Add Team Websites as a Social Media option

[JonathanLindsey]

Expected Behavior

When adding a social media link to a team's TBA page, allow them to add a general website.

Current Behavior

As discussed on Slack it used to be that the team websites were pulled in from FIRST's API and displayed on TBA but FIRST stopped providing the team websites via the API so the data was always out of date. FIRST also no longer displays team websites publicly. The websites were removed from TBA by commit a1a8358.

Possible Solution

Allow teams to manually provide their website address to TBA via the social media feature. Obviously this will need to be moderated.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

As of 3/18/2024 team 8069 has our website https://superhornets.org in the FIRST dashboard system. It was actually there since at least March 2023.

1. Go to https://www.thebluealliance.com/team/8069
2. Our website is not listed.

Context

We would like to share our team website with other teams, particularly in a way that teams can find it by simply knowing our team number.

Your Environment

• Version used: Production website 3/18/2024
• Environment name and version (e.g. Chrome 39, node.js 5.4): N/A
• Operating System and version (desktop or mobile): N/A

[gregmarra]

We have avoided this so far due to the moderation implications. Domain names expire and are reregistered pointed to inappropriate content, and it’s hard to stay on top of that.

…

On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 02:40 Jonathan Lindsey ***@***.***> wrote: Expected Behavior When adding a social media link to a team's TBA page, allow them to add a general website. Current Behavior As discussed on Slack <https://the-blue-alliance.slack.com/archives/C15SUFL92/p1674846402526949> it used to be that the team websites were pulled in from *FIRST*'s API and displayed on TBA but *FIRST* stopped providing the team websites via the API so the data was always out of date. *FIRST* also no longer displays team websites publicly. The websites were removed from TBA by commit a1a8358 <a1a8358> . Possible Solution Allow teams to manually provide their website address to TBA via the social media feature. Obviously this will need to be moderated. Steps to Reproduce (for bugs) As of 3/18/2024 team 8069 has our website https://superhornets.org in the *FIRST* dashboard system. It was actually there since at least March 2023. 1. Go to https://www.thebluealliance.com/team/8069 2. Our website is not listed. Context We would like to share our team website with other teams, particularly in a way that teams can find it by simply knowing our team number. Your Environment - Version used: Production website 3/18/2024 - Environment name and version (e.g. Chrome 39, node.js 5.4): N/A - Operating System and version (desktop or mobile): N/A — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#5807>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAN6DM654HEA7EAEVUJTB3YY2D4RAVCNFSM6AAAAABE27EXKCVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZSGE4TCMZVGUZTGMI> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[JonathanLindsey]

The Registrar Registration Expiration Date is available publicly by doing a whois lookup on the domain. For example go to https://www.whois.com/whois/superhornets.org and do a ctrl+F search for "Registry Expiry Date". I'm sure there's a more direct way of doing the lookup in an automated fashion.

Could TBA grap the expiration date of the domain and invalidate the website based on that. It would also be helpful to notify the person that added the website to TBA and/or a moderator depending on how you're willing to deal with that.

[bdaroz]

Having had to do a project with whois data in the not-to-distant past, yes the data is available, but everyone does it differently. As an example: thebluealliance.com

First you have to look up the .com whois server from IANA and find the refer field. Now there's not exactly a standard way to do this, but I did find I had to convert to all lower case, and ignore any protocol identifiers (https).

Then you use that refer server (sometimes with, sometimes w/o a port number) whois.verisign-grs.com and repeat for thebluealliance.com. Then you finally get some data. But again, not ever exactly the same format, field names, or capitalization. Even the date/time strings can differ sligtly (tho most conform to an RFC, IIRC).

For this case the expiraiton date should be in this call. If not, there's another referral to another whois server (whois.tucows.com in this case) and another data dump, in another format....

Either way, it's a significant amount of code to follow these breadcrumbs, and a lot of ways for it to go wrong.

Looking at alternatives, aging and relying on TBA moderators to re-promote/enable isn't fair to them either as it possibly exposes the moderators to unwanted/unintended "content".

My only other suggestion would be to allow teams to add a website that expires at the end of the season (date TBD) using the team moderation tools and the code from the Virtual KoP. Teams would need to re-add their website each year, but it alleviates the nightmare that is whois, removes moderation, and drastically shortens any window for expired domains and unwanted "content".

[JonathanLindsey]

My only other suggestion would be to allow teams to add a website that expires at the end of the season (date TBD) using the team moderation tools and the code from the Virtual KoP. Teams would need to re-add their website each year, but it alleviates the nightmare that is whois, removes moderation, and drastically shortens any window for expired domains and unwanted "content".

That sounds like a decent solution from my point of view. Maybe send the person that last submitted the website address a couple reminder emails during build season leading up to and on the expiration date.