of their choosing, well....
Some possible mitigations:
ISFDB has (AFAIK?) gone this far without any such vandalism, so perhaps this will be considered a low-priority or non-issue, but based on experiences in my working career, it's the sort of thing that suddenly becomes top priority as soon as it starts being abused.
I don't think we have encountered outright vandalism yet. However, a few years ago we came across a related issue -- users creating non-bibliographic tags. For example, a user may create a tag like "SF-read-by-user-X-in-2013". They can be handy in certain cases, but they make no sense to other users.
The solution was to allow moderators to turn regular tags into "private tags". Private tags can only be viewed by the users who assigned them. It seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time and it has been working fairly well.
In addition, there have been requests to allow moderators to monitor newly created tags. I think it should be doable if we create a "creation date/time stamp" in the tags table and tweak the software to use it.