Haha, I feel seen.

I mean, you're totally right (except for that last part), and 2023 was kind of frustrating for me. I didn't keep track (ratio-wise) of how much of my work got merged, but it feels like my success rate was around 20%. That's pretty depressing, but, on the other hand, it's also pretty encouraging: when I joined Bitcointalk, I knew jack-diddly-squat about SMF and I had never really used PHP in anger (when I'm working on things that I have architectural input on, which is most of the time, then I'll almost always reach for something with a better type system). PHP proficiency is easy to pick up, but SMF is difficult to untangle: internalizing all of its idioms and reasoning out the consequences of any given change takes a lot of time/effort (and a lot of testing).

So, I get why theymos has been slow to merge my work: on his end, he either has to trust me (which would be kind of reckless at this stage; I'm still new), or he has to essentially repeat most of the thinking and double-checking that I do for each patch, to convince himself that it won't cause new problems (especially security-related ones). And once he's done that (either trusted my work or independently verified it), he then has to splice the patch into the franken-SMF that this forum runs on. So, don't be too hard on theymos, he's a legend, and we're very lucky to have him. (I think if he ever moved on from Bitcointalk, I probably would, too.)

I'm quite proud of what I did in 2023 (the April Fools thing, the 2FA patch [1], the spiffy badge I got for fixing a small security bug, and some other things I did behind the scenes). I'm not that concerned (all things considered) about my stuff sitting around for a long time before theymos looks at it. I'm also not that concerned about some fraction of my stuff never getting merged (I count those failed attempts as me accumulating the experience I need to do bigger/better patches in the future).

[1] I'm 99% sure that the 2FA/TOTP patch will get merged. And I'm 100% sure that I'll open a bottle of something special when it does.

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On-topic: Yep, the profile page/settings could use some attention. I've got some ideas about how to migrate those fixed-label messenger links to something more free-form, but I haven't thought about it deeply. I'll read through the topics logfiles posted, and see what folks have said/suggested in the past.