One Rule, Three Leaderboards: Propagating the “Already Has a Website” Green Tag

That’s a two-line ask. It touched three separate systems, on three different hosts, one of them behind Elementor’s cache and one of them behind a members-only password. Here’s what actually shipped.

The photo problem

62 of the 78 rows on dunkerspotlight.com/pro-dunkers were showing a plain two-letter monogram. Some of that data already existed — a June 19 Instagram lookup for the Dunk Camp roster had cached verified profile photos for a chunk of these people, just never wired into the board. That covered 35 rows for free.

The other 27 needed a fresh Instagram search — including the board’s own #2 and #3, McDeezy and Finn Addy, who had real sites but still showed initials. Both came back mutual-follow verified, photos wired in.

The rest is where it gets interesting. A same-name search for “Jack Chen” ranks Jackie Chan’s verified account above the actual dunker — using it would have put a Hong Kong movie star’s face on our board. A search for “Xander Whelan” surfaces a hockey player, not a dunker. “Brian Ung” had been mis-matched before to a CBS Atlanta news anchor — the correct account turned up this time, bio: “Defying gravity & autoimmune odds.” That’s exactly the story on the board already. Fixed.

The green tag, everywhere now

The one Dennis actually asked for by name. On the Dunker Index, anyone with a live personal site gets their name linked and a small green pill next to it — MBMatt Bodnarmattbodnar.com → — so a reader can tell at a glance who’s already built and click straight through. It existed on one board. Now it’s on every board that ranks people:

Why a members-only WordPress page was the hard part

The Sigrun scoreboard doesn’t render from `post_content` like a normal page — it’s a single Elementor text-editor widget, and Elementor caches its own rendered HTML. Publish the content and the page looks unchanged until you also clear Elementor’s file cache and purge the host’s page cache. It also strips real `<img>` tags out of that widget on save, which is exactly why that board’s photos have always been colored-initials by design, not by accident — the green tag had to be a plain text badge, never an image, or it would vanish the next time the page saved.

What’s written down now

This isn’t a one-time pass. The rule is now a file, not a memory: LEADERBOARD-STANDARDS.md at the project root spells out the photo-fallback order, exactly what qualifies as “owns a website” (a real personal-name domain — not a brand site, not a rented course platform), and a table of every board it’s live on. The Content Factory README points to it. The three generator scripts (`build_public.py`, `build_pages.py`, `build_leaderboard.py`) each carry a one-line comment pointing back to it. Next leaderboard we build starts with this by default.

Update, same day: the portal wasn’t actually matching

Verifying the propagation caught a real gap: the gated Dunk Camp members portal’s Leaderboard tab was still showing the old static “BUILT” pill — no domain, no link — while the public board already had the full green badge. Rewrote the portal’s row template and CSS to match the public board’s linked-name + domain-badge pattern exactly, fixed the click handling so the badge opens the site instead of the portal’s own dashboard nav, and republished. Both boards now match.