Four years of BBS

If it were a much bigger forum maybe, but I haven’t run across anyone who sorely needs blocking whom the moderators haven’t taken care of in short order.

The ellipsis next to the Reply button opens up a Flag option that you can use to report objectionable posts. It even lets you specify a reason.

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Ahem…

I am That One Guy, and the one feature I would want is one I that I already know ain’t gonna happen.

But that being said, the BBS is as decent a forum as any that I have ever been on, and the flaws that do exist are tolerable.

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Threading?

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Sometimes I wish I could change my username without losing my whole history.

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Lucky you. My experience differs.

The flagging options are fine. But an automated notification when a post is deleted (even as by-catch) would be awesome.

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You would only lose mentions. We discourage people from changing usernames since it is awkward for continuity of conversations, quotes have the username baked in, etc. But if you really need to change it, you can, just ask Falcor to do it. @enso for example changed his.

Also @daneel I know you probably aren’t serious but we have considered topic filtering.

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It has been discussed; there are some nuances to it that I want us to get right.

I am one million percent in favor of suppressing manifest user behavior badness, as I think that hurts everyone, but one thing I struggle with is this:

You’re merely pointing out that User X may not want to see User Y for … reasons. Which is fine, those may be perfectly reasonable reasons, but no badness was manifested on the site. It could be User Y posting “it’s awfully sunny today!” and User X simply can’t tolerate the presence of User Y in any form whatsoever.

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I understand the concern; but hyper-intolerance isn’t something I’m advocating.

For example:

There is one member here who actively doesn’t like me; who was actually pleased when I got my little time-outs, and who has gone so far as to passive-aggressively suggest that I would be “more comfortable” on some other site… and so I avoid engaging this person like he’s the Plague.

But he still insists upon commenting in certain posts of mine, despite the obvious mutual disdain.

No one is breaking any rules, yet it’s still needlessly antagonistic.

And that’s actually the case for a few people here that I can think of; they know how to skirt the site’s parameters just enough not to get into any trouble, while still being persistently annoying.

Situations like that should have some sort of option for resolution.

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Interesting, so the proposal is a method of preventing people from replying directly to you. The existing user mute option on your user preferences prevents notifications of any kind from that user and that has been possible for a while. Preventing actual replies would be a step further.

On the other hand I know Falcor has asked people to refrain from replying to each other and I think that is a totally reasonable request. Since you can easily reply to the topic it is not like anyone is asking people to stop posting altogether.

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How long until we create the perfect filter bubble of people we don’t agree with if blocking gets implemented?

Hell, I passively (because I’m lazy) dislike a couple of people commenting on this thread (and I’m sure it is mutual) but I can usually just about manage to ignore them and never reply to them. At least one of them is responsible (AFAIK) for my last “time out” as well and probably took personal joy in it. That said, we run the risk of creating a hermetically sealed echo chamber.

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I’d like that. The mute function’s a bit… underpowered. It doesn’t stop the muted one PMing you and it seems to reset if the mutee is given a ban.

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So then we manually quote each other but we just leave the User ID out of the quote? I mean, if I can see your text, I can put it within quote tags in a variety of ways.

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Yes, exactly.

Indeed it is, but that’s no guarantee that BOTH sides will consistently adhere to such a request, no matter how reasonable.

Additionally, my feeling is that as good of a job as Falcor does moderating, the members shouldn’t always have to go bother him (or her) for every little thing.

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I don’t understand what you mean?

How do you propose it would work to prevent people from doing quote replies of another person? In practice.

You know when I read stuff like that I think “both of these people are behaving badly”, not “wow this totally vindicates User X who is clearly a Good Person that was Sadly Wronged”

Maybe @M_M we should prevent PMs altogether for mutes to strengthen the feature a bit before crossing the chasm to “can’t reply to you at all”. It is fascinating that “I don’t want to see their posts” has not come up, this is a different angle I had not considered.

I do think asking someone not to reply to you (or Falcor asking with a bit more weight behind it) is a reasonable request, if it comes to that.

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It’s the old ‘no solution is absolutely perfect, so let’s not do anything to even try to fix the problem!’ argument.

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I don’t know. I’m not much of a coder, I’m afraid. Wouldn’t know where to start or what language or whatever to use.

Yeah, that would be a good step in the right direction. :smiley:

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I’m not sure which “that” you mean? People disliking each other and still replying to one another? :slight_smile:

I agree it would be nice that if I muted a person that they couldn’t then PM me because, pretty clearly, I don’t want to hear from them. :slight_smile:

I’ve more than once considered implementing a Firefox extension to hide certain users’ comments. It wouldn’t be hard to do at all on page load but, again, then you’re just making a nice filter bubble for yourself, so I walk away from the idea.

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My point is that since:

  1. We can see everyone’s comments.
  2. They are text.
  3. Text is selectable in browsers (and can be copied to the clipboard).

That even if someone made a feature of “don’t allow the ‘quote’ function for this user on me,” said user can still select the text, copy it to the clipboard, open a generic reply in the thread, add the quote tags discourse uses, and put your text in. You can’t stop someone from making a quote reply. You can only make it take more work.

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