The Admin Tool allows Archive volunteers to file Archive uploads and edit their descriptions. It's a fairly straightforward web interface.
Note that there is no public login to the Admin Tool. Only Archive volunteers have accounts.
This document assumes that you have full volunteer permissions. Current policy is that all volunteers have full permissions, but we may someday add people with more limited roles. (E.g., "description editing only".) People with limited roles won't see all of the controls described here.
Your account settings are available by clicking your name (in the upper right corner). You can change your password and set your time zone from this page.
The main navigation bar lists where you can go. Most of these pages contain lists of files.
You can view the upload info for any file by clicking its "(info)" link. For convenience, the Incoming and Unprocessed pages show the upload info for each listed file. Archive pages don't, but that's what "(info)" is for.
Most of the older files on the Archive have no upload info. That's because they were contributed before the upload form existed.
Occasionally a file will have two or more upload records. This can occur if a file is uploaded twice, with identical content but different upload info. See "Multiple copies uploaded" in the Procedures doc.
Most of the upload record is taken straight from the upload form. The only possibly confusing elements:
Note that not all file commands are available in every directory. In particular, the top-level Archive page is quite locked down; only the "Edit Index" command is available. Visit a lower-level directory to see the full array of buttons.
Move the file to another directory.
Rename the file in place.
Delete a file. (Really, this moves it to the Trash folder.)
Zip up a file. This option is only available for .html and .svg files, and only in the Incoming directory.
We don't want "naked" HTML files publicly available on the Archive; they could contain malicious Javascript. Therefore, our policy is zip all such files in Incoming and then move them to Unprocessed. See the Procedures doc.
(Text articles in HTML format might not have scripting, and could be left unzipped. There are some such in the /articles directory. But games always have scripting.)
Edit the description and metadata of a file entry.
The description uses Markdown format. Metadata lines look like key: value. See the Overview document for a complete description.
You can also edit the description and metadata of the whole directory. That's the "Edit Index" button at the top of the page.
The "Edit Index File" button (also at the top) lets you edit all the index entries on the page as a single text file. (They're stored as a single text file, for example this one. When you hit "Edit Index File" you're editing that text file directly.)
Add a link referring to this file in another directory. We use this to make one file seem to be in two different places. (Say, if a package contains both a game and its source code.)
When you push this button, you're in the location that will be linked to. You are then prompted to enter the directory where the file will be linked from.
Add an administrative note to the file. These notes are never publicly visible; they are meant for the volunteer team only.
This button is hidden away on the file's info page! Hit the "(info)" button to find it.
(These notes cannot be edited or deleted, only added to.)
Tell IFDB that a file has been moved to its permanent home; its IFDB entry is adjusted to indicate this. See "After you move a file" in the Procedures doc.
This button is hidden away on the file's info page! Hit the "(info)" button to find it. It only appears for files with an "IFDB temp ID" entry. (That is, they were uploaded via IFDB's form.)
Wipe the Cloudflare cache for this file. If you replace a file with a different file of the same name (say, because a new version was uploaded), you should push this. You don't need to push it for newly-arrived files.
Create a subdirectory of a directory. This is not available in Incoming, Unprocessed, or Trash.
This is only available for empty subdirectories.
This command is not attached to an individual file; it's on the site's front page. (The "Home" tab.) It regenerates the public index pages for all the directories you just edited. After you do a bunch of filing / description / metadata work, hit the "Rebuild" button before you leave the site.
You should not need to set the "Rebuild all" checkbox. That's only there in case the index generator goes off the rails, or if we change the page templates or something.