I never saw a notification for this comment.
Right now, ‘Ignore’ seems to be functioning as well it can* except for the time frames; March 1st is not a full 4 months away.
* For a ‘band-aid fix’ to a bullet-wound problem, that is.
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That’s the goal. Remember staff is actively notified about users who are simultaneously ignored by many other users, so…
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Seems to me that the people who should be notified are the persons being ignored. Not with the information about who is ignoring them, but with a count of how many people have them ignored. That way, they have the opportunity to change their behavior.
Except they might view it as a badge of honor… you know, “look how contrarian I am!” and all that 
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Respectfully:
The ignore feature does NOT work efficiently (if at all sometimes) and needs to be upgraded, especially as we get closer to the election and tensions on the site are only likely to increase.
We need a full block feature, wherein there can be ZERO visibility or any interaction between blocked parties, not the ineffective half measure that is currently in place.
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I agree with this. A full block feature would be very helpful in this regard.
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it seems exceedingly counterproductive not to have one at this point.
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Agreed. Especially considering how bad things are going to get in the next few months online…
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That is beyond the capabilities of this forum to address. We are not going to change forum software. We did not write it, and our ability to influence the software is not unlimited.
There is a topic on meta.discourse.org about this feature anyone is welcome to contribute to, especially if you are experiencing issues:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-ignore-a-user/110254
More importantly, if seeing posts by users you would rather not see results in no choice but to behave in ways contrary to the guidelines, there is a larger problem at hand here. One does not “justify” the other.
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I have directed the same concern @codinghorror repeatedly, including recently.
The lack of said feature will only continue to make more even work for the mods needlessly, IMO.
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The workaround is for the staff to make the Ignore forced reciprocal, that is, to enter the other user’s account and add the reciprocating ignore.
But I’d say quite definitively that …
… should be grounds for permanent bans. Not really seeing the relationship between these two events. Ignore already prevents someone from PM’ing you. Remember that trust level 0 (new) users can’t PM at all.
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Are you saying there is no viable permanent solution?
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Agreed.
Right? It’s a sacrifice on our part to keep from being harassed…
Which let’s the ignored person know that they are now on our ignore list?
Sure, but plenty of people manage to skirt the edges of bannable behavior and often it can come down to whether or not we’re believed. 
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Not to speak for Jeff here because it’s not my software, but I think it’s been mentioned many, many times by him in other threads of this type and on discoruse that the goal here is that the community moderators should remove problem people that the system alerts them to. And that the system WILL alert them to those people by flagging.
Ignore isn’t a solution for problem people. The mod staff actioning on problem people is the solution for problem people.
Some people just rub each other the wrong way, both in person and online. Ignore is supposed to be able to make it so you don’t interact with someone who can’t help but piss you off, even if they aren’t explicitly violating the guidelines. After all, there isn’t a flag for “Annoying me.” Yet there are some people who you just want to reach through the monitor and smack across the face with a damp herring.
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You’re assuming that the system isn’t shaped by all of the things in our society that advantages some over others.
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There’s no doubt the system (like any system) can be abused. That’s why humans are the backstop. But it’s all predicated on community involvement through flagging. Way to much is posted on the BBS to hope mods will just “stumble across” flaggable content.
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We’ve all seen this justification before - just ignore them, if enough ignore a user the mods will take a look, etc. This is largely ignorant of realities that there are people that some of us simply never want to interact with. Period.
Sometimes these users get banned, many times they don’t because they otherwise follow the rules but rub me the wrong way and I have no desire to ever read their posts.
So, now we have to micromanage these ignore lists because there’s a forced expiration. It feels like extra complexity that nobody asked for.
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Very recently, I’ve suspected that same pathetic behaviour of at least one user who asked to be anonymised and then returned with a backup account they’d set up when they saw that their “brilliance” was being increasingly Ignored. I can’t prove anything and don’t care to, but since the new account is acting the same as the old one I just put that one on Ignore, too.
As I understand it, if an account exceeds a certain level of Ignores by the community the moderator is alerted to a potential problem user. Perhaps that, combined with a flag alerting the mod to the suspicion, might prompt a quiet warning from the mod to the user in question.
I also find the forced expiration date odd. I would assume the almost no-one uses any option except for four months, on the reasonable assumption that any user obnoxious enough to make one’s list is so iredeemable that one would prefer never to hear from them again.
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I get that, but the design of this software is basically so that people can’t set up little circles and cliques using permanant ignore. IT’s viewed as an anti-pattern to communication. So, if you really want to do it, it forces it onto the user to reset the ignores each time. The feeling is, if you have a large number of people on ignore, you might not be the right fit for the particular community the discourse server is servicing.
My point is, the ignore being the way it is is an intentional design decision, and the best you can do is keep resetting it, flag people who send harassing or threatening messages, and if that’s not enough, try to convince @codinghorror to make it a permanant feature or leave the community that’s using discourse.
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