Your brother (James) was never ignored. Thiradell approved him on Jan 2, 2014.
http://rankings.the-elite.net/~James+Szklarz. He used a hotmail-address. Guess he thoroughly never checked all his inboxes.
Automising the process may sound like a good idea but doing that would only lead to more trolls/fake accounts.
Jimbo gets sole credit for processing new player applications on the staff page which is a bit inaccurate. Consequently, he should not be solely responsible for this incident. Trouble, dsx and myself also approve (and sometimes reject) pending users.
Like Jim said, you get no notifications when someone applies and I think a good solution would be if every rankings moderator would receive a notification automatically instead of manually checking the pending users page every once in a while.