Look, I get the design intent completely. And I think it’s wrong and misguided. If people want to form little cliques and echo chambers there’s plenty of better ways to do this.
Oh we’ve tried, with gusto.
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Fair enough 
As for forming cliques and echo chambers, I suspect if that’s revealed on here, it too will be coded out of fashion so it can’t be used here. Discourse seems very much to be into personal choice and personal ability. Silencing others, even in your own filter bubble, isn’t something they seem to like.
I concur. It doesnt take into account many viable factors.
Also not wanting to tolerate someone else’s unwanted attention is hardly the same as “silencing them” - as Ken has pointed out repeatedly we are all free to make our own topics.
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That’s pretty heavily biased towards the narcissistic “look at me!” kind of tr0ll to be able to harass anyone they feel like, vs. balanced to maintain a healthy community.
And if people can’t completely shut out others they find annoying, then it’s a feature of the software that is begging for users to end up violating the guidelines when exposed to content they don’t want one too many times.
In other words, if the software doesn’t let me truly ignore a user, then the guidelines need to leave some room to let me tell them to piss off. Personally, I’d rather not get annoyed in the first place, so lack of a permanent Ignore is a bug in the community, even if it isn’t one in the software.
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Yup. As it is those Ignored people just come back into the threads unannounced and that can be anything from a horrid surprise to a full-on depressive episode for some of us here.
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I use 1 month. The people I put on ignore are generally people whose posts I mainly value even if I disagree with them, but who have managed to irritate me beyond a tolerable level in a short time. (As an academic often involved in faculty governance, my tolerance for people who are irritating is quite high.) The irredeemable posters I put up with until they get themselves flagged into oblivion. How are you going to flag someone whose posts you can’t see?
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As I recall from the discussion around the creation of the Ignore feature, Discourse’s intention was that it’s not really about the other person. AIUI, it’s there to give oneself some time to cool down, to help oneself refrain from violating the community guidelines. It’s not about controlling the other’s presence on the board; it’s there to help us—if we need some extra help for a time—to regulate our own behavior amongst the variety of people here.
As I recall it, the reason behind having it expire was the idea that hopefully we can find more-productive ways to interact with others, and learn, grow, and change, and not need to rely on the Ignore permanently as a crutch to regulate our own behavior here. Having to review it periodically gives us an intentionally-built-in opportunity to reassess our approach. As has been said, if the issue is someone else violating the community guidelines, then flagging is the thing to do. If the issue is that we find someone else annoying and we fear that we might violate the guidelines in responding to them, then we can Ignore them and buy ourselves some time while we figure out a more useful approach.
From that, I conclude that, if one can’t function here without permanently Ignoring other users who are following the community guidelines (remember, someone violating the guidelines should result in flags, which will be dealt with by mods) then one might do well to rethink one’s own manner of participating here.
TL;DR: “Ignore” isn’t about the other person. It’s a short-term crutch, voluntarily taken up, to help keep ourselves from fouling the discussions here, so we don’t risk being flagged/banned ourselves.
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So I put myself in the silent corner because they’re an asshole…?
I’d much rather be able to Ignore someone and just hold my tongue, so to speak.
ETA: not that I’m particularly pointing this comment at you @zfirphdn I just don’t see the issue that way.
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If you’re being harassed, flag the post.
If someone’s saying something you’re disagreeing with and you don’t like them, ignore them via the inbuilt system or use your own mind to just skim past their posts.
But if they’re not violating community guidelines, they deserve to be treated like first class citizens too. Ignore is a timeout feature. @Orenwolf and their very capable staff are able to handle people beyond that.
That’s ignoring both the reality and the history in favor of some kind of nonexistent utopia. You’re making an argument for why Ignore shouldn’t be permanent then leaning really heavily into it being a necessary feature. You do realize that, when the Ignore period ends, you don’t even get a notification that it has? All of a sudden, that user’s posts just start showing up again, and you have to go back and start a new Ignore period.
No. I don’t have to be exposed to content that makes me angry or frustrated. Free speech isn’t free platform. It’s not forced attention. I don’t have any right to force other people to pay attention to me, and neither do they.
As for the mods, as @orenwolf will often mention, the guidelines are a tool that cuts both ways. The mods are restrained by them as much as they are enabled by them. And there are users who are skilled at staying barely within the guidelines while still being assholes to other users.
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I mean, then this is not the right software for you. I can’t speak for this site or what not as for it not being the right site, but I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one. The software is designed to foster communication, even between people that generally may have different opinions. A timed ignore facilitates that. The modstaff and flagging handles things that go over the line. You aren’t the only user of this site, and the avoidance of creating filterbubbles is pretty high on discourses list, it seems.
Dunno what else to say. I see where you’re coming from and understand your position, but I also know this software isn’t going to change.
Same as it ever was; if something isn’t a problem for certain people of privilege, then it must not actually be a problem at all.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
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Are you kidding? We don’t have a choice in the kind of software in use here… We’re here because we enjoy Boing Boing and the community we find here. It’s not our fault that some of the people who show up are less interested in community and more interested in winning internet arguments.
No one should be forced to engage with people. Do you believe you have the right to talk at someone IRL that doesn’t have an interest in talking to you?
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Strangely, it’s not the folks who I disagree with who I put on Ignore (it’s a short list, really). It’s either people who strike me as overly whiny or negative, or people who demand my attention without adding value. I intentionally don’t ignore people who violate the guidelines, as I am a frequent flagger. 
Right. Like all software, once it’s written it’s uneditable. 
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I think it’s more that @codinghorror has design intentions with the software that don’t mesh up with this line of thought. Software, obviously, can change. But this software probably won’t.
This is a bulletin board.
You’re not forced to engage with anything any one posts here, you choose to engage with things you want to. Nobody’s talking about engaging with people PMing you, you can turn off PMs or use the ignore functionality to block PMs from people. I think , like I said, the design and fundamental features of this software are incompatible with what you want them to be. So your solution is to live with it the way it is, convince them to change it to the way you want it, or no longer participate.
I don’t know why this is a continued discussion. @codinghorror has made clear the opinions of the people who made discourse.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the free ice cream. But ignoring the feedback of your users has never been a successful software strategy for long.
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And people can continue to talk to you, once you’ve made clear your not interested, without a proper ignore feature. This is especially critical for those of us who aren’t cisgendered white men. But we are less likely to be listened to with regards to our concerns, because far too often, the people who make software assume their experiences are all experiences, and the problems we encounter are merely edge cases that don’t need to be seriously addressed.
So that you can’t PM with anyone. So no middle ground there.
Which, as others have pointed out, over and again, has serious limitations.
I live with it, because I like the community here. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, or we can’t discuss the limitations here.
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I’d much rather be able to Ignore someone and just hold my tongue, so to speak.
Here’s the issue though…and I think @Melizmatic is exactly correct about Ignore being a badly designed function…I am sick and tired of having to always put people on mute/ignore all the damn time and bite my tongue. I had found myself constantly being the one hurting my oral muscle and watching others say whatever they like with zero repercussions. Much like the much espoused “You don’t have to reply” and yet some folks always reply and then it’s your bad for having replied after that.
I found myself exactly in the scenario @zfirphdn describes. Constantly ignoring/muting others so that I don’t reply in some fashion that gets me on a timeout. Back to the whole you have to be the one who says nothing…which is incredibly frustrating.
Somehow Facebook and Twitter have figured out a block function, but Discord can’t? That seems a tad dubious to me.
The platform much like this community is not perfect. But at least in the case of the community I think there is genuine interest and effort in becoming better and fixing the imperfections. The platform on the other hand seems to have the stance of “suck it up buttercup”.
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Let’s reiterate and bold that for emphasis:
Problem, meet nutshell.
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