Yes.
The one that hasn’t been posted to since @Khepra left after Hillary lost?
It should be pretty easy to disallow the reply to a specific post; the quote tag has four parameters: UserID, PostNum, TopicNum, and Full.
If (User.IsMutedBy(UserID) OR User.IsMutedBy(TopicNum.PostNum.GetPosterID())
{
PostError(Muted);
}
Of course, that doesn’t protect blank [quote] tags or the > symbol, but at that point it’s no longer pointing to the original post, and the person who clicked “mute” is no longer getting the notification. And, at that point, it’s probably too much hassle to go further than that.
Although…
It’s never happened to me, but I remember reading that people have gotten errors when posting that “Your post is too similar to something you’ve already posted.” If Discourse already has that functionality, it might not be too hard to expand it to scan the contents of quote tags to see if it matches other posts by “IsMutedBy” users in the same topic. But that might be going too far.
muting
I don’t really see the use-case for muting, but if users here are feeling harassed, I think that it’s a good thing. This is never going to be a 100% “safe space,” but there should be a better way to deal with people inadvertently harming each other than exiling one or both of them from the community at large. As for accusations of conspiracy and enforced echo-chambers: for my part, in the Lounge, I’ve seen more consensus of “don’t flag” for loathsome opinions delivered in inoffensive ways than I have seen people coordinating to slay anything but the foulest trollies. I remember a couple of cases where people come back from bans, and there were a few Regulars being counselled by all of the others that no, we need to wait until they do something flag-worthy before we act.
I was on a Flag Strike for a while because of lack of feedback and collateral damage. I’ve seen some great things posted (a few of them posts of mine that I put a lot of time and effort into), that disappeared for no good reason.
I’ve had a long, heart-rending post in a discussion about mental illness, quoting multiple users and advancing multiple threads, deleted because a small part of one thread was a person repeatedly calling me crazy for being sensitive about calling people “crazy” (due to a disclosed family history of mental illness) and I’d flagged that because it was obvious, deliberate provocation directed at me.
I had a defense of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” deleted (it was the root of the ones deleted, so probably not collateral damage), with absolutely no feedback as to what lines it had crossed. Was I being insensitive? Provocative? Trivializing a sensitive issue? Or was my opinion about that song just at odds with the opinion of the mod who deleted it? I’ve read and re-read the post in question and I don’t know.
Without knowing which lines I crossed, I have no idea how to alter my future behaviour. When the same subject came up again a few weeks later, I largely recused myself and my opinions from the thread, not because I’d been given a point of view to re-examine my actions from (I hadn’t), but because, like the proverbial cat who sat on a hot element, I’d been burned once, and yes, I’ll never sit on a hot element again, but I’ll also never sit on a cool one.
My Flag Strike is over, but I’m still flag-shy. The shit that started showing up after the election convinced me that I need to act sometimes, but I’ll still only act in the worst cases. And that will continue to be the case until flagging has predictable consequences and I don’t feel it will risk ripping out chunks of the productive discussion along with the driving trollies.
